Hoping for good news!

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.

I probably need to get Otis on a simple 100-150 yard run to a deer for this next outing if any of you guys close by knock something down. I'm pleased with how he's progressing along. I just want to be sure to keep him motivated and not let these unsuccessful runs discourage him.

I need to do the same with Gunner

I downloaded this morning’s track onto the Garmin Basestation program on my computer to watch Otis’s track playback. It’s pretty cool to be able to watch a replay of everything we both did. It’s really easy to see when Otis lost the scent and when he was right on it or when he was initially casting out in circles. In the woods he was working 50-100 yards out in front of me a lot of times so I couldn’t see him. On the computer though, you can see him over run the scent….loop back around, pick it up and move on. Pretty neat dog collar. Measuring on a straight line and not counting all of his loops and such…..we actually tracked that deer around 850 yards…..or just shy of a half mile.

What kind of dog do you have?

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.

I took matters into my own hands this evening and got Otis on one of those easy tracks I was looking for. Ready to go after the hard tracks again now.......

I got an update today on this track from earlier in the week. The deer was finally found due to buzzards. We had tracked it a half mile before pulling off of the track as it approached a major roadway with heavy traffic. The hunters called me today and told me that we were right on it….we just stopped about 100-150 yards short. That ones on me and not the dog. He was tracking that deer like a champ but after tracking for over 800 yards we all thought that the deer wasn’t hit as good as they had expected and called it off as we were getting close enough to the road to see traffic in the distance. It's nice to know that we were right on it though and Otis was doing what he was supposed to.

I didn’t want to keep hi-jacking the LFTT thread too bad with my tracking stories so I’ll post this here. It’s bothering me to not have put this one on the tailgate today. Almost like letting a deer of my own get away. It may be best that we didn’t get into another bay situation with that deer though. That kind of situation is going to take some getting used to….it’s unnerving. It all just happens so quick and so close when you’re in the thick stuff like we were in. Below is crude sketch of what the buck did to us and why we had a hard time getting Otis back on the track. The top of the pic is the ridge we came off of into the creek bottom. The green is a food plot and the tan line a hunting club road….blue the creek….and the red line the bucks trail.

When we originally crossed the creek following the buck we had to loop around about 50-75 yards up creek (left of pic) at a better crossing spot. Otis followed with us and then got back on the track after we crossed. What we didn’t know at the time was that the buck was just lying in the bushes on the other side of the creek from where we originally came up to it. Otis bayed him right on the side of the creek for a moment but then the buck bounded back across the creek and went right back the way he came from. It was so thick that you couldn’t see really what happened other than a giant buck all of sudden emerged from a thicket like a flying unicorn. Me and the hunter both thought that he went on down the creek. I never gave Otis time to run the deer after he broke bay. I just beeped him to me and we regrouped. Both me and the hunter were really surprised that the buck was still alive.

I sure will be glad when Otis and I both get past this training period. This learning curve thing sucks.

My humble opinion......'whistle break' Otis so that you can immediately call him off a track at any point. Then, when faced with this situation, let him run the deer to presure him to bay. The deer was obviously not wounded badly enough to expire in a timely matter and needed to be put down.

You can call him off if you make the determination that he cannot stop the deer.

He’s trained to come to a whistle and the GPS collar he wears also has a beeper on it that I can trigger from my handheld unit. He knows to come back to me when the collar beeps. I can pull him right off of running a deer like the one we came upon today…he’s responding well to that. That’s the third live one I’ve pulled him off with no issue. We went from tracking to instant bay though today. Otis was originally tracking about 100-125 yards in front of us but when he came to the creek, he waited up on us and was a little anxious to cross on his own. After we went around and got across in a better spot…Otis went back ahead of us and hadn’t even made it out to 30-40 yards or so when he let loose baying. The buck had gotten up out of a thicket right along side the creek and immediately squared off on us. We were right in behind Otis and didn’t see the buck until we were already within 10 yards or so. Nasty thick along the little creek we were on. Otis was within feet of him before he knew it. For the brief moment the buck was squared off Otis didn’t seem to be trying to grab him....but he was really close upon him though. I think it startled all parties involved. Its one of the reasons we took a minute to regroup.

We fully expected to find the deer dead. Two hunters bow hunting close together had actually watched the deer bed twice after the shot the evening before. They had left him in the second bed at dark and snuck out hoping that he would be there in the morning. They had really only called me because it was a friend of mine’s hunting club close to my house and we thought we would get Otis some work. Couldn't believe he was still alive 17 hrs later. The arrow was coated with gut slime.

Just to add a little more detail to the story. The buck actually wasn't in the bed where they had left him the evening before. He had gotten up again during the night and made it 300-400 yards to the creek where he bedded up a again.

I really enjoy reading these stories

Thanks!.....Hopefully I’ll have one with a happy ending soon. Me and Otis both are getting better and better with every track though. I feel a lot more comfortable now knowing how to approach a track and how Otis should work, etc…..He’s still young at 19 months and does a lot of stuff typical for young tracking dogs but it won’t be too much longer before these learning tracks are behind us. The rest of this season will be spent getting him as much experience as I can. He’ll be a much more mature dog next year and that’ll be when things really start to get good.

I went out on yesterday’s track for free still and to get Otis the experience. However, after tracking down the deer and finding him still alive….the hunter paid me for the effort anyways. This was one where I didn’t argue with them about it too much. I took the money to town today and upgraded my equipment with a boot dryer. It seems to be working pretty good. We’ve went from completely saturated to about dry now in a couple hours time. Just about ready to go again.

