Ended up going on a couple of tracks today…..thought I was gonna have to climb a tree...beginning to really dislike hogs…..

I’ll tell the stories in the morning..... Right now I’m just gonna watch football and toss back a few frosty beverages…

Changed my mind….I went ahead and wrote part of the story……

So I broke one of my own rules on the first track. I said I wasn’t gonna track at night and the first track just reaffirmed to me why I made that decision.

The hunter called me back later last night. He expressed his concerns about the rain moving in this morning and told me that he was positive the deer was dead and just piled up in some of the thick sedge grass around the bottom he was hunting in. This was somewhere I had tracked before so I was familiar with the terrain…it’s just an ocean of sedge grass and briars so I understood what he was saying about it being thick. After listening to the hunter a little more and letting him convince me what a good shot it was….. and thinking about having to track in the rain the next morning…….I conceded and headed out to go find the buck.

Well….of course that was not the case. After getting Otis to quit worrying about all the boogers in the dark and the pack yotes howling around us…..we tracked a few hundred yards through some nasty thick undergrowth and jumped the buck out of his bed….confirming it with a small amount of watery blood in the grass where he was laying. So, I loaded up and headed back home with plans to meet back up a little after daylight.

What I haven’t told you up until this point is that the hunter had also shot a hog not far from his stand while searching for his deer and it had also ran off in the same direction. We really weren’t even 100% sure which track we were following or what we had jumped up. I felt like it might be the buck since we didn’t hear any pig noises…squealin, snortin, etc…when it jumped and ran……..

To be continued…..

At least Otis didn't come running back to you with the pig on his tail again!

Oh but the story is not over just yet.....

Finish that cold drank your sipping on and write the story.....

CNC, you need to wake up and start typing this story. Sounds like it's going to be a good one.

Another Cliff Hanger here, tune in tomorrow for the conclusion!!!

Gotta let the suspense build a little.....


Alright…..so I woke up the next morning and headed back to continue tracking. Luckily the front wasn’t close yet so it wasn’t even raining. The hunter had to put some guests in their stands that morning so I told him that me and Otis would go ahead and start searching from the bed we had located the night before. It was nice to be able to go out and work Otis with no one else around….no pressure…..no reason to be in a rush…..just peace and quiet.... while watching my dog work across a beautiful piece of hunting property. It doesn't get much better than that.

So I’m not sure if it was the two different scent lines running across the hillside or if it was just all the pig smell in the area…..but something was giving Otis a hard time with this track from the get go. We picked back up from the bed and progressed the track up the hill a ways before Otis circled around and came back to restart. It was like none of the trails led to something he was confident in….he was just working checks over and over. Finally I just pulled him off of it and we started our arcing technique 100….. then 200…then 300 yards out from the bed….

Well it was during this blind search that Otis picked up something on the wind and ventured on up ahead of me 40 yards or so. That’s when I heard something erupt out of the sedge grass like a jumped deer. Keep in mind that I’m wading around in grass and briars nearly chest deep. I look up and see the tops of the sedge grasses shaking as something is coming at me in a hurry. My first thought was that it was Otis just coming back to me but that’s when whatever it was let out a “REEEEEE!!!!! Snort! Snort! Snort!!!!!”

This is all happening in the blink of an eye and by this time it’s closed the distance from 30-40 yards to about 15-20……and that’s when I see that it’s big arse hog running right at me.....probably a 150-200 pounder.... “Holy chit!!!!”… ..There wasn’t anything around me other than sedge grass and a couple 8 inch pine saplings. I leaped up and grabbed ahold of one of the pine saplings and started to shimmy my way up it as the hog was closing fast. Luckily the hog must have seen me when he got to about 5-10 yards and he turned back. I say luckily because I never made it more than about 3 ft off the ground.

The hog turned around and trotted back to where we had jumped him…..the whole time squealing and snorting and acting pissed off as hell. I toned Otis and hollered for him to come on and we got the hell outta there. The hog never ran off either. As I was backing out of the area I could hear him snorting... going back and forth..…back and forth.

Yesterday’s conclusion still to come………

…..and nowwww the rest of the story.

To try and make a long story a little shorter, I’ll just wrap it up and say we never found this deer. When I came back down off the hill the hunter was there waiting on me with another searcher. We all spread out and grid searched the area for another hour or two before calling it off. I really believe that this was just another shoulder shot with a Rage expandable. At best he may have gotten one lung.

With a situation like this where the arrow is broken off a few inches up from the broadhead, you’ve likely either hit the front side shoulder or passed through and hit the off-side shoulder. Had the arrow passed through and hit the offside shoulder then this deer would not have went far before piling up. I still believe that was him we jumped the night before though. I wish I could go back now and convince the hunter to wait instead going after him that night. There’s a chance he would have still been there in that first bed.

