Congrats on the find! I really enjoy reading your posts.

Thanks!

I shot a giant in 09 in almost the same spot but I hit both legs probably a touch higher than that except I was trying to shoot him in the hams and hit low. It was the only and last shot i had. That sucker dropped like a sack of taters. Finished him off with another shot. To this day that's the bloodiest kill sight I've seen.

good job to CNC and crew. Always like to read the update and glad the recovery worked out.

A rainy day update on Shelby………




A lot of the thread so far has been about Otis but I just wanted to give everyone an update on Shelby’s progress too. I haven’t been able to get her on as many known kills yet as I hoped for. My folks I was hoping to come through for me have either whiffed completely or dropped them in their tracks. However, I’ve kept the hide/neck/head of the little deer I killed during bow season in the freezer and I’m using it with some liver blood about every ten days or so to run mock tracks for Shelby.

From what I’m seeing out of her on the mock tracks…..she still has a long ways to go before I really get too concerned about working her on real tracks. The training process takes several years and some aspects of it can only be achieved with the maturity of the dog. In Shelby’s case, I don’t think she’s gonna be able to progress past where we are at right now until her puppy excitement calms down a notch. She has the desire to want to track and the ingraining in her that she is a tracking dog is being accomplished…..but to progress to the next step of focus and advanced technique is only going to come with some maturity.

It’s all good though…..I think at the 2-3 year mark she will be just as good of a tracker as Otis at that age. He just didn’t have nearly as much of a true puppy stage as Shelby. She gets so excited right now that she shakes and her teeth jitter. We ran her last training track off lead to see how she did and it was like watching greyhounds come out of the chute at the dog track. She was running S-patterns back and forth across the line like one of those show dogs running a cone drill. The funny thing was that she ran nearly the whole thing and wasn’t 30-40 yards from the end when she realized that she had run off and left me. She turned around and ran wide open back to me and then ran the whole thing over again. We’ll go back on lead again for the next track to continue to work on throttling back.

Pfft - she just likes to run and you like to walk. Let her run, call her back, let her run again. She'll get you trained eventually.

She's getting the hang of coming back to me on the collar tone ....so as long as she understands that then I'll turn her loose on a real track eventually. All puppies like to fast track but dang she's wide open.

Call just came in for in the morning....bow shot. The hunter says he drilled a big buck in the shoulder but feels good that he got a lot of penetration. He said he saw it after the shot and feels like it went through and hit the opposite shoulder. They've already tracked it 250-300 yards so that may be a little optimistic. We'll find out in the morning......To be continued.

^^^^ Will y'all start early with the heavy frost or allow it to burn off? How much does the frozen ground hurt/help? I always like to hear when Otis is gonna get to get after one the next day!

I’m gonna go in about the time the frost burns off. I’ve wondered the same thing about a hard freeze effecting the scenting conditions. I really don’t know. I give it an extra hour over what I normally would to make sure. We’ll probably start around 8:30 ish…..

Good luck! I'll be checking in tomorrow to see if y'all recover the buck.

Cnc do you know anyone near Dale County who tracks. My buddy shot one this evening and is going out in the morning to see if he can find it but if he cannot it may be worth trying to get someone out

Tony Luker is about the only person down that way and I don't think he's available to track for the next couple weeks. You could call him and just double check though....334-589-0767

Also try giving Randy Vick a call...aka trackncur....he's across the line in GA and if he doesn't have anything going on he might ride over there.....229-224-1814


Are you by any chance in the northern part of the county? I'm already headed in that general direction for tomorrow mornings track....if nobody else is available, call me in the morning and we'll see what we can do. If it's a quick track in the morning then I may be able to come down that way. Just have to see how hard Otis has to work on the first one.

It's near Ozark . My buddy let it be last nite and has found fat and white stuff at impact and fairly dark blood about 60 yes on.but nothing else

Touchdown!....pics later....headed to another one.

Hmmmm....fat and white stuff sounds like possible brisket shot. Be sure to watch for buzzards tomorrow if y'all didn't find a dog. Them things get on 'em a lot quicker than people think. I'm seeing them routinely on some of Otis's finds. There were two circling low on this morning's find and the deer wasn't even completely dead yet.

Finally made it back home. I’ll write us up a story in a bit if I ain’t asleep. Here’s a pic for now of this morning’s find. Ended up going on two more tracks but no luck on either one. The second track was a backslap that called off after 700 yards……Third track was a likely hard graze that we jumped and never could catch up to.

So this was the biggest deer we’ve found to date. A bow shot really far forward in the shoulder and brisket. By the way the crow flies the track was 750 yards…..the deer probably went 1100 though. It made a big 300-400 yard loop and crossed right back over on it’s on path. To make it more challenging…..2 does decided to jump up in front of us right before the point where it crossed. I think Otis may be farther along than his handler….After several hundred yards and not seeing any blood, I saw him out in front of me high nosing and speeding up. I pulled him off and restarted him. After rerunning the same line again I found out that he was high nosing cause the deer was just right there. My bad Otis!

This was probably the happiest guy I’ve tracked for. I chit you not I think he shook my hand 6 or 7 times as I was leaving. I didn’t mind it a bit though and to be honest, I’m grinning now thinking about how excited he was. When we finally saw Otis up ahead of us easing up to the deer.... the hunter ran and bear hugged me and hollered “Wooooo Hoooo!!!!”…..and that’s when the deer lifted it’s head up and tried to get up. The dang thing was still alive. We dispatched it and that was that. Like I was saying in my last post to Brad…..there were two buzzards already circling really low over him. Them things are damn good trackers too.

Another call just came in for in the morning......Not sure of the hit...deer was broadside....no sign at hit site other than a little blood. Deer tried to bed quickly within 100 yards. They believe they jumped him and after finding the bed and not much past it decided to back out. Decent blood to the bed and good blood in the bed but really nothing after that they said. The hunter said that just by chance they happened to see another speck of blood a little farther past the bed as they walked out. To be continued.......