We don’t get many easy ones but I’ll dang sure take them when we do. The deer didn’t run 150 yards out the field they were hunting. The hunter was a 12 year old boy shooting a 7mm-08. He put a good shot on the deer hitting it right behind the shoulder. The only problem was that the buck was quartered to him and he didn’t get an exit hole. There was only a small entry hole and not a drop of blood on the ground. When I got there this morning they were still unsure if the deer was even hit or not. There was indeed some green looking diarrhea in the field but I don’t think it had anything to do with the shot. He was one heck of a buck… a 210 lb nine point or eleven point depending on how you count it ...... probably flirting with a 20 inch spread. This was after we got him dragged back to the plot……

Yep that is a Good Un!!! Congrats to the young Man!!

Fine buck right there!!

Congrats CNC. I bet you just made one 12 yr old boy's Christmas finding that one for him.

Thanks fellas!....Yep, that little boy was grinning like a possum eatin chit.

Its got to be such a rush to help folks find deer like that.. AWESOME!

Without a doubt!....The combination of working with your dogs along with the excitement of the hunters when you find their deer….to me it makes tracking more fun than hunting for myself. One of the coolest aspects of it to me, being the habitat nerd that I am, is getting to see everyone’s hunting land. It makes me giddy just driving into some of these places.

Just had a call come in on a leg shot from this morning. They found bone, decent blood, trailed him for 400 yards and lost it. These are always a crap shoot so we'll see what happens......

To be continued.......

Good job CNC!

Way to go team Otis and Shelby! (you to CNC)

Good job Otis and Shelby! I was fearing the worst on this one from your description last night.



Lets hope the leg shot turns out as good.

Great job on the 12 yr olds buck!
On to the next...

Great buck. Is he missing part of his right leg..... or just looks that way....

Thanks everybody!.....

Top cat, it’s just the pic making his leg look like that.

The leg hit this afternoon turned out to be a long track with nothing at the end. We took the track 1900 yards and never even caught up with the deer. We were around some ag fields and the deer went most of that distance across a big huge cotton field. The hunter must have hit him pretty low. One thing that was a little odd about this track is that the buck took us on a straight line for the whole 1900 yards….he never tried to circle back. He must have been roaming outside of his normal core area I guess and was trying to get back home. Here’s the cotton field we tracked him across. We came out into the field in the far back of the pic and took him down that hedge row off into a bottom. I took the pic on the walk back.

Got another call this afternoon just before I got back home.....I don't have much to go on. The hunter said he shot a really good buck and feels pretty confident he hit him but can't find anything....no hair, no blood. We'll just have to wait until in the morning to see what happens on this one. It could be a clean miss or he may have smoked him.

To be continued.........

Well he was definitely hit….but barely. The hunter said that the field was already full of deer when the big buck came walking in. He had several deer close to the blind and when he moved to get on the big buck....all the deer spooked and in the process spooked the big buck. When he shot.... the buck was at 100 yards or so standing on the edge of the woodline…quartered away. The hunter is shooting a 300 mag and he said the gun popped up on him when pulled the trigger.

We tracked the deer out of the field never finding a drop of blood until we got to the bed about 250 yards away. It didn’t look like the deer had bedded for long because the bed wasn’t nearly as defined and pressed as they are when one lays overnight. We found about a spotty, fist sized spot of watery blood in the bed and another decent spot beside it where it looked like the buck may have stood before laying down. When he got up he circled right back to the food plot and went back the same way he originally came from. The funny thing about it is that Otis was trying to take us that way from the start and I pulled him off of it twice. Oh if we could only just talk to one another.

We never found any more blood after the bed. We took the track about 600 more yards across a big, steep creek bottom and into a small stand of young pines about head high where the track went hot. I let the dogs push the hot trail out for a few hundred yards and we called it off. At that point the deer had went well over 1000 yards and just wasn’t showing signs of being very hurt. The blood we found in the original bed looked like watery muscle blood to me. I think the most likely thing that happened was maybe the hunter caught him across the neck or leg.….. “Tis but a flesh wound!!”

As we came off the creek bank I stopped and snapped a pic of the deer trail he was on. It was tore up pretty good with fresh sign.

An additional note to this story……These folks are actually the neighbors of the jaw shot deer from the other day and share a campground together. They told me that the neighbor had the jaw shot deer on camera again 2 days later still alive.

Call just came in for tomorrow morning……This will be our first boat ride into the shot location. Should make for an interesting story.

The hunter shot a good buck with his bow this morning around 8:00. He said he saw the arrow hit and saw blood coming out of the deer about midways back. Trailed decent blood for 400 yards before losing it. This would normally be a pretty promising track…….however, this guy is hunting in a booger of a spot right down on the river. Due to the threat of gators, I’m gonna have to track this one with Otis on-lead....Shelby will have to stay at home. I’ve been looking at it on google earth and it just doesn’t look like a good situation for recovery. It looks like the deer had no choice but to head into a marsh with knee to waist deep water. The hunter really wants to search for the buck though so we’re gonna give it a try.

To be continued………