I hear that….you and me both. I ain’t afraid to sling some lead on a follow up shot either.

It really sounds like a high back shot but maybe several inches down in the body under the spine about midways back....gut/liver area. It sounds like they’ve found a decent amount of blood. I like the fact they’ve found some kind of tissue even though I’m skeptical on it being lung. At least maybe we’re dealing with some significant internal trauma and not just a back slap. I should also add to the story that they’ve already taken their own pet dog to try and track it with no luck. That’s not gonna help make things easy on us but I still feel pretty confident we can hopefully work our way through it. I feel like the deer is likely gonna bed up pretty quickly….within a few hundred yards past where they backed out.

Well we were due for a bad day and we had it this morning. I don’t know what was up with Otis this morning but he just wasn’t acting his normal self. I don’t know if the other dog being in there threw him off or if it was the back slapped deer he didn’t want to track or what but he just didn’t seem that interested in tracking it like he normally would. I finally got him around the search area and picked up on the clean line but he only ran it for 400 yards or so before stopping. I’ve had Randy tell me that his older dogs wouldn’t track back slaps sometimes like they knew it wasn’t a killing hit. I’m hoping that’s all it was this morning. I’m just gonna chalk it up to a fluke and go back again on the next one with confidence just like we’ve been doing.

We found some more blood smeared on some saplings between waist and chest high on me. No doubt it was a high back shot. I believe he might have went under the spine on this one though. We grid searched for a long ways in some really open habitat so I at least feel like the deer made it a good ways out of the area. It's very possible he's still alive. I wish Otis would have done better on this one but that's the way it goes sometimes. Maybe he just recognized it wasn't a fatal wound like Randy said. I ended up doing this track pro bono because I just wasn't satisfied with Otis's performance.

Moving along......

Well dang, I hate Otis didn't perform as well as he usually does. Good for you for not charging on this track, even though y'all didn't find the deer you still made a good impression I'm sure.

It was a difficult track to begin with since there had already been another dog brought in ahead of him but he really regressed back to some puppy chit this morning. As a puppy when he didn’t know what to do or didn’t have the track….he would stop out ahead of me about 40-50 yards and just stand there looking back at me. He hasn’t done that at all this year until this morning. He’s usually out actively searching around me. On most tracks he’s so excited that it takes him a minute just to calm down and slow down. He had a completely different demeanor this morning. Maybe he doesn’t feel good today or something…..I’m just not really sure. That’s the trouble with not being able to talk to them. Sometimes you just don’t know what they’re thinking. He could be thinking….”Look humans…..we ain’t gonna find this one so I ain’t bullchittin around out here this morning.” .....If the deer was dead, it was either in a pond/lake or he was WAY out there somewhere. We did a pretty extensive search through some really open understory for 500-800 yards around the hit site.

I’m gonna have to go back and look at my GPS to make sure this is 100% accurate but I specifically deleted everything last night before this track to make sure my memory was clean. Anyway though…..the hunter asked me at the end of the track how far we had walked. I pulled up Otis on the GPS and checked his stats and it showed 8.2 miles for him. We searched for 3-4 hrs so I suppose that could be accurate but that seems crazy. Like I said though, I know I reset everything before this track so I don’t see how it couldn’t be right. I know a lot of folks don’t understand how you could go that far without going into the next county but think about it more like the pattern a timber cruiser would work rather than a straight line. The great thing about my Garmin unit I’m using is that I can see everywhere we’ve been and run a timber cruise pattern by just looking at my screen.

Everyone, even dogs, have crappy days... Better luck next time. Enjoy the post CNC.

Thanks!.....That's what I'm chalking it up to. We were out walking around a day or two later and I look over and Otis is up at the house sitting next my truck like "C'mon let's go!" I think he's ready to go again.

Call just came in for tomorrow morning. Sounds like somebody shot Ol’ Split Toe for any TK & Mike fans. The hunter reported that he was sitting with his wife and she knocked the stuffing out of “big one”. He said they found hair and gut matter at the hit site but not much else. He said that knowing it was a gut shot, they just backed out and called for a dog. This sounds like a very promising track. You never know though until you get there. To be continued………

Alright, I hope Otis is fired up and ready to go. looking forward to the rest of the story.

Great big ol tk and Mike thumbs up! Good luck bub

Well, I hadn’t made it but about 2-3 miles down the road when the hunter called and said he couldn’t meet this morning due to getting called into work. So, now I’m back here at home sippin coffee and watching the sun come up. Hopefully, we’ll still be able to get on the track later today. Otis is not happy about it.

Well dang, I was hoping for a different story this morning.

How do you feel about the track if y'all have to go this evening as opposed to this morning? Will this fog/humidity help keep the scent heavy?

