And now……the rest of the story.
I’ll cut right to the ending and save the suspense. After tracking it for about 600+ yards we determined that the deer wasn’t hit quite like they thought it was and was probably still alive. I misunderstood the story a little last night. The deer had only went a few yards after the shot and dropped. They had actually walked over to the deer and shined a light on it thinking it was down for the count. They went back to get the truck and when they came back it was gone. They thought they heard it down in the bushes but wasn’t for sure. They didn’t jump it up and see it a second time like I had originally thought.
We put Otis on the track and it was slow at first . He was picking up on scent but the line was old from last night with likely very little wounded scent. We tracked it about 150-200 yards off into a creek bottom where I think the buck must have bedded up there for part of the night. The reason I think that is because once we got into the creek bottom Otis picked up on good scent and started running a direct line with great confidence. He took us down the creek bottom a little ways, then back up out of it and across a freshly burned clear cut. The hunter stated that where he was headed was where the buck had originally come from and where they had been getting picks of him....so it makes sense that he would head that direction. We made it about 400 yards across the clear cut and started back into the woods again when we decided to call it off. We were only a couple hundred yards at that point from a major roadway with heavy traffic and the line was headed straight at it. After putting Otis in his kennel we all spread out and grid searched the area just to give it one more shot…..but no luck.
We all talked it over and think that maybe it was actually a grazing spine shot instead of gut shot. I don’t think and unpressured gut shot would have made it as far as we tracked this deer. Gut shot deer also don’t tend to go down right away and lay motionless on the ground like this one did. That tends to be a shocked spine. Overall I was very pleased with how Otis worked the line. It took him a minute to get going but once he picked up on good scent then he was on it like stink on chit.
