'Gut wrenching' but successful: 2020 tracking season wrap-up holds a lesson to keep in mind
No bowhunter likes to see a gut shot but it doesn't have to mean the deer is lost
Deer season 2020 wrapped up this week on a high note for Whiskey and with a lesson that is a good one for bowhunters to tuck away for next season.
If a bowhunter is at it long enough, sooner or later a bad shot will happen. What’s less likely is they will handle it well, understandably. It’s a bad feeling, but it’s nothing a happy dog like Whiskey can’t help remedy.
One of Whiskey’s first finds, two years ago, was on a gut-shot buck that was a first for the bowhunter as well. After many years and successful, quick kills, he admitted he was a little embarrassed to actually call someone. He had been smart and quietly backed out and returned the next morning. But he searched and searched and found no blood and had no luck.
Forty-eight hours passed before Whiskey and I arrived. He said he felt miserable and just wanted to take one last-ditch effort and see if a dog could help.
Whiskey found the buck about 75 yards from his tree stand in less than 10 minutes.
The more I talk with archers who call to ask for tracking help the more I think the traditional idea of a “bad” shot needs some adjusting, and our final track for the 2020 season is a great example.
Archery season closed after sundown Friday and at about 7 p.m. came a text from our friend Sean, a hunter we first helped on Christmas Day 2019.
Back then he arrowed a nice, big buck and was desperate to find it. After talking my wife into letting go of us for a few hours on the holiday, we gave it a hard try but came up empty. Whiskey had a track for a while but we just hit that point where I knew we had a dead end.
It’s just an attitude on the dog I’ve come to know on the dog that says, “it ain’t here.”
Sean said he saw that buck again this year. Likely the shot hit just a bit too high, maybe a bit forward.
Saturday he arrowed a smaller buck but it was going to be some “good eating” and it came along as an opportunity for a last chance in the final moments of the season. In his initial text he said the shot was “behind the last rib, mid body.”
“I had watched a bunch of dog tracker videos over the last couple years and all said to not mess up the scent rail and let gut shot deer lay for 10+ hours and let a dog find them,” he wrote in the text.
That is exactly the right thing to do.
Trying to track a gut-shot deer is tough because there is virtually no blood trail but, boy oh boy, can a dog ever pick up on a trial of intestinal fluids.
We met at the site where the buck was shot at sunrise Saturday, a little more than 14 hours after the hit on a frosty, 33-degree sunrise.
Sean said he watched the buck run across a field knee- to waist-high grass toward a tree line. He found his arrow, stuck it in the ground, quietly left and texted us.
Whiskey got a good sniff and a lick on the green-stained fletching of the arrow Sean left stuck in the ground at the hit site and—after what seems to have become Whiskey’s ritual of peeing, pooping and what I would call general jacking around with excitement—he jumped into the tall grass and indicated he had a track on that buck.
Sean walked along with us, parallel and about 30 yards downwind.
About 100 yards into the track Sean said he saw the buck about 10 or 15 yards ahead of and downwind of Whiskey and said, “Wait! I think he moved.”
I hit Whiskey with a whistle-sit and clamped down on the 30-foot lead Oklahoma game laws require us to use while tracking. As much as I cuss that lead in thick brush sometimes I was glad to have it in that instance. Whiskey wasn’t quite buying the idea I really wanted him to stop and sit. I’m sure the scent of that nearby buck was pretty strong, but a wounded buck can be extremely dangerous.
The buck, nearly expired, lay in the brush, head tucked over like it was sleeping. Had it any potential to survive it would have bolted long before it had a hunter standing 10 yards on one side of it and a panting dog with a bell on its collar 10 yards in the other direction.
“He’s not really moving, but I can see him breathing,” Sean said.
Peaceful as he looked, it was a gut-wrenching (no pun intended) sight for the hunter and he immediately asked if it would legal for him to put the deer out of its misery on the day after season closed.
I called the game warden that I had notified prior to going on the track, informed him what we found, and asked if it was OK to dispatch the buck with another arrow. With the details fully explained, the warden agreed that putting this buck out of its misery sounded like the best thing to do and said he would allow the exception.
By law, Whiskey and I had to return to the truck and I put him in his kennel. I stood in Sean’s pickup bed and watched him with binoculars as he went back out in the field with his bow.
Sean circled the buck and looked for a shot from all sides and then called me to ask if I wanted to go ahead and leave. One side of the buck was concealed by thick grass and from the other angle its head was curled in and covering its vitals, he said. He was going to have to wait for the buck to expire or for it to move its head. I told him we would stay.
Luckily it only took about five minutes. The buck moved its head just slightly, and it gave him a small opening to wrap things up.
Sean was nice enough to let Whiskey complete his track and enjoy his find, and I helped him drag the buck back closer to his truck before we left.
As we talked about the two bucks Sean made an interesting observation.
While he had thought the arrow hit mid-body, behind the last rib, on this buck it actually hit closer to the haunches. He was truly surprised.
“I actually made a better shot on that buck last year. I was only off by about four inches,” he said.
It was true. The shot the prior season had been more accurate to the heart-lung area. The more deer we attempt to track, the more I’m learning that those high or slightly forward “chest” shots can be deceiving. They tend to be the bucks that our hunters end up seeing again on their trail cameras or the next season.
A buck we tracked earlier this year clearly had its lungs nicked, but a neighbor ended up shooting that buck about 24 hours later and a mile from where it was arrowed the day before.
So here we had it with one hunter; a buck found within 100 yards this season after a “bad” gut shot but good moves by the hunter in quietly backing out and calling the dog for a track the next morning, and one lost and still alive last season after a “better” but less deadly shot.
Gut shots are never desirable but they certainly aren’t the disaster most hunters think they will be if they can back out quietly, wait and summon a good tracking dog; just a thought to file away for next season.