One cool thing that did happen while we were searching is that we found 7 sheds. I wish I would have thought to have taken a pic of them for the story but it just didn’t cross my mind at the time. They were all just basket rack sheds but they were scattered all over the hillside we were searching. I told them after they burn in the spring we need to walk around with Shelby and do some shed hunting.

There wasn’t a whole lot to the second track. It was dang near the exact same hit……shoulder shot with a Rage expandable. The hunter only got 4-5 inches of penetration and the arrow fell out at about 50-60 yards. The blades of the broadhead were bent up where it had likely hit bone. Otis tracked it without any issues at all before we called it off after 900 yards. It was odd how the exact same hit was giving him such fits on the track prior but on this one he never missed a beat. I still think it was likely to two different scent lines that was confusing him....I'm just not sure though. Like the saying goes “It just be like that sometimes.”

I’ll say it again fellas…..If you’re gonna use these expandable broadheads then drop your point of aim back a little and don’t flirt with hitting that front shoulder. The same thing happens every time……no deer.

Call just came in for tomorrow morning…..

We're going in after jlbuc’s deer he shot this afternoon……Not real sure on the shot. May be dealing with a shoulder shot. He did the right thing though and backed straight out. If it's a good hit then he should bed up. The only thing that worries me a little is he thinks the deer may have stopped and blew at him. I'm just hoping that was maybe another deer he didn't see traveling with this one.

To be continued……….

Ain't no hogs here to worry about either! Better feed Otis his wheaties in the morning!

present and hoping for a find on JLB deer

^^ Waiting!!

A visit with Ol’ Sam


Nearly 20 years ago now, my wife and I (fiancé back then) moved to south Alabama to attend school at Auburn. We originally leased a little lot from some folks my FIL knew…. where we lived in a single wide trailer that sat at the base of a hill just below a little house. The daughter of the fella my FIL knew was attending Auburn as well and lived in the house. Eventually as time went on the guy’s daughter left school and we bought the house and 5 acres from them and had the trailer moved out. We ended up living there for nearly 7 years.

The place was out in the sticks a little and there was some pretty decent looking hunting land that surrounded us. One day I caught an old man out by the road looking at the land next to me. I struck up a conversation with him and it turned out he owned the couple hundred acres that surrounded me. I asked him about the possibility of me being able to hunt and I’ll be damn if he didn’t say I could. All of sudden I had me a little honey hole right out of my back door.

I hunted that little honey hole for years while we lived there. It’s where I killed my first buck with a bow…..it was where I killed my first “older” buck period…..and it’s where my old beagle Sam is still buried under a little pile of rocks in the creek bottom off the back corner of the house.

We eventually sold the house and moved on to the little farm where we now live……and eventually the folks who bought it from us sold it again. As fate would have it, some guy named jlbuc10 bought it…..and last night he called me out to track a deer in my old honey hole. Not only was it my old honey hole.... but the tree he shot the buck out of was the same one that used to be my favorite spot….the same spot where I shot my first buck with a bow and had so many memorable hunts.

I’ll save you any more suspense and tell you that we didn’t recover his deer. We tracked it for 800 yards before calling it off…..chalking it up to most likely being a shoulder shot. But man let me tell you it was nostalgic to be back in my old stomping grounds. I dang near shed a tear on the way out the driveway looking at the trees I had planted there nearly two decades ago and thinking about all the good times that were had there. It was definitely one of the coolest tracks I’ve been on. It was good to see you again Sam………

PS......That's 3 shoulder shots in a row now. Y'all drop your point of aim back a little!

Hate that it wasn't recoverable, but it's awesome that you got to go back!

I feel fairly confident on this one after putting all the pieces of the puzzle together. I feel like he probably hit the deer in the point of the shoulder and hit bone. He was using a fixed blade broadhead so it likely lodged itself in the bone a little about like if you shot a tree. The deer never bedded up and there wasn’t a single drop of blood that we could find. Otis trailed it well but it was just eventually evident what we were dealing with and we called it off. We did some extra searching just to make sure but Otis never indicated on anything else. I think he just went straight into the meat of the shoulder. A shot like that likely wouldn’t bleed much…if any at all.

Dang it.

Yep, I agree.....

Great read. So much of our enjoyment outside is tied to an emotion, a memory, a smell. It's something that those that don't hunt will never understand. As I continue to age, it's much more about the memories I've had than the kill that's to come.

Thanks for that trip down memory lane with you guys and sharing Sam with all of us.