Bitterly cold and snow covered track.

By: Mark Maniaci

Sublime tracking

Xbow

30 yards

Swhacker (possibly didn’t deploy)

Age of track 23 hours old.

7* bitter

Track distance 700-800 yards

All gut.

Wow! This is as a hard one! Ruca and I were on a struggle bus pretty much the entire track.

Let’s start from the beginning, cody shot the buck the night before as the snow had just started comming down. He looks for blood roughly 30 mins after the shot. He finds some blood where the deer had stopped, cody stated that the deer looked a bit wobbly. Cody stated that finding blood was very hard as the snow had already covered it up. He wasn’t wrong.

We decided to meet the next day 22 hours after the shot. We put ruca on blood, she’s not interested almost like she’s telling me it’s not dead/ she has no scent to go off of. Remind you it’s 7* with a good wind whipping around. We start shoveling snow with our boots and confirm more blood. Ruca still wants to take a different line. We work and work occasionally she digs up the snow and takes a whiff. As I’m out trying to run behind her over tons of dead falls. The hunter confirms blood on a different path (under the snow) as he is going step to step brushing the snow with his boots.

I had some good advice from veteran trackers, Tom Monehan and Gary Blessing. The advice was that it’s dangers for the dogs paws and that we need to take breaks. Gary tells me to watch and see if she starts raising a leg if so frost bite maybe setting in. Sure enough ruca raises her back leg and starts to bite it…rut row, I check and she doesn’t have any debris in it. I literally pick her up and jog her back to the vehicle. I rub her paws for a bit and let her warm up in the vehicle. I go back with out ruca to go trail more blood. Cody is doing great advancing the snow covered track. We do this for a bit, I go back and check on ruca. She’s ready to go again.

I drop her again on the now brushed line she goes the same way as one of lines I pulled her off before. I let her go this time, there where a few doe beds she struggled through then we were off to the races. At this point we at at the 26 hour mark.

She flying, I’m thinking this feels really good. 300-400 yards after the brushed trail, we jumped him! That was his last move! He jumped and went roughly 15-20 feet and died immediately.

It was so cold that my phone had a rough time working and my go pro didn’t want to play in the cold weather either. Track distance was between 700-800 yards.

Note: Cody did the right thing and backed out. If he didn’t this deer would have went a long way!

Thanks for letting us be apart our your hunt!

#thatsmygirl