Man tells the harrowing tale of being shot while deer hunting

Ronald Venden remembers the exact moment he was shot. He recalls the bullet’s agonizing route, first smashing through his wrist and rendering his hand immobile, then crushing his femur as it plunged through his leg and sent him to the cold autumn ground. 

If it happened 100 times, he probably would have died 99 of them. And yet somehow, this time, the bullet missed his femoral artery. A nearby hunter came to his aid and helped stem the gushing tide of blood and life that poured from his body. Rather than a life cut short, Venden would spend 111 days in a hospital bed. After that, he would spend his life walking in special shoes to compensate for the fact that one of his legs had been shortened by a 30.06 bullet. He would occasionally pull tiny flecks of lead from his leg and arm, as the bullet’s castaways worked their way to the surface over the years. 

“I was lucky when I got to the hospital,” he recalls. “Because the doctor there had been in Vietnam, and he was real familiar with gunshot wounds.”

He is happy to be alive, but for the ensuing 48 years, whenever the weather cools and the Wisconsin woods ring out with the sounds of gunfire, one question – never answered, and never asked aloud until now – has haunted him: “Why did you shoot?”

Venden had been hunting in the rural countryside, not far from the new home he shared with his wife and their young daughter in nearby Belleville. He was a young man, still in his 20s, and he had headed out that morning with his father in search of whitetails. 

“I didn’t see one deer that day,” says Venden, now 76 years old. 

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” he says. “I was north of Barneveld, and I took a stand on a high hill.”

He spent some of the morning watching and waiting for deer. None arrived. What he did see, however, was another hunter, a few hundred yards away, perched on the tongue of a combine. 

With no prey in site, Venden eventually decided to move. He bent over to grab his seat, and when he did, he heard the report of a large-caliber rifle. 

“Bam,” he says. “I went down like I had stepped on a landmine.”

The bullet rendered one hand and one leg useless. On the plus side, it somehow shattered the femur without fatally slicing the nearby artery. “If it had, I would have bled out in a few seconds,” he says. 

“A guy came running and I said to him, ‘If we can stop the bleeding, at least I’ll live for a while,’” he remembers. 

“I yelled some words I shouldn’t have,” says Venden, and soon a group of hunters gathered around him. Authorities arrived, and eventually an ambulance was able to reach him by cutting through nearby cornfields, extracting him from the scene. He says before he left, he saw the bullet’s path, evidenced by broken berry bushes on the way to where he had been when he was struck. 

“I couldn’t move,” he says. “You’ve got to understand how badly it hurt.”

Eventually, Venden arrived at the Methodist hospital in Madison. There, he was immobilized in a bed for more than three months. “They couldn’t pin it or nothing,” he says. “They had to wait for the bone to start growing. They had to let nature take its course.”

He remembers the hole in his leg, stuffed with gauze, and the troubling odor emanating from the wound. “I didn’t know for some time if I would lose my leg,” he says. His doctor, the one with wartime experience under his belt, removed the gauze, smelled the flesh, and told him he would likely keep the limb. In that way, he was lucky. 

Repairing his hand proved difficult, as well. Doctors had to move and repurpose other tendons in order to help Venden regain the use of his hand, particularly his thumb. While he was confined to a hospital bed, his wife and their daughter, who was only a toddler, waited and wished, unsure if they would lose their family home; unsure if they would lose him, too.

In the hospital, Venden had plenty of time to think. He thought about the fact that he was wearing red, along with a florescent vest, when he was shot. (The Wisconsin state legislature would not pass a law requiring hunters to wear blaze orange until 1980.) He pondered what happened, thinking he knew where the bullet came from. And he wondered why, despite the fact that nearly a dozen hunters convened at the spot when he was crying out for help, not one of them ever sent him a card, visited or called to find out if he lived or died.  

“I guess that’s what bothers me the most,” he says. “That none of them did anything. I don’t think they were sportsmen.” 

“I know the name of the guy who shot me,” he adds. When asked if anything happened to the suspected shooter, whether he was ever held accountable or punished, Venden replies: “Nothing. Nothing happened to him.”

“It was a careless act,” he says. “It was a cowardly act.”

All that remains now is the memory, and the story, which are still fresh in Venden’s mind, especially when deer season, which starts this Saturday, approaches. 

“I’m sensitive to gunshots this time of year, as you might imagine,” he says. 

But all things considered, Venden does feel fortunate. He and his family didn’t lose their home. He was eventually able to go back to work, and he and his wife still live there today. 

“I’ve got a short leg and a wrist that don’t turn all the way,” he says. “But physically, I got pretty good.” 

Little was made of the shooting in the press, at the time. “I don’t believe anything was ever published with my name in it,” he says. 

His hunting career ended abruptly that day, however. 

“I figured if I ever tried to go hunting again, my wife would probably shoot me for it,” he says with a soft laugh. 

His wife, Marie, had to bottle feed young calves and watch over their daughter while her husband was confined to a bed that fall and winter. She, too, remembers it “like it was yesterday.” 

“I was at Ron’s mom’s house when I heard about it,” she says. “I don’t even remember driving to the hospital. He went into surgery. I didn’t know if he would lose his leg. I didn’t know if he would live. It was a long process.”

Like her husband, she wonders why none of the hunters from that day ever reached out to check on him. But she remains grateful to the one who arrived on the scene and helped stop the bleeding, at least. 

“That man who helped get a belt around his leg and stop the bleeding; that guy saved his life,” she says.

“That was a long year,” she says. “But he made it, and that’s the main thing. But he re-lives it every year, especially around this time.”