Blood Trailing: Biggest Mistakes

Blood Trailing Biggest Mistakes and Gambles

By John L. Sloan

Judd Cooney has spent almost all his life in the pursuit of game and sometimes hunters. He is a former wildlife officer in Alaska and Colorado and has been in the guiding and outfitting business a long time. If you read outdoor magazines, you’ve seen his stories and photographs. He and I have been friends and hunting companions for a long time. One night, kicked back before a dandy campfire, we started discussing blood trailing wounded game. We estimated between us we had been involved in over 1,000 trailing jobs on various game animals. And we agreed on almost every aspect.
As we talked we noticed that some of the other hunters around the fire appeared to think we were crazy because some of what we do when blood trailing and some of what we don’t do is in direct opposition to commonly held beliefs.

Let’s start with gut shot animals. Judd and I mostly agree on this and very few other hunters do. First, if it is open country, country where you can see the animal, we both begin the trail immediately providing it is a morning shot. We are not trying to catch up to the animal, just keep it in sight. When we see that animal bed down for maybe the third time, we back off and wait. Here is why.

A gut shot animal almost never runs a distance, beds down and dies. (There is no absolute in blood trailing so I will use the words almost and usually a lot.) Gut shot animals run, bed, get up and walk a ways, bed down, get up again and walk a ways and then bed again. Usually they will bed three or four times. Now they seldom bleed a lot and usually once they leave that first bed, there is no blood trail. By pushing them and watching them, we can speed the demise and have a better idea of where they went.
If there is snow on the ground, of course, you can wait all time in the world. If it is at night, you have to wait. In thicker cover Judd and I disagree some. I still favor trailing immediately and making that animal get up at least once. Judd tends to want to wait for a long time before starting the trail. Once I bump an animal, I back off and wait as long as 24 hours if it is cool. In comparing notes, it seems we have both had pretty good success in recovering gut shot animals.
Both of us also agree on trailing animals shot late in the afternoon. If it is dark, regardless of how much blood we have or how plain the trail is, if we have not recovered that animal within 150-200 yards. We quit. We come back in full sunlight the next morning. We are both of the opinion that more animals are lost by stumbling around in the dark than by a poor shot. Left alone, in the dark, that animal with even a slightly marginal hit, is very likely to be recoverable.
Neither of us is real big on waiting a long time to trail an animal when we have plenty of daylight. Our thinking is, that animal is either dead or it isn’t. If it is dead, we’ll find it. If it isn’t and we can see well and do our job correctly, we should be able to find it and either back off or make a second, killing shot.
Then we started talking about common misconceptions and myths. I don’t know how many times I have heard hunters ask, “Was his tail down or up when he ran off?” or “Did he run uphill or down?” or “I’ll bet ran straight to the nearest water.”

Game animals do what they feel like doing. The tail up or down on a deer shot or shot at, means very little. It certainly is no indication they were hit or where they were hit. Judd and I have both seen deer run with a tail tightly tucked that were not even scratched and with a tail straight up, bounding like they hadn’t a care in the world, then keel over grave yard dead.

A shot deer will run downhill...if it wants to go that way. It will run uphill if it wants to go that way and it may do both before you find it. Be prepared for shot animal to do anything. I once shot a 5X bull in Colorado at nine yards. The arrow went completely through and stuck three inches in a pine. For 100 yards we had good blood. Then it trickled off to drops every 40 yards or so. We trailed that bull from eight in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon. Came back the next morning and picked up the trail. Found the bull, stone dead with a perfect double lung shot around noon-almost three miles from where he was shot. He had gone up hill, down hill, around hills, past creeks and beaver ponds and as far as we could tell, never once bedded down.

Sometimes wounded animals do head for water. As often times, they don’t. If you have lost all sign, it sure doesn’t hurt to look. Another good place to look is a fence line. Sometimes animals get to a fence and then don’t want to jump it. Often they die right there. You just never know.
One other thing we agree on every time is the biggest mistake hunters make in blood trailing. It is having too big a crowd. Blood trailing, especially when there is little blood can be time consuming and exhaustive, involving hands and knees, inch at a time, work. Judd and I agree, a maximum of three people involved. One who does nothing but stand at last sign and two who actually trail. One is the lead trailer, the other works side trails, never getting ahead of the leader and constantly scanning ahead for a bedded or dead deer.
So, there are some basics that have worked for Cooney and I over the years. I could write 3,000 words on blood trailing (in fact, I have) and the only thing I can tell you for sure, is when you shoot an animal, only two things can happen. It either dies or it doesn’t. What you do and how you do it can greatly influence the outcome. And without a doubt, the single greatest thing you can do to insure a good outcome is to never take low percentage shots.