Call came in for tomorrow morning. This one actually came in earlier today. It’s a local outfitter I’ve tracked for in the past. They told me that a hunter had shot one this morning and it looked marginal. I told them that it would be tomorrow morning before I could track again so he said that they would give it till this afternoon and then track it to see what they had.

We talked again this afternoon and the guide told me that they had tracked it a few hundred yards to a creek 6 hrs after the shot and jumped it. He said the deer looked like it had one of it’s legs hanging off and that it seemed pretty hurt. The deer ran just out ahead of them and the guide believes it laid down again. They backed out and decided to wait on me in the morning. Hopefully they’ve gotten into the body cavity on this one and he’ll be dead in the morning. We’ll see………….

To be continued……..

Another call came in for tomorrow. Grandpa and granddaughter were sitting together and a buck came out on the greenfield. Grandad said the shot looked good. He said the deer bolted out of the field like it had been hit hard but they can only find a couple small spots of blood. The deer ran into some young pines and they can’t find it. He can’t meet until tomorrow afternoon so it actually works out good for me. I’m gonna track the one in the morning and then let Otis rest for the middle of the day before tracking granddaughters bucks tomorrow evening as it cools off. That's all I'm taking on for tomorrow.

To be continued..........

Just caught up reading from the past few days, and shew, I'm tired just reading about all of the tracks! Good job guys! Looking forward to tomorrow's tracks!

Good stuff

"I had a couple more calls come in this morning but I just couldn’t take them."

I assume you refer them to other trackers?

Yes, I referred one to our tracking Facebook page…..another one was a neighbor of mine that was looking for what he called a “cull buck”. When I told him about Otis needing to rest he said just don’t worry about it…..The last one didn’t seem to happy when I told him I couldn’t come out. The conversation never made it to referrals.

This morning’s first track was exciting. Otis picked right up on the trail and led us another 400-500 yards up the creek branch. We came to a little thicket and Otis started pointing and indicating that the deer was in the thicket. The hunter was carrying a shotgun loaded with buckshot. I called Otis back to me and told the hunter to ease up to that thicket with his gun and be ready to shoot. Sure enough about the time he got in there….”Booooom!!!!”……….


……Buuut he missed. He said the deer was actually still about 30 yards from him and it was going away from him in some really thick stuff when it jumped. I sent Otis back on its track but we never caught up to it again. We went another 400-500 yards to the property line and called it off. I figure this one was just another low leg hit. This was 24 hrs after the shot so the deer had plenty of time to weaken if it would have been a hit in the body cavity.

Got one more track later this afternoon for Grandad and granddaughter. I hope this one is laying out there dead somewhere. Too dang many live deer situations here lately. To be continued.......

Dang, I just found this thread and I'm tired just reading it. You guys need some cooler weather and everyone needs to aim real good for a couple of days for you and Otis to get rested up.

I hear you brother. It definitely won’t hurt my feelings if we don’t get any calls this evening. Otis could use the rest. He was still a little sore today but not as bad. If you’ve ever lifted weights and know what it feels like when you first start…..I think he has that same type soreness. That really long day we had took its toll on us.

This afternoons track was just a scratched-up deer. My best guess is that it was grazed across the brisket. The shooter was 7 years old and it was about a 125 yard shot. Grandad said she completely missed the first shot but on the second one the deer just bolted out of the field….no kick….no hop…..nothing of that sort. There was just a few specks of blood at the hit site and a little about waist high on some sedge where the deer went out of the field. We tracked it for about 600 yards before calling it off. We didn’t find anywhere where it tried to bed up or any more blood. We both agreed that the hit wasn’t as good as they hoped.

CNC, you and Otis are putting in some work for apparently bad shots and shots where poor judgment play a role. I'm just gonna say it. We owe it to the deer to make/take ethical clean shots. Practice more, slow down when the time comes and make the first shot count. Everybody wants there kid to kill a deer. Until the kid can shoot and understand what they are doing they should not be allowed to shoot at an animal.

I look forward to reading the trails of Otis. The times he finds the deer and it is recovered are awsome. Keep up the good work CNC.

I'm sitting here hoping that more people lose their deer instead of recovering them so I can read more of these stories.. So everyone in Macon, Lee, Russell, Barbour, Bullock, Pike, Montgomery, Elmore, Tallapoosa and Chambers counties. May your .243 ballistic tips explode with no blood. May Otis always have employment with the stories to follow.

I agree with both of you.

In all seriousness though, there's a lot of folks using ballistic tip bullets. Maybe this is just another “Rage VS Muzzy” debate but I’m not a fan of the ballistic tip. I don’t think a lot of the folks really understand what they’re shooting and how it will react when it hits the deer. If you're gonna use them then for sure shoot the deer well behind the shoulder.

I’ll say this BigEd because I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression about tracking dogs. I’ve heard folks make the statement before that tracking dogs could lead to more folks taking bad shots because they know they can bring in a dog……that’s not the case at all though. Folks are calling in the tracking dog as a last resort. I don’t think it ever even crosses anyone’s mind until long after the fact.

