They aren't always big

Andy Bensing writes:

Eibe and I had 2 more calls on Saturday. Our 1st call today was a quickie. The hunter had gut shot a little button buck and was only able to track it 40 meters till the blood ran out. The hunter and his buddy had grid searched out about 300 meters in the direction he had last seen the deer running but were unable to find the deer. We found the little button buck only 200 meters away but not in the direction the hunter had searched. The deer had button hooked (pun intended!) right after the hunter lost sight of it and Eibe was able to find it in less than 30 minutes. We only saw one spot of blood along the way.

As you can see in the pictures, the deer somehow fell into a creek and ended up under the stream bank. We came up to the stream from the high bank side and when Eibe got to the creek she stretched over the bank and poked her head into the roots, I thought she was smelling for critters! She then went a few feet up the stream bank where she could jump down to the water and proceeded under the bank overhang. I was about to scold her for looking for critters when I was surprised to see her biting at the deer! Good thing I didn't yell at her!

And Ybensing is holding Eibe who found the button buck.

GPS map of the track showing one spot of blood.



Google Earth representation of the track

 The second call was for a nice buck with a lot of penetration and sounded pretty good on the phone. When I got to the hunter's house he showed me on Google Earth the course of the 400 meters he had already tracked the deer. I did not like what I saw. The buck had made several what looked like unnecessary turns on the map. Not something a hard hit deer would usually do in my opinion. The hunter had the shot on video and he thought it looked a lot better than I did when I saw the video at the hunter's house before we went out. It did not look very encouraging to me from the start but I was there so we of course gave it a shot. The interesting thing about this call was that the hunter owned a 1 1/2 year old Hanoverian hound that he had imported from Germany and had run the dog at 2 hours after the shot. The young dog had done a great job the 1st 400m (with no blood at the start and for the 1st 200 meters) but came to a grass yard and was distracted by several people and vehicles that came to see what the hunter was doing. At that point the dog and hunter did some searching of the edges of the yard but were unable to continue and called me for help. I was there at 10 hours after the shot. We put another 600 meters on the line and found 3 or 4 spots of blood but eventually quit the trail surmising that the deer was not mortally wounded. There was one place where the buck chose to jump over a strand of barbed wire that was 4 feet high when he could have very easily just walked under it ( like we did). His belly left a little hair with a touch of blood on it on the wire.

Congratulations Andy on another fine find!