Quartering-away is the shot everyone wants and almost nobody aims correctly. You hear it a hundred times: "Wait for him to quarter away." Good advice. Then the buck turns, gives you a perfect 35-degree angle, and you put the pin on the crease behind the shoulder like it's a broadside deer. And you watch a one-lung hit walk off into the dark.
The crease is the right hold on a broadside animal. On a quartering deer it's a trap, because the body rotated and the vitals rotated with it. Your pin didn't move. The lungs did.
What actually happens when the body turns
Picture the deer from above. Broadside, both lungs sit stacked behind the near shoulder, and a pin on the crease drives straight through the middle of both. Now rotate the animal so the off-side hip swings toward you. The near-side entry that used to be "behind the shoulder" now clips ribs and the back of one lung, and your arrow exits in front of the off-side leg through nothing but gut and ham.
The fix isn't complicated, but it's the opposite of what your eyes want to do. On a quartering-away shot you aim at the off-side shoulder. Not the near crease — the far leg. You're picking an exit point and working backward to it. The steeper the angle, the further back your entry hole sits, sometimes well into the last rib, and that looks wrong to a hunter trained on broadside pictures. Trust the line through to the far shoulder. The arrow does the geometry for you.
I learned this the dumb way. Buddy of mine, Cody, shot a doe at maybe 18 yards, hard quarter away, and held dead on the near crease because "that's where you aim." Single lung, six-hour track, found her by luck. Same setup, same deer angle a week later, he held on the far shoulder. Arrow buried to the fletching, both lungs, 40-yard recovery. Nothing changed but where he looked.
Quartering-to is mostly a pass, and the math says so
The other half of this nobody wants to hear: quartering-toward you is a bad shot and the geometry is why. The near shoulder is now a wall standing directly between your broadhead and the lungs. To reach vitals you either thread a tiny window in front of the shoulder — high risk, low margin — or you punch the shoulder blade and hope. Even a tuned 500-grain arrow with a single-bevel up front is gambling against the densest bone on the animal at the worst possible entry angle.
People talk themselves into quartering-to shots because the animal is right there and close. Close is exactly when the angle is steepest and the shoulder coverage is worst. I pass them. I'd rather eat the tag than wound a deer because I couldn't wait ten more seconds for him to take a step.
And here's the part the broadside crowd forgets entirely: the angle eats your effective penetration too. An arrow that sails through 14 inches of broadside deer might have to travel 20-plus inches of tissue on a steep quartering line, and it's pushing through at an angle that loves to skip off ribs instead of splitting them. That's not a knock on quartering-away — it's the reason your arrow and broadhead choice matter more on angled shots, not less. Marginal penetration becomes a problem precisely when the geometry stretches.
Two angles, not one
The thing that makes real-world shots messy is that there are two angles working at once and hunters only ever think about one. There's the horizontal angle — how the body is turned relative to you. And there's the vertical angle — the downhill or treestand angle. Both move where your arrow ends up, and they don't cancel out. A steep quartering-away deer below your stand is a genuinely three-dimensional problem, and "aim a little back" is not a number.
This is the math nobody does in the moment, because you can't. You've got a deer at full alert and maybe four seconds. You do the math before the season, on the bench, until the right hold is a picture in your head instead of a calculation. That's the whole point of rehearsing angles cold: when the buck turns, you already know where the far shoulder is.
If you want to actually see how the entry and exit lines shift across angle — horizontal and vertical together — run your setup through the shot-scenario tools in The Forge. Punch in your real arrow weight and the angle, and it'll show you where that line comes out the other side instead of leaving you to guess on the crease. Build the picture now. The deer won't give you time later.