So by this time its getting close to noon and another calls comes in before I ever left from track #2. These guys had shot one earlier that morning crossing the top of a ridge in a HUGE clear cut….. going from one draw to the next. We’re talking a clearcut in the 100’s of acres. They had found decent blood here and there for a couple hundred yards and even found one really good spot but couldn’t progress the line any further. The problem was that this clear cut was fingers of draws leading down to one main bottom and they were all slap FULL of treetops everywhere that the logging crew had left. It had also had a summer’s worth of weed growth grown up in it that was over your head in many places. It was a struggle just to walk through this stuff most of the time.
We probably tracked it for 500-600 yards or better and found more blood but the sun was beating down on us HARD out in that open clear cut. There wasn’t any relief at all in terms of shade. After a little while of tracking Otis had slowed way down and had his tongue hung out panting enough that I could tell he was getting pretty hot. He wasn’t tracking like normal anymore and I was having a hard time reading his body language to feel 100% confident that we were still on it the line. By this time we’ve crossed over another little ridge into the next draw. We decided to ease off into the main creek bottom, take a break, and circle back.
Otis got down in the creek and laid down on his belly to cool off. We stayed there for a while until he completely quit panting. I told the hunter that I wanted to check the main creek bottom (SMZ) we were in really well and see if the deer was there since that’s the way it was originally headed and that being such a common place to find them.
We worked back up the bottom for several hundred yards until we passed over the original draw the deer was coming down but Otis didn’t hit on anything. We decided to go back up the creek and check there and then see if we could take anything away from where we left off to take the break. By the time we finished checking the bottom Otis’s sniffer was about spent. We decided to check the next draw over from where we had left off earlier and then call it.
Checking that last draw was when the heat got to me. My heart was beating fast and I got really light headed. My legs felt like they were just shutting down on me. I had to stop multiple times on the walk back to the truck and I typically never have to stop period. I just didn’t feel right at all.
I don’t what kind of hit we were dealing with on the last one. I suspect it was a really low gut hit like the ones we see go for a long, long ways. It was putting out decent blood here and there too like those hits will do. The hunter said it just hopped a little and trotted off. He could see it trot off for a decent ways too and even got a second shot off but missed. This was a track we would have been much better off to not have worked during the heat like we had. It just took its toll on all of us before we could find it.
This is one of only a couple tracks all year where I was really disappointed in me and Otis for not at least finding the deer still alive somewhere, if not dead…….where I felt like we could have tracked the deer much better if the conditions wouldn’t have gotten the best of us. This deer was likely WAY out there somewhere but that usually doesn't stop us. Today it did.
