Choc lab. His last 2 tracks were next to nothing blood.
I had a “bad” track on Sunday that I never wrote a story about. There wasn’t much too it really. Pretty sure it was just a clean miss. You guys I’ve tracked for don’t take that description offensively. Some tracks just have very low probabilities of finding the deer from the get go and the trackers I’ve talked to often refer to them as bad tracks.
It was a little after 9:00 am on Sunday morning. I had just left the house to go riding around handing out more cards to hunters when I got the call. It was a small group of older gentlemen that I had just met the day before. One of them told me that he had shot a doe on his walk back to camp and wanted to know if I wanted to put Otis on her for practice. I was only 3 or 4 miles down the road from them at the time and I said heck yeah I’ll be there in 5 minutes.
When I got there he tells me that he thinks he hit her but isn’t really for sure. He said the deer jumped and took off out of the road and that was all he saw. It was a really thick understory, so straight down the road was all you could see. After doing a little searching, we couldn’t locate any sign of a hit where the deer was standing or where it had exited in the brush. As were searching the hunter and I talk a little more. It turns out he had just had a stroke not too long ago and he was a little shaky from it. We’re talking about someone not far from being 80 probably. The shot was also a free handed shot from around 75 yards. This may have ended up a “bad” track but I still enjoyed meeting these old men and hanging out with them for awhile. They were just enjoyable to talk to. One of the other older gentlemen asks the shooter while were searching for blood….”Elmer, you think it could have been standing on down the road down here?”……Elmer replies…..”Hell naw, I know it wasn’t down there….I can’t see that far.”
I decided to turn Otis loose anyways and see if he picked up on anything. They hadn’t done any searching, so if it was hit he had a fresh, clean line to follow. I let him search and circle for about 10-15 minutes before just calling it off. He never acted like he hit on anything. We all agreed that it was probably just a miss and I rode on.
