Finally made it back home. I spent the day riding around talking to hunters and handing out some more cards. That track this morning just verified a pattern that I’m seeing play out over and over. Many of these marginally wounded deer are headed down into a wet bottom. A lot of people say that they want to get in water to cool themselves because they feel hot. That very well may be the case but these deer are also headed to “mud”. They’re trying to treat the wound by packing it with mud.

When we got off into the creek bottom today I knew that’s where we would eventually find the deer. We ran parallel about 10-20 yards off the little branch for several hundred yards before Otis all of a sudden hung a left at a cane thicket and took a 90 degree turn down to the creek. He started circling the cane thicket and easing around it checking it out when the buck came up out of the canes and took off on us. I believe he was actually in the creek branch itself. Something else I’ve noticed is that these wounded deer will stay held tight until you kick them up like a rabbit.

Anyways, it must have been a slow morning for deer movement. I had a few calls from folks just calling me to talk to me in case they ever needed a dog but no calls for lost deer from the morning hunt. I was really surprised with it being Saturday. Maybe we’ll get one on the afternoon hunt.