Thursday November 6, 2025

My second time using the TRAKR app

Ray only gets out a couple of times a year. This year he found himself a neat looking buck with a unique rack that seemed to be a bully of the woods. Not a huge buck, but big enough for Ray. Unfortunately he didn’t see the buck fall or expire. Ray went to find a Tracker.

I had taken myself off of the maps for tracking, for a while. Ray was able to connect with another Tracker, Johnny. He told Ray to try out the TRAKR app and that I would be the guy but wasn’t on the map. He was right, it worked.

Description of the hunt

From the description of the shot and the behavior afterwards, it sure seemed like we were going to locate for Ray. He described the hit as around the leg/shoulder area with no pass through, but a lot of penetration and then the buck fell forward favoring his front legs like he couldn’t keep on his feet. This followed by some loud growl or groaning sounds and some circling around while thrashing about. Suddenly the deer took off into the switch grass and river bottom abyss.

I typically try to keep my dog limited to about 5 miles a day. While this may not seem like a lot, we’re not just goofing around and having fun playing grab ass. This is usually 5 miles of work. Sniffing and tracking can take a toll. This track was a mile walk inwards and a mile back. The track itself was about 2.5 miles of tracking through some thick river bottom brush and grass.

Difficult Start

Unfortunately there was no real sign at the hit site, no blood or hair etc. We struggled finding the hit site for a while. We reset ourselves about 3 times before I felt like we were on the right track. Eventually we took off and started working, it felt good. To me, this started off like we were not going to find a dead deer, just based off the difficulty of lining out and the overall interest from the dog.

About 100 yards or so in, we finally found some blood, we were on the right path (at least now I knew – I often wish I knew what Alli was thinking). Not much blood, but there was some there, and it seemed a bit wet from memory.

We restarted after a long trek and this time Alli showed me what looked like a possible bed, but there was something red on the ground, almost like the shape of spit out gum. It was a chunk of meat, and it was still limber. This deer is still alive. We never kicked him up that we know of, but it is pretty thick in there, so who knows. After about 3 hours of work, we called it. We were all tired. On the way out we found a nice dead-head. At least Ray had something to take back home!