I think the truth is that that these type situations have been occurring for a long time and trackers are just shedding a little sunlight on it. I agree with you that we as a group could improve on our preparation for shooting a deer as well as our decisions during the heat of the moment.

I firmly believe though that it’s as much mental preparation as it is practicing to be a proficient shooter. Many of these situations are just due to rushed shots. The deer yesterday morning with its leg blew up was shot at 15 yards with a gun. Precision shooting doesn’t play much of a role at that distance. That’s all nerves. It was someone fairly new to hunting and they shot with the deer quartering hard away from them instead of waiting just another moment for a better angle. The deer came by the hunter walking down the road headed into the field he was sitting on. A high percentage of the ones I’m tracking are where the hunter saw the deer and immediately shot.

Read the deer’s body language. If they’re calm and not alerted to your presence….then just chill out and wait for a good angle on your shot. Either broadside or just slightly quartered away. Especially be patient with any deer that’s coming out into a greenfield. Don’t feel like you have to shoot the moment it steps out of the woodline if you don’t have a good shot. These bad angled shots have a very low rate of solid hits.

Awe man you just need more bullet weight. Gonna be hard to stop a 150-180gr ballistic tip.

My suggestion would be stick with something that’s gonna blow a hole all the way through the deer or penetrate hard if you shoot the shoulder. I’ll take a plain old snub nosed bullet shot out of a 30-30 over some of this fancy chit.

Call just came in from the morning hunt. The hunter reported that the deer ran off with gut hanging out. They don’t have any blood to follow and gave up searching. These are the deer that take a long time to die and can go a long ways if you push them. I advised the hunter to back out and give the deer 12-18 hrs before we get after it. These deer are often still alive even after that long. We’re gonna go in tomorrow morning and recover it. There’s a chance they pushed it a little if they got too extensive with their search……if not then I expect to find him somewhere in the 400 yard range. Fingers crossed anyways.

To be continued........

Not really hard to stop any weight ballistic tip if it hits the shoulder. Soft bullets with explosive expansion don't make good penetrators.

It's quite common for them to shed their jackets and have small exit holes with straight through well placed shots.

Someone please make a bad shot already!!!

I must be an enigma then cause I have never had a problem with them. However the smallest caliber I hunt with is a 25-06. Never shot a bonded bullet and never really plan to. In 22 years of hunting ive only ever found two bullets in a deer. And it was the same deer I shot twice.

I've hit shoulder, brisket, neck, lungs, and everything else with a Hornady SST, which could be considered a ballistic tip. Every deer I've ever shot has dropped in its tracks. Granted, I'm shooting 150gr .30-06, but that bullet causes devastation.

I'll get back in on the bullet discussion with y'all in a minute. Here's an update on this morning's track.


This one did not turn out nearly like I had hoped. Otis took the track and led us straight up the creek for a few hundred yards and then all of sudden the track went hot. I let him go for a little ways but I was fully expecting a dead deer or a really weak deer..... so after a few hundred yards I told the hunter I wanted to stop right there and just double check Otis before getting after it any further.

We looped back to the hit site and led Otis down the creek in the opposite direction as well as across the creek to the other side but never got on anything promising that led me to believe he was wrong the first time. This deer didn’t have too many options on places to go either so it wasn’t too hard to narrow it down.

After double checking we got back on the original track and re-run it to look again for any blood or gut we may have missed but never did find a single drop or nothing. We followed the hot trail for a few hundred yards until we got to a young stand of pines about chest high and pulled off there in hopes that the deer lays back down out in the cutover and eventually dies.

We come to the conclusion that the hunter just barely caught the deer under the belly enough to rip the skin and allow some gut to pooch out. He said the deer kicked on the shot but then just trotted off like it wasn’t that hurt. I don’t believe that he actually did any damage to the innards of the deer at all because there was no gut matter splatter or blood or anything at the hit site…. just a wad of white hair. Even for the 100 yards that the hunter saw the deer trot across the clear cut there wasn’t a speck of anything nor on the trail Otis took us on. That’s just not typical for a really low gut hit and why it leads me to believe that he only cut the skin.

I fully expect this deer to eventually die but just how long that may take I don’t know. It’s likely to be days or even a couple weeks. I don’t think he’ll go far though and he’ll stay in a small area around the creek. The only positive thing about the situation is that it’s in a great place to see buzzards if they get on him. Here’s the hit site.



I believe this one was actually hit below the chart under the G11 square or maybe in the G12 box.

Looking back on this morning’s track I should have just trusted Otis from the start. The hunter said he heard Otis let out a bark right as we went hot which means he very likely saw the buck get up and take off. The situation just didn’t play out anything like I expected after giving the deer 24 hrs though. Hell, I was just hoping that the yotes didn’t have him eaten up when we got to him. That’s the damn thing about dealing with these marginally hit deer like this, it’s kind of like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolate……..