Too bad. It happens that way sometimes. Should have upped your game and boogied over to where the O-Man had a piglet for you. Twice. Those little ones fit in a smoker whole.
Kind of glad I hunt huge blocks of public property. The whole property line and legal issues with following a wounded deer onto private property thing is all new to me.
Of course, I say that and I'll see one I want behind the house and then it's really on.
Oh, we thought about it for a second cause there was pigs all around us close that we could have likely gotten a shot on. I asked the hunter if he wanted to shoot one while we had the chance and he said…”Hell yeah!”…..No sooner than he said that though than we both thought better of it since we still thought we had a deer down. If we started capping pigs then I may have never got Otis to refocus on the day old line we we’re following. It’s probably best we left them alone for Otis’s sake anyways. It was good training for him to reinforce to him that we’re not chasing anything else in the woods other than the one wounded deer.
The property line situation has probably never been a big problem for most hunters because the vast majority of the deer we track “by hand” never extend more than a few hundred yards if that. Some do but the vast majority of the deer like we’re tracking just can’t be followed without a dog. It’s pretty easy with a dog to cover 500-1000 yards or more following a deer if he’s just very marginally hit. With someone that’s only hunting 200 acres or 500 acres, etc….you can hit property lines pretty quick. There’s other places that are 3.4, or 5,000 acre chunks of property where you usually have plenty of room and it’s not an issue. Most deer tend to circle back eventually.
