Well he was definitely hit….but barely. The hunter said that the field was already full of deer when the big buck came walking in. He had several deer close to the blind and when he moved to get on the big buck....all the deer spooked and in the process spooked the big buck. When he shot.... the buck was at 100 yards or so standing on the edge of the woodline…quartered away. The hunter is shooting a 300 mag and he said the gun popped up on him when pulled the trigger.

We tracked the deer out of the field never finding a drop of blood until we got to the bed about 250 yards away. It didn’t look like the deer had bedded for long because the bed wasn’t nearly as defined and pressed as they are when one lays overnight. We found about a spotty, fist sized spot of watery blood in the bed and another decent spot beside it where it looked like the buck may have stood before laying down. When he got up he circled right back to the food plot and went back the same way he originally came from. The funny thing about it is that Otis was trying to take us that way from the start and I pulled him off of it twice. Oh if we could only just talk to one another.

We never found any more blood after the bed. We took the track about 600 more yards across a big, steep creek bottom and into a small stand of young pines about head high where the track went hot. I let the dogs push the hot trail out for a few hundred yards and we called it off. At that point the deer had went well over 1000 yards and just wasn’t showing signs of being very hurt. The blood we found in the original bed looked like watery muscle blood to me. I think the most likely thing that happened was maybe the hunter caught him across the neck or leg.….. “Tis but a flesh wound!!”

As we came off the creek bank I stopped and snapped a pic of the deer trail he was on. It was tore up pretty good with fresh sign.