I’ve had folks back out before but this one was a little more disappointing than normal. It was a beautiful morning to track with all the moisture in the air and on the ground. I didn’t want to jinx myself, but with the good tracking conditions and it being a very likely gut shot….. I felt like I could just about point my bat toward the left field wall on this one as soon as we stepped up to the plate. It certainly won’t make the track any easier if we have to wait until this afternoon but we could still likely work it if they call back. It would be a 20-24 hr old line. The deer’s probably less than 500 yards out.

^^^Good luck! I'll be tuned in hoping for a good outcome should you guys get to track.

That hunter never called back. I did go on another track though. It didn’t sound very promising from the start but I still went....you never know……..

One of my favorite things about tracking is that I get to go on different hunting properties all over south Alabama and see a lot of cool things that I likely never would have otherwise. This afternoon’s track took place along Pintlala Creek just south of Montgomery in the back end of some huge cattle pastures. All the areas I’ve grown up hunting have either been in the mountains of Jackson Co or the pine thickets of Lee, Macon, Barbour county areas. Going into that flat open blackbelt land is like stepping into a whole new world. I really enjoy getting to see it all.

I wish I had a happy ending to go along with the story but this was just a case of a hunter learning the hard way that a Rage expandable straight down through the back is not a great shot. JB could have told ‘em that. It was the exact same shot JB…..and the exact same result. The hunter said that he must have just barely missed the spine. Otis tracked the deer well. It was stuck yesterday afternoon so we were 20 hrs after the shot. We tracked it for about 900 yards and were making that usual loop back toward the hit site when the track went from cold to hot. We gave chase but never caught up with him. I think he was probably well out ahead of us. The deer will very likely live or take a lot of time to expire. That straight down into the back shot with a bow is just not a high percentage shot.....with any broadhead.

My new hiking boots are already paying for themselves. A lot of the places I’m tracking are dry upland areas and they work well for that. They’ll suck though if I ever have to get into any wet areas. With the distances we’re walking though…..I’ll gladly hang them on the boot dryer if I have to. I checked before we got started this last track to make sure Otis was on zero when we started. According to GPS, he traveled 5.4 miles by the time we made it back to the truck. I would say that put the hunter and I walking between 3-4 miles. There was a strip of woods about 600 yards wide between the wide open cattle pastures and the big creek. The deer ran a straight line just off the edge of the fields for hundreds of yards before making a loop over to the creek and then traveling down the creek right back the same direction it had come from. It had bedded in some canes just off the creeks edge.

There’s gonna be a little lull in action here around Christmas as we all take a few days off to spend with our families before hitting the woods hardcore. Lace your boots up tight boys….it’s about to get good.

A quick update on Shelby: I’ve started working with her a little on shed hunting. I thought I would talk to folks and see if there was any interest in going on shed hunts with her in the spring. Right now, I’m just hiding some sheds around my property before we walk and allowing her to find them and bring them to me. She’s something else….she’s got a whole different searching gear than what Otis has. Otis is a shortlegged, cold nosed slow tracker and Shelby is more like a bird dog. A more hot nosed, cover lots of ground, high nosed wind scenter. Don’t get me wrong, she’s still doing great at putting her nose to the ground and blood tracking…..but she’s gonna be hell on a grid search. Maybe a situation where we don’t have good ground scenting conditions such as one of these 2-3 day old tracks…… and we’re just gridding into the wind trying to locate the deer dead or alive. I’ll see if I can get a quick video of her on our next shed hunt.

Merry Christmas from Otis and Shelby!

Two calls just came in for in the morning. The first one is a bow shot I’m tracking for one of my neighbors. He feels like he made a pretty decent shot but he saw the deer run off for a decent ways with the arrow still in him. He said he thinks he may be a little low and hit the off side shoulder which stopped the arrow. Very scant blood trail so he just backed out.

The second track is a little bit of a mystery. A buck came in harassing a doe and the hunter rushed his shot. He said the deer bucked and took off. Good blood at the hit site and decent blood for 60 yards and then nothing. I figure he’s just hit too far back around the liver/gut area and the wound hole clogged up on them…… but we’ll see in the morning.

To be continued......

Good luck bub

Thanks man….I think its gonna be a good morning to track right here at daylight. There a lot of moisture in the air and on the ground. My truck is wet from all the moisture.

I think my neighbor may have drilled this one in the shoulder plate. So far we’ve tracked it around 1100 yards but we’re finding good blood every 50-100 yards or so..... it makes me think we should eventually track up on him maybe. Some places better than that some a little farther apart. It’s crossed over onto another neighbor’s property though that I don’t know so we’re currently getting some lunch and trying to contact them so we can keep searching. I’m kinda wondering if the deer is dead or not.

Another tracker was able to get to the second track late last night so they called me off of that one. The deer was laying 30 yards from where the folks quit tracking…..go figure.