flathead977
Ten Pointer
Dang, they didn’t leave much.I got a call last night, buck had been shot with a rifle, the hunter and friends attempted to track but bumped the deer just 50 yards into the woodline. They backed out, came back a couple hours later, tracked 100 yards or so past that bed and couldn't find anymore blood so they backed out again. They stated it was shot with a 270 at 225 yards and was broadside. They noted bubbles in the blood. Immediately I'm thinking a 1 lung hit, I think very high likelihood we jump the deer alive in the morning since it was uncomfortable enough to bed that soon. I know it's not double lung or heart since it lived until they tracked. So I tell them we will likely jump a 1 lung tomorrow and deer will live for awhile unless pack of coyotes get it.
So we start 16 hours later at the bed the deer jumped from since the field it was shot in had a ton of burrs. 100 yards later Cooper is figuring out the contamination at last blood, the hunter advises they walked through the area ahead of us all the way to a pond. Cooper circles and eventually finds the deers trail and heads straight through the contamination 80 yards to a food plot, the hunter finds blood behind me as we enter the field. 100 yards straight across the plot the hunter confirms blood behind us as we enter the woodline. The blood is still dry, so we keep moving up a hill and Cooper works around a junkpile 80 yards into the woods to the right now past the pond on the right another 80 yards and into another foodplot. 100 yards across this foodplot and we are in the woods again weaving through it but taking a similar trajectory. We haven't had blood in 250 yards but Cooper is tracking very confidently. 150 yards into those woods we drop down edge of a dry creek, and going up the other side we see white deer hair. Cooper finds a freshly eaten front shoulder/leg soon after. Now we know the deer is dead. In the past, I've had a similar situation with the dead deer being 75 yards from where the yotes carried it's leg. I hung the leg in a tree and went back to the white hair at the creek crossing and gave Cooper the track command, at that time Cooper realized we had unfinished business and he ignored the deer leg. It was clear there was a ton of scent in the area and Cooper eventually found the beds the deer was likely bumped from by the yotes. The 4 beds were 50 yards after that creek, the deer must have been uncomfortable and pulling hair out around the wound. I give Cooper a break, water him and we work from the beds down the hill into a bamboo bedding area. Cooper works deep into the bamboo but I suspect he is too far from where I believe the deer would be from his shoulder/leg. We loop back and head into the scent cone. We found the deer just on the edge of the bamboo, it was clear the deer put up a good fight against the coyotes. You can see where the deer backed up against a tree to fight and protect his backside, the dirt was tore up. It's bittersweet. The yotes we're quick last night, but without them, I believe we would have bumped this deer alive this morning and likely would not have been able to recover it at all with a leashed dog. In that case, it would have been caught by yotes later but too long after the shot for a tracking dog.
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