Two Pope and Young bucks recovered in one weekend!

Well, my plans have changed. Thursday early morning I am leaving for Maryland, where our young dogs will be participating in the NATC Small Game Hunting Test (Thursday), Zuchtschau (Friday) and two AKC field trials (Saturday and Sunday). I am taking Sky, Tuesday and Mielikki, all very young dogs. I should be back on Monday afternoon. It also means that I will have to catch up with posts after I get back (this is my last trip this year). Have a great weekend everybody!

Congratulations to Dean Muthig from Wisconsin who wrote few days ago: I got a call at about 9 this morning wondering if I could take a track. This gentleman found my name via the UBT "find a tracker" feature. He stated that he had gut shot a buck yesterday at 7:30 in the morning and had lost blood. Unfortunately he started tracking the buck only an hour after shooting it and tracked for 6 hours. I knew even though it was gut shot that this one might challenge us a bit especially being a 24 plus hour old track and that the deer was most likely pushed out of his bed. Well that assumption was correct as the hunter had tracked the deer well over 40 acres before losing the trail...At the original point of loss my dog seemed unsure of the path of the deer but walked me to a drainage ditch and put her nose in the grass as she crossed the other side telling me she was thinking this is where he crossed. She went a little further and seemed to lose interest so I decided to walk her down the drainage ditch to see if the deer was in the water. We walked a couple hundred yards down the drainage ditch and ran into another ditch which ran perpendicular to the one we first walked down. We then ran that ditch another 200 yds. While walking this ditch the wind was in our favor and she was able to scent check a large area. I decided to turn back around. When we came back to the ditch we were a hundred yards or so down from where I thought she smelled him originally. As I looped back into that area she whipped her nose straight up in the air and almost sounded like a pig snorting. She took off with me in tow and within another 30 seconds we were standing on top of this beautiful 8 point buck! He truly was a brute! And what was most impressive about this buck is that the hunter took him on a high pressured area of public land!

 

Second Pope and Young buck recovered by Dean Muthig last weekend.