The first buck was bleeding pretty good but just not fatally wounded. We consistently found blood for 700-800 yards before Otis got the buck up and took off on the chase. He just never attempted to bay up. We let Otis push him for another 800 yards or so before calling it off. We had looped out around Otis and gotten on a little straight away in hopes of seeing the deer cross ahead of the dog but no luck. You could actually smell that rutty buck smell in the road where he had already crossed.
The second track just had the hair skint off his belly. There was a decent sized wad of hair blown off at the hit site and then a little blood for the first 100 yards or so but that was pretty much it. We found a few more spots where the deer crossed a ditch at about the 700 yard mark but it was only like three drops. Otis was having to really dig to work this track as well which leads me to believe it wasn’t hit high enough to really get into the guts.