Today’s call actually came in last night about 9:30…..It just so happened to come in during the 5 minutes when I walked outside to take the garbage to the road and I went to bed not even knowing it. I texted the guy back around 6:30 this morning and he told me to come on that they had one down. This was actually a landowner I had tracked for earlier in the season. The earlier track was a nice 3 year old 10 pt that we found on the youth hunt for the landowner’s little boy. This track was for another young hunter’s first buck as well but it was the son of the landowner’s friend. The track took place right on the banks of one of Alabama’s major rivers. Just for the sake of keeping location private….I won’t say which one.

We had talked about this over the phone but when I got there the hunter went over with me again the story of what happened the evening before. A young ten-year-old boy had shot his first buck just before dark and they suspected that he either hit it really low or hit it really far forward in the brisket. They estimated that they had tracked the deer around 800 yards the night before in a big semi circle… having jumped the deer at least once and more than likely twice. They had good blood for a distance and then it would peter out….pick it up again, peter out….one of those kinds of tracks. They also reported finding small chunks of guts or some type matter on the briars as they tracked. After having tracked the deer a long ways and believing they had jumped him a second time….they called off the search late last night and decided to bring in a dog.

Since they had tracked so far already……we started Otis a couple hundred yards from where they had called off the search. Otis took off searching with good enthusiasm and doing a decent job working through the search area. This is still where he struggles though being so young. To him, he smells scent lines meandering in all different directions where the searchers have been searching back and forth across the real line. It seems so simple to us to look and see blood but he’s not using his eyes at all….its a nose driven search. Depending on the given day or track he may go anywhere from 5-20 minutes through this maze of scent line before he runs back to my feet and gives me the “I don’t know” signal. This is exactly what happened today. Before we could work through the search zone….he came back to me confused as what to do.

To help Otis work through this, I asked the hunters to show me exactly where they called off the search last night and didn’t go any farther. After watching them search themselves for 5-10 minutes for where they broke the branch marking the spot…… I asked them just to give me a general idea. I was going to arc out around the area to see if Otis could locate the clean line. (Take some toilet paper with you fellas. Drop it any and everywhere you think is an important location we might need to relocate later on.) So Otis and I started to arc out around the search zone about 100 yards past where they had given up. Not far into the arc Otis hit the scent line and went with it. Once he made it out to around 60-70 yards I started slowly easing in behind him. He worked this line at a nice moderate pace. He tracked on a pretty direct line but I never had to get over a normal walk to keep up. The farthest he made it ahead of me was around 130 yards.

After we had gone around 400-500 yards I noticed on the GPS that Otis had stopped in front of me and was on something. As I approached though and I emerged out of the thicket we were in, I could see that we had actually ran right smack dab into the river. As I was walking, I also noticed under my feet that there was a good amount of fresh blood on the trail Otis had run. When I got to Otis he was at the edge of the water on a little slough of the river. He was going in and out of the water but hesitant to go any farther. The blood verified what had happened, leading right down to the water’s edge.

It was looking a little bleak at this point. All signs pointed to the deer going into the river one way or the other. He could have either swam 50 yards across the head end of the drainage we were on to another point of woods on our side of the river…or he headed out to sea in which case the search was likely over. We worked back around the back end of the slough and came around to the banks on the other side. Sure enough, the deer had swam the slough and came up the bank on the point of the other side. Otis picked back up on the trail and we were off again. The deer ran right down the bank of the river never getting more than 10 yards or so off of it. Otis had just worked out ahead of me to about 100 yards again when I saw on the GPS that he had stopped on something. I was hopeful but hesitant because at this point the deer has made it a mile and a half from the original shot and it looked like he was probably river bound. I was also preparing to deal with a live deer at any moment.

As I topped the hill I could see down into the next holler where Otis had stopped. There was a good sized oak tree with a broad crown that had fallen right at the water’s edge. Otis was cautiously pacing around it. I think him and I are both a little gun shy after that last one jumped up on us at close range. By the time I made it to him, Otis had already committed to going into the tree top and was chewing on the deer when I got there. Lot of fist bumping and high fiving broke loose. Several happy hunters.

The deer had been shot really low in the guts. Just below where the brown hair meets the white hair…..so were talking really low. The young boy had caught just enough of it though that it ripped a hole in its belly and the guts basically started falling out. There was a balloon sized ball of guts hanging down from the deer. He was dead when we found him but he hadn’t been dead very long. He was still very warm on the inside and you could see at least two different beds in the tree top where he had moved around.

All in all, this was a great track for everyone. It was an awesome track for Otis to have to work through but still end up finding the prize at the end. I hate it when he puts forth a lot of effort and does well but we don’t end up recovering a deer. It’s part of it and not so bad when you’ve got and old dog that understands tomorrow is another day, Training a young dog though, I really hope to be able to spur on his drive with each and every track. The only downside to this track was that I left my camera in the truck and relied on the landowner to text me the pictures he took with his phone. I haven’t gotten them yet and I think he may have forgotten. I’ll have to call him back in the morning and see if I can’t get us one to go along with the story. The buck was a little 1-2 year old 6 pt. One of the most awesome things about this tracking gig is that the deer was just as exciting to find as if it had been a booner.

Well……let’s hang the boots up on the boot dryer and get ready to go again!

Congrats! Sounds like you and Otis are coming along.

Way to go Otis and Co! Sounds like a great find!