We all get that question, "What's your success
rate?". In the leashed tracking dog
states we have to tell them, "Around 35%" because we know that what they
are asking for is the frequency with which we find the deer and tag it. It
goes without saying that the non-productive 65% are FAILURES.
If you have tracked for a while you come to realize that
it's not that simple. Some of those FAILURES, when you didn't get the deer,
actually become sources of pride and satisfaction. Our tracking adventure this
afternoon is a good illustration.
We got the call this morning. The buck had been hit behind
the shoulder late the previous afternoon with a Rage expandable broadhead. As
happens, all too frequently, there had been inadequate penetration, four to five
inches. The one thing that made me take the call was detail that the buck was
occasionally blowing fine droplets of blood from his nose; a lung had been
penetrated, but it was impossible to know how much damage had been done. A deer
can go on one lung, and the damaged lung can eventually heal and become
functional again.
Another slight complication was that the hunter's son was
playing that morning in a high school football game. A good father knows that
family comes first! It wasn't until 1:30 PM that Jolanta, Tommy and I started on a long ATV ride back to where we
were to begin tracking. We didn't start at the hit site, which is the normal
thing to do, because the buck had been eye-tracked so far the previous night.
Tommy, our tracking dog, started on a drop of blood and took off across the
very dry leaves and pine needles.
Occasional drops of blood reassured us that we were on a right track. |
John's worn out tracking coat. |
I began to realize that there would be no "successful
find" on this call. This buck had come too far and had stayed strong for
too long. If he had been fatally gut shot, things would have been different,
but clearly this buck was not losing
blood now and he was in a condition to
keep going, back into the thick stuff, as long as we wanted to follow.
The decision to quit is a delicate matter. I like to have
the hunter participate and agree that
there is little chance of catching up to the deer. Would the hunter believe that we were still on his
buck and not just rambling around on hot lines of healthy deer? Then the
hunter's buddy, who had been following us closely, found blood, a tiny drop,
but it was fresh and still wet. I checked Tommy for briar scratches, which might
have left that drop. Tommy was clean, and Tommy was right. We were still on the
wounded buck, and the buck was still strong after 22 hours. We pushed on for
another 200 yards with Tommy pulling confidently.
We came to an ATV trail through the thickets. Tommy pushed
on across but the humans were ready to stop. The hunter knew that the trail led
back to where we had originally left the ATV. We called back Tommy and he seemed to understand. There
was no getting this deer even though he
had done his best. The whole tracking adventure seemed a success, not a failure, both for Tommy and for the folks who had
supported him from the other end of the
long tracking leash.
4 comments:
Absolutely a success. just not a find. As I have been saying in our conversations John, we need to come up with a word to categorize some of the none recovery "finds" we as leashed trackers are often left with. When a deer is "found" and jumped like happened to you today but the deer is not wounded well enough to be recovered we should have a term for that.
Definite success ...
I put my Taiga on 6 tricks last season. All were cases where the hunter was unable to recover the deer on their own. We recovered 3 of the deer, but we found all 6 of them. In 2 of the cases we jumped the deer and it was obvious that it was still strong and that we would not be able to catch up with it. The other case we jumped the deer, but it seemed weak. We tracked the deer for 3.5 miles occasionally catching up with it. But it kept going. Eventually Taiga and it got too tired to keep going.
Of course a success. Grat job. It was like Trym last week, trust your dog you wrote. We should have trusted him. He wanted in that direction where my hunting friend found the buck fighting for his Life with a fox eating on him.
Will practice some more with Trym next year, now is hunting practice and trials on the schedule
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