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.
