11/02/2025
‼️‼️You have to read this story‼️ EDIT: the game comission also seen the post about the dead deer so they went to the deer and removed the rack, when the hunter called them about what happened they met him at the deer. They didn’t quite believe that it was his buck because it was so far away, he told them all about the track and how far we went tracking the deer, that we were headed that way and about the bone chips! He kept the bone chips that Red found on the track and the game warden matched up the bones as proof that it was his deer and he now has his rack‼️‼️The hunter said please thank your dog because the bone chips were what we needed as evidence💪💪see pics! THE HUNTER IS HOLDING THE RACK ONTO THE DEERS HEAD SO HE COULD GET PICTURES WITH HIS DEER
Our second track of the day. Long story, but worth it. The hunter called and said he believed he hit the deer low, as it was actually at a different distance than what he thought. When I got there, I carefully looked over the arrow and said I had to disagree; I'm almost certain we're tracking a high-shot deer. I explained that the sign on the arrow was what I almost always see on high shots: tiny specs of ground meat stuck in the broadhead, bent or broken blades on the broadhead, and hair that almost has a dark and light color stripe to it, which is consistent with a Pennsylvania whitetail's back/shoulder hair this time of year. So we start tracking. No blood trail pretty much past the hit site. After quite a distance, we finally found a bloody bed! But what was in the bed, besides the blood, was the important part: chunks of the deer's thoracic vertebrae and pieces of what looked like upper rib bone. From that point on, Red was tracking like he was on a live deer. I was fighting the leash the entire time because he wanted to pull my arm off. We eventually ended up in a bean field about 850 yards, as the crow flies, from the hit site, and I decided to call it because I felt we were pushing the deer. So I left. A few hours later, I got a message from the hunter to please call him, so I did. He had just seen on a community page that a guy was bird hunting and found a big 8-point freshly dead that wasn’t there earlier. He asked if I thought his deer could have gone over a mile. So he sent me the location, and it was the exact - I mean exact - path that we were on. So he called the guy who found the deer and he sent him pictures; it was his deer, shot through the spine and dead over a mile from the hit site! He called and told me he was headed to get his deer, i was probably just as happy for him as he was! Now, what happened next is terrible. In the 45 minutes it took him to get back there, the bird hunter had left, and someone else cut the rack off this beautiful buck. Talk about a rollercoaster of emotions. He reached out to the game commission, and hopefully, he will not have to waste his tag or the meat. Now, for the record, I do not think we would have caught up to the deer. However, if it was in fact laying in that bed when we came through (which I think he was), and we hadn’t bumped him, he would have died in that huge thicket and never been seen again. Not a great ending, but it’s closure, and the hunter can sleep tonight knowing it didn’t go to waste.
