As soon as I got off of work today I drove down to the lease to spend an hour in the woods.  I wanted to hunt the climbing stand that Pete and I had moved last week, and as I made my approach to the stand a big doe jumped up and ran.  Encouraged, I got into the stand as quietly as I could and climbed the pine tree as high as I could go.

It wasn't long before I heard soft footsteps in the leaves down to my right.  Looking carefully through the tangle of trees and vines, I saw a deer making its way through the woods towards our corn pile.  It started feeding, and soon a second deer of equal size joined it.  With the current angle I had, it was difficult to judge the size of the deer, so I sat still and watched them eat.

After about 10 minutes, the second deer started heading up the hill toward me.  I saw that she was a good sized doe, and decided to take the shot if the opportunity arose.  She soon caught sight of me in the tree, but I sat still and avoided making eye contact.  Through my peripheral vision I watched her try to figure out what I was.  She bobbed her head and stomped her foot, but I didn't move an inch.

Deciding I was nothing of interest, the deer began to eat some of the bushes in front of me, and the other deer slowly made its way up the hill, glancing at me occasionally but not showing the interest that the first deer did.  They were both 10 feet in front of me, and I had no way to raise my rifle without being detected. 

As I sat watching them, I heard something moving quickly through the woods to my right.  I turned my head that way as slowly as I could, but couldn't find the source of the sound.  Finally I saw the black tip of a thick tail; a fox or a coyote.  The deer, alerted by the sound, both jumped and began to run.  This was my chance.  "Wahhhhhhh," I said loudly, imitating the bleat of a deer.

The both stopped for an instant, and I raised my rifle and took a quartering-away shot at the biggest of the two.  I held the crosshairs back behind the shoulder, finding the proper angle for such a shot.  The deer leapt six feet in the air at my shot, then crashed into the bushes.  My heart was pounding as I climbed down from my tree and walked over to the spot of the shot and marked the start of the blood trail with a piece of orange tape.

You should never go in the woods immediately after a deer that has run, so to give it time I walked back down the road to my truck.  I drove it up to the site of the shot, then spent some time organizing my gear for a solo tracking job in the dark.  As a concealed weapons permit holder, I'm able to keep a pistol in my backpack, so the first thing I did was get that out and belt it on.  Don't want to be alone deep in the woods without personal protection of some kind.

Next I got my flashlight and a half-dozen spare batteries.  Again, you don't want to be alone in the woods and have your flashlight die on you.  Some more trail marking tape, my cell phone, and my GPS unit completed the kit.  I also took Pete's "Dead Sled" with me, which is a device to help you drag a deer out of the woods.  I've also got temporary custody of Ted's homemade deer buggy, but I didn't bring it with me today since I left home in such a hurry this afternoon.

Kit organized, I turned on the hazard lights of my Jeep, then locked the doors.  When I'm trailing a deer a night, I always park my truck near where I go in the woods, then turn on my flashers.  This can help lead you back out of the woods close to the spot where you parked.  With all of the essentials being taken care of, I made my way into the woods and soon found the blood trail.

At each place I found blood, I tied a piece of marking tape on a tree or branch.  I occasionally lost the trail, but usually picked it back up within a few minutes.  At one point I lost it completely, but in making a wide arc I found a small drop of blood on an ant hill.  Once I found a big puddle of blood where the deer had laid down for a few minutes.

Whenever I could not find blood, but had an intuition about which way the deer had gone, I simply laid a piece of tape across a branch without tying it in place.  This helped me to differentiate known blood spots from suspected ones.  Once, while shining my light around looking for the white belly of the deer, I saw a pair of eyes looking at me from 40 yards away.  A fox, I thought, or a coyote.  Standing still, I could hear soft footfalls in the leaves in the distance.  Animals were moving tonight.

Finally, I came to the last blood spot that I could find.  It was a puddle six inches in diameter; a good sized pool of blood, but I could find nothing else anywhere around it.  I looked around for quite awhile, but it was getting quite late, and I knew I would have to leave the deer and come back in the morning.

December 20, 2007

All of the books and magazines say the same thing.  If you're pushing a wounded deer, or if you can't find it, leave it alone overnight and come back and resume the search the next day.  Last night's temperature dropped into the low 30s, so I knew that the deer wouldn't spoil over night. 

Pete was with me this morning, and we decided to do a short hunt until the sun was bright enough to help us look for my deer.  I got in stand 1, while Pete hung his climber over near stand 8 on the second road.

At dawn, I saw a nice doe come out of the woods and cross the logging road in front of me.  I resisted the temptation to shoot; I already had one deer to look for this morning, and the only thing I would shoot between now and then would be a big buck.  Unfortunately, one didn't show up.

At 9:00am, I got down from the stand and walked down the road to where I had been hunting last night.  I started into the woods and soon came upon the spot that the deer had been standing in when I made the shot.  There were white hairs everywhere, and I found a leg bone fragment on the ground.  Normally a leg bone is a bad sign; a leg broke deer can go a long way.  However, I knew from the shot angle that this was probably a fragment from the opposite side of the body that I had hit, meaning that the shot had been true and had simply exited low, striking the leg on the way out.

From there, I followed the tape trail from last night until I came to the last spot that I had marked.  As I arrived at that spot, Pete radioed me to say that he was on the way into the woods to help me with the search.  Rather than immediately look for blood, I began a wide arc, hoping to simply find the deer laying dead on the ground.  When that yielded nothing, I returned to the last blood spot just as Pete walked up.

We both began to search for the next blood, but had no luck with that.  Fanning out in different directions, we still could not find any sign of the deer.  Returning to the blood, I got down on my hands and knees and looked at things from the deer's perspective.  I kept thinking that she would have made a right turn at the last spot and headed down hill, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not find any sign in that direction.  Pete, also on his hands and knees, also found nothing.

Finally I looked back behind me at the trail of tape leading off into the woods.  It was heading fairly straight, and although the trail was a little thick in front of me I decided that maybe the deer had not turned after all and had simply continued straight up the hill.  Walking in that direction, I soon found another blood spot, then another and another. 

Pete stayed behind me, always stopping at the last blood and waiting there while I looked around.  As I looked, he said that he had seen a vulture fly down from a tree off to my left.  I headed in that direction.

The further along the trail I got, the more I dreaded what I was going to find ahead of me.  Deer hair was now showing up on the trail, the blood was more and more evident, and the pine needles were scattered as if a massive struggle had occurred.  As I crested a small hill, I couldn't believe what I saw.  There was the spine, rib cage, back legs, and backskin of my deer.

There was not a scrap of meat left on the bones.  A pack of coyotes had found the animal and had absolutely skeletonized it in a matter of hours.  Pete was walking up the trail behind me now, asking me if I found the deer.  I kept quiet, wanting to see his reaction to what he would find.  We both could not believe what we were seeing. 

There was nothing left do to.  We had played this one by the book, and had done everything right.  Although it's hard to lose a deer, it's not as tough when it plays out this way as it is when you don't find the animal at all.  There was nothing we could have done.  Every book and magazine would have told me to leave the deer overnight, and 99% of the time it would have worked out ok.  This time nature beat us. 

We took a short cut back out to the road, talking about what we had seen.  We've apparently got a bigger pack of coyotes to deal with than we thought, and I looked forward to January when we'd be hunting them with a vengeance.