The conclusion……..

So after a long day of tracking I finally made it back home right about dark. I got settled in and was enoying a few cold Dos Equis when the phone rang again. The hunter said that he had 5 racked bucks come in on him that evening and he had shot the biggest one in the group….it was a stud. He thought his shot was a little off though and that he had hit high and a little back maybe catching liver. Like with most of these stories it was super thick where the buck had ran after the shot and the blood trail was very sparse. Him and a couple of other guys had searched around but only found a fist sized area with spotty blood in it where the deer had crossed a small creek branch. This was in a creek bottom and they had tromped it out pretty well looking for the buck but with no luck.

We got there the next morning just after daylight and I took Shelby down to the hit site and left Otis back at the truck with my younger cousin. She picked up on it at the hit site but just got muddled down in the area where the searchers had been walking around so much. I called my cousin and told him to bring Otis down and lets see if he could pick his way through it. In the meantime I crossed the creek with Shelby and walked it out for about 300-400 yards to make sure he just wasn’t laid up on the side of the creek branch. One side was super thick but the side we walked on was really open. That kinda led me to believe that the buck would likely be on the thick side of the creek and that what we needed to really work it over well with the dogs.

So after not finding anything Shelby and I went back to the hit site to get Otis and restart. By now Otis was so jealous and upset at having to stay in the box….he was ready to hunt and prove himself. He didn’t even pay Shelby any attention. I started working him on down the bottom through the thick side of the creek…. trying to work out ahead of the muddled up search area where we could pick up on a clean scent line. The hunters had tromped it for a good ways so it was tough to tell if he was on a scent or not. I felt pretty confident though that the creek bottom was the most likely place we’d find the deer. Well, after we’d searched about 500 yards down the creek I told the hunter and my cousin we needed to back up to last blood and see if he didn’t go a different direction. I just didn’t see anything from the dogs that looked as if he had gone this way.

There was a 1-2 year old clear cut that ran along the side of the creek bottom we were searching in. It wasn’t crazy thick but it had grown up in some summer vegetation like they typically do. I told my cousin that as we looped back to last blood….walk up there in that clear cut and check the edge of it to see if you see anything. Well, we had almost made it back to last blood when I hear my cousin holler out….”Got him!!!!!!....Wooooo! Hooooo!”…Sure enough….instead of continuing on down the creek bottom like he was headed…the buck had taken a hard right and shot straight out in the clear cut where he crashed and died. He was probably 200-225 yards from the hit site. The hunter was pretty accurate about where he had hit him….it was a little far back and high. This was one heck of buck here with a spread I’m guessing was around 20” or so……and another one in velvet. I gotta believe the drought is causing them to shed late this year.