Losing deer is never fun, and even trackers worry about leaving deer in the woods.

Nick called me on Saturday worried about his shot. He knew it was back and not a good shot. He gets worked up with bucks and we completely understand. It happens to all of us, and if it doesn’t then maybe its time to hang it up. Nick however, gets a form of target panic and his shot cycle goes out the window. Nick decided to back out and leave the site for a tracker. We waited until Monday to track. By this time it would have been about 36 hours post shot. This is ideal for gut shot, sometimes we need longer wait times. When it gets closer to the rut especially. These deer just don’t want to die and the will to live for reproduction is remarkable.

Nick did not get a pass through and he thought his arrow had mostly passed through but just not all the way. There was hardly any sign of a hit. No blood or anything of the like, at the hit site. However, the deer did defecate right afterwards and ran off. I put Alli on the hit site and we started to track. The hunter thought maybe we were back tracking from where the deer came from. We followed for quite a while until we reached a bed on the side of a creek. This could have been the bed he came from before the shot. We restarted at the hit site and took a different path. This time Nick felt that it was the exact path the deer left on. We eventually found a speck of blood near the creek. Alli had taken me to water a couple of times and kinda worked the edge. I was thinking about a previous track where the deer was just up stream. Keeping that in the back of my mind, we crossed the creek. After the crossing, Alli took to a trail, no sign. The tracking on the other side seemed more like we were either hunting for the track or chasing. Alli tends to really dig in and pull me when this happens. Here behavior is hard to read sometimes. After a couple of restarts back at the crossing, we decided to go back to the speck of blood, on the other side. With my doubts starting to creep I was hesitant to follow Alli along the edge into a messy brush area with stick tights and all the early fall fun. Then I spotted a couple of spots of blood. Two little specks of blood. Well heck. I followed her for a while. She was a bit slower and nose down, so I felt comfortable with it. We worked sorta parallel with the creek but started to head towards a corn field (adjacent to where we were parked on entry). No sign still. No beds.. By this time we had been on site for a couple of hours and put in about 2 miles worth of work. I had gashed my face even – I didn’t realize this until I got home. Alli kept taking me parallel in that direction, but I turned her around and called it. We had to go, I had an appointment and I didn’t feel like we were going to locate. bummer.