I’m a little perplexed on the second call. The hunter thought from the reaction of the deer that he had just smoked him. He was 75 yards standing broadside. The hunter was shooting Fusion Corelokt bullets out of a Ruger 30-06. He said the deer’s chest nearly hit the ground when he shot and that he almost plowed dirt before he got his feet back in under him and took off. There was only one speck of blood at the hit site and none after that. Otis got right on the track with no issues and took it about 250-300 yards before jumping the buck. He was out in front of us 100 yards or better and over a rise when the buck jumped. It sounded like he had him held up for a second or two……but by the time we got there the deer had broke and ran. Otis will bay one on the jump if its weak but he doesn’t take off after one like a Walker Hound or something. He pushes them more like a beagle. So we pushed it for another 500 yards before the deer crossed the dirt road onto the adjacent property that we didn’t have permission to be on and that's where we called it off.

My best guess is that maybe he hit him high or maybe the bullet did something funny on impact. The deer bedded up pretty quick and the hunter is baffled that he didn’t smoke him. I'm thinking maybe he hit him high under the spine or just over but I really don't know.

The funny thing about this track is that it’s almost identical to the track I ran for the same guy last year out of the same stand….ending in the same cutover across the same dirt road. He told me today that his deer from last year we pushed into that cutover was actually found later on by the black folks across the road. He said he saw it hanging at the processor a couple days later and was like “Holy chit!...That’s my deer!”…..Sure enough, he asked where the deer had come from and they told him three black guys brought it in. It was the folks from the land next door. He said he went to them and offered to pay for the processing and told them he would have it made into whatever they wanted if they would let him have the head. They wouldn’t give it to him. He said it had 15 scorable points and it would’ve been his biggest deer ever. Now don't that suck.

BTW.......Shelby is running every track with us now and shadowing Otis so she's getting in on all the tracks too. I let her run this one off lead and she did pretty well. She still doesn't have the confidence to leave me for very long so she worked a lot back and forth from me to Otis but that's to be expected.