RE: When do you give up on the track?
Being it was your first I can imagine all the rookie mistakes you probably made in searching... not watching the deer as he ran, like going to fast, expecting too much blood, etc etc. I sure would have looked along that highway really well too.Going up and going down he would have leaked. Not knowing where you hit and all it's hard to say, butI would expect the deer was down within a couple hundred yards. If you for sure toasted one lung and got penetration into the other I'd even expect maybe sooner. It's hard to say without being there. I do expect you gave up too soon. I agree you should have enlisted some help from someone that's been there and done that. I've found deer before by just sitting back and surveying the lay of the land and the vegetation and deciding where I'd go if I were a deer. I found a deer one time for a guy in Georgia. He was a member of a dog hunting club. The deer had come right out onto the pavement, made a U turn and the guy hit him with buckshot. For some reason their dogs couldn't pick him up again. About 10 guys in the dog gang left for the next run after a quick look around, but the guy stuck around to satisfy himself. About an hour later I found a speck of blood 100 yards from where he last saw the deer. Another half hour revealed nothing. I stood there talking to him and said, look over there, it's just a little thicker underbrush in the big pines there. It looks like it slopes off. I walked straight to the buck, dead as a doornail laying at the bottom of a wash out in the red Georgia clay. The place just looked right to me. The guy had no knife so I gutted the deer for him and helped him drag it the 400 yards back to the road. About the time we got to the road the rest of the gang came looking for him. They were shocked we'd found it. He said "We" didn't, this damn Yankee birddog did. The guy offered me everything but $ez with his daughter. I was proud of him for sticking it out when all his friends said give it up. I just decided to keep him company and see if I could help. He was so positive he'd hit the deer good. The buckshot just didn't leak a lot of blood. The deer had 2 pellets in his chest cavity and one in his neck.