Alright, so part 1……

After I got home the other day I had no more gotten my tracking clothes off and posted up the story than the phone rang again. Long story short……we came to the conclusion that the buck the hunter had shot was likely a one lung hit or one of those hits right under the spine that only catch the top of the lungs. He said it looked like a high shot. He shot it at daybreak and they had jumped him an hour and a half later with him just standing in some thick stuff about 100-120 yards away. We tracked it late that afternoon through some crazy thick undergrowth for a good little ways until we found where he had bedded. There was only 4 or 5 drops of blood in the bed so I believe he was probably clotted up when he got up. There wasn’t much of a scent trail past the bed but we searched the immediate area really well and he wasn’t anywhere to be found. I think there's a good chance he lived just going off of past experiences with that kind of shot.

Well, while we were tracking that deer…..the hunter’s phone rang and he tells me…..”Another hunters wife has just shot a big buck and hit it too far back. They said for you not to leave!”…..So we called off the search for his deer and rode back to camp to meet up with the other hunters. After listening to her story and analyzing what had happened….I told them that I thought the best thing we could do would be to just back out and look for him at daylight the next morning. She thought she had hit him about the middle of the body with him slightly quartered to her. I could tell it was a struggle for them to agree to not go look for it that night but I commend them on backing out and waiting. What I told her was that if we went out there now he may or may not be dead. If we wait until tomorrow morning he’ll likely be dead within a few hundred yards and you’ll have him on your wall to look at for the rest of your life. If we go out there now and he’s not dead….You may just end up with a story to tell.

The next morning I woke up expecting it to be raining but it was barely drizzling outside about 5:30. I looked at the radar and it only showed a little faint green that had just about moved out the area. I don’t know what happened after I left the house because by the time we made it to the woods it was freaking coming down. We tracked this one in a down pour. Shelby hit on the scent trail right off and started taking it the way the buck had gone. For some reason, even though she’s fixed I think she still puts off a heat odor every so often because Otis loses his mind and starts trying to breed her every couple months or so. It just so happened that this was one of those days and he was bad distracted and just harassing her. Like a dummy I pulled Shelby off the track and had my cousin hold her on lead just having more confidence in Otis under the extreme conditions we were tracking under.

It took me a while to get his focus on the track but we finally got back searching and working to pick up on the scent line again. The lady’s husband and son was with me looking and we had gotten separated about 100 yards when I hear her husband holler out “Wooooo!!! There he is right there!!!....The brown dog was running right to it!!” She was too….If I’d just let her go and put Otis on the leash she would have took us right to it. It was only another 75 yards past where I pulled her off. He had only ran about 200 yards from the hit site before bedding up. The shot turned out to be a lot farther back than the hunter thought and it was actually hit right in front of the hind quarter. They did the right thing by backing out and as a result she has one heck of a bow kill to put on her wall.

Just a side note….this deer still had some velvet on it. Its on the end of the main beam that's laying on the ground. Sorry for the blurry pic….Like I said, we were tracking in a down pour….Parts 2 & 3 of this week’s tales still to come……