It’s pouring rain here so I'll tell the story about yesterday’s track. Tracking deer is teaching me new things about their behavior that I never knew before. One thing I’ve come to learn is that deer have an instinctive behavior they turn to when they feel like they are being chased/tracked by a predator. In order to try and lose the predator that’s tracking them….they travel a little ways and then they run around in circles in a small area crossing back over their own scent line again and again. It makes it difficult for the pursuing predator to continue to follow the scent line through all the erratic changes in directions and multiple lines run across one another. This just reinforces the importance of giving a deer PLENTY of time after the shot before tracking it. Most of the time the deer doesn’t even know what has happened until the hunter starts pursuing it. This "pursuit" of the deer can flip that instinct in him and completely change the nature of the track.

This is what happened on yesterday’s track. The hunter shot the buck with a bow at a quartering away angle with it’s head down. He thinks he just yanked the shot because the point of impact ended up being in the back of the neck right behind the skull. He said the buck left with the arrow sticking out the back of his head. They had tracked it for several hundred yards and then ran out of blood. For the first 100-125 yards there was little to no blood at all. However, at around 150 yards there was a really large spot of blood the size of a hula hoop or a couch cushion…..big spot with lots of blood. After that really large spot it went back to being spotty and finally trickled out.

Here is what I believe happened. The buck bolted out of the hit area but once it got 150 yards away it stopped and just stood there. This is where the large spot of blood was located. It probably stood there for a very long time and only moved when the hunter eventually got down and started tracking. The buck may have even bolted and left when the hunter was coming down out of his tree and the hunter never knew it. At that point the buck knew he was being pursued and went into his instinctive flight strategy to lose the predator. This is why the blood became really spotty again.....the buck was on the move or even running. When we got there to track the buck 6 hours later….we tracked it beautifully right through the search area and several hundred yards on past it. However, once we tracked a few hundred yards farther the deer starting that circling crap.

Otis has successfully worked through several of these areas on other tracks but this one through him for a loop for some reason and looking back on it I wish I would have handled it a little differently. He was trying to work his way through it with enthusiasm for a little while but after giving it several attempts he came to me and “said” that he couldn’t figure it out. Here’s what I should have done differently. We had already walked a long ways in to where the hunter was setup along with tracking a ½ mile and working through a search area. When Otis hung up on that area I think I should have sat down and taken a break. I gave him some water but we immediately went back to trying to work around the loopty loops. I should have given Otis a little mental break and then let him tackle the puzzle again with a fresher mind.

As it was, an old buck ended up giving a young dog and a rookie handler the slip. We grid searched the area for another 2 hours but never came across the buck. I almost want to believe he doubled back on us when he exited his scent loops. Lesson learned though. We’ll try a different approach on the next go round. I honestly don’t know that we would have ever found this deer no matter what we did. The hunter hadn’t hit any vitals nor had he cut the deer’s jugular. At best I think the deer may eventually die from a fractured skull or it could possibly live. The important thing I think we should all take away from it though is learning that deer react differently if they know they are being pursued. Had the hunter not pursued the deer after the shot he may have eventually laid down right where he was standing and bleeding the puddle. At worst case I think he would have just walked to another area a short distance away and bedded up where we could have tracked up on him much easier.

If you know it’s a bad hit fellas…..slip out of the area very quietly and give it several hours before proceeding. Don’t trigger that flight instinct in the deer and I think we’ll all find more of them....even on ones you track alone where a dog is not needed.