Got called out on a bow shot buck yesterday. The shooter described it as a sho nuff good un. The hit was a little low and back but the hunter felt like he had made a killing hit. The buck walked off panting from the mouth and stopping every 10 yards or so. The hunter waited 30 minutes and backed out to give the buck time. It was shot at 8:30 and we gave it until around 2:30 before we started tracking it. The hunter felt like it would surely be bedded up dead not far away.

Tracking conditions were tough yesterday afternoon with the humidity being very low and the wind whipping around. Otis could definitely smell the track but each time he would get his nose down on it, he would get overly excited and get too fast to track under those conditions. He would run the line 20-30 yards then over shoot the track and have to loop back around to pick it up again. This happened about 4-5 times in the beginning of the track before he finally figured out that he was going to have to slow down to follow this one. After he calmed down a little he put his nose to the ground and tracked it right up. Unfortunately at around 200 yards, the track went hot. I figure the deer got up out ahead of us cause I never saw it. I did see a big change in Otis’s behavior though when he ran across where the deer had been bedded up. I gave him the green light to go after it and we ran it for about ½ mile before pulling off of it after no attempts to bay. We marked the spot where we pulled off and decided to give the deer overnight before continuing. We also went back to where the line went hot just to double check Otis. After circling the area for about 30-45 minutes we didn’t find any sign that pointed toward Otis being wrong. He didn’t attempt to take anything else off in another direction and when I put him back on the original line he went with it again.

I’m really not sure how bad this deer is hurt. We’re going to go back in later this morning and see if he bedded down and died overnight. Hopefully we’ll have a happy ending to the story. Suppose to be a 140-150 inch buck.