00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about a long blood trail I ended up on just before the past season, ended up here in the North Country and. 00:00:32 Speaker 3: What that taught me. 00:00:41 Speaker 2: What I love about deer hunting, at least some kinds of deer hunting, is that there's just so much mystery to it. You know, at least if you know where to look for it, and you understand that there's just like a lot of stuff. 00:00:52 Speaker 3: You don't really know out there. 00:00:54 Speaker 2: I often feel like I have this whole thing pretty well understood, but then something happens and it makes me realize that I just don't And man, do I love that stuff? Well, I'm going to tell you on this whole episode is about something that just kind of rocked my dear world recently, and it was probably one of the most educational and humbling white tail experiences of my life. And speaking of life in all of its big changes, you crafty listeners might have noticed that this particular episode is not only number nine ninety eight, but nine ninety nine. That's because the high ups here at media to realize that anything I do is worth about twice what Mark does, so they're finally giving credit where it's due. Just kidding, that's not going to happen. But what is going to happen is that you're going to hear a special episode a wire to Hunt this week where our favorite mustachioed butterfly enthusiast is going to emerge from his cocoon with some big news. Give it a listen, and I mean this without being a smart ass at all, for real, give Mark a little love this week for reaching his one thousandth episode. That's a lot of shit, oh a lot of work, and a hell of a lot of white tail hunting insights, which is pretty cool. While it seems like everyone is just speed running right into a style of white tail hunting that strips away as much mystery as possible to make things as predictable as possible. You know, at least without putting up ten foot fences, there's still a hell of a lot of stuff out there we don't really know. The kicker is that we don't need to know a lot about white tails to kill them. We really don't. We mostly just need to know where they like to eat, and that covers a hell of a lot of it. Of course, learning where they like to bed and drink and travel and leave sign and all of that stuff is obviously important and great too, but it's actually not that necessary. Well, I guess it is if you want to be a better hunter. So in a way, it just depends what you're looking to get out of this white tail thing, and it goes beyond that too, at least in my opinion. I also think that you kind of just need to learn what deer do to avoid predation from us, from toothy critters, from whatever. For a lot of hunters, figuring that last one out would actually be a hell of a lot more beneficial than knowing they like to eat clover in September and corn in December. 00:03:11 Speaker 3: You can't really learn what deer do. 00:03:14 Speaker 2: To avoid us or other predators without being with them as much as possible, and I'll tell you what. I'm going to tell you a story right now about being with a little buck in northern Wisconsin for a twenty four hour period and what he taught me and my daughter, because I haven't stopped thinking about it since then. 00:03:29 Speaker 3: So here it goes us. 00:03:31 Speaker 2: Peterson's just don't like unfilled tags, and we don't like any empty space in the freezer at the end of the year. So when one of my daughters told me she really wanted to try to fill her buck tag in Wisconsin before the clock ran out, I did what a dad does. 00:03:44 Speaker 3: I drove a couple. 00:03:45 Speaker 2: Hours over there, put up some cameras, picked a few spots to sit on the ground after scouting around, and then cross my fingers and toes. I knew it wouldn't be easy because it almost never is over there, and I also knew i'd definitely green light her for a dough if we got the chance. You know, the focus on bucks it is mostly just because the deer population over there is pretty sparse, So instead of killing one of the baby makers, I wanted to try to make a play for a buck at least if it was possible. But mostly it was just a late season deer hunt in the If it's brown, it's down fashion Now, with the wind forecasted to go from south to north to south in the three days we had, I made a plan, and then the morning we were destined to head over there, I got a picture of a scrapper buck in daylight and a certain spot. So I changed all my plans and we drove over there, bundled up and slipped into a row of pine trees to post up and see if that little buck or someone else would show up. I know this because I texted my buddy an update. But we had only been sitting for twelve minutes when I looked up and guess who was trotting in? It was like an absolute gift. The wind was totally in our favor. We were brushed in real well, and that little buck was on a path that went nowhere but the danger zone. I was just about to start filming with my phone when he stopped at maybe tw twenty five yards, and for reasons only known to a fourteen year old girl who I truly loved with all of my heart, but who also took a terrible shot. I watched as the buck trotted off with a clearly messed up front shoulder. She just rushed it, and I knew it. She knew it, The squirrels knew it. You now know it. I couldn't tell where the hit was exactly, only what angle the buck was standing when the shot went off. 00:05:25 Speaker 3: He was clearly hit, not. 00:05:27 Speaker 2: Doing all that well, and since she's been really, really solid at making good shots, I talked myself into thinking the buck was probably toast, but to play it safe, we backed out. We waited around for two hours, and then went in to see what the initial sign would show before it got too dark. Now here's where I made my first mistake. I looked at the blood trail through the snow, which always amplifies things, and I figured he was toast at about two hundred yards into the trail. I knew that I was wrong. I was standing in the swamp with the sun setting and a very good blood trail to follow if I needed to, but also that not so good feeling in my gut saying back out. That's when I looked up and saw him standing in the woods, staring away from us. I couldn't see through my binos what the hit looked like because of the brush, but he didn't look like he was doing that well, so we backed out again and gave it five hours this time. But here is where I should give you a disclaimer. I know that the best move was to give that buck the night to die, but this was one of the few situations where I felt like the coyotes and wolves would have a real edge on us. And also I just talked myself into believing he wasn't long for this world. I was so confident of that that I hauled my big ice fishing sled out there when we went back into the woods, figuring i'd need to use it to get him out. 00:06:46 Speaker 3: Now. 00:06:46 Speaker 2: The blood trail was ridiculously easy to follow, but I turned on my tracker on onex just in case. A couple hundred yards from where we left him, we found two beds, including one with a clot in it. We followed that buck for one one point three miles before I realized once again that I had jumped the gun and we were pushing a for sure living deer ahead of us. Anyone who has been on enough blood trails knows the feeling I had when I made the call to make the long hike out to leave him overnight. So so far that buck had gone, you know, basically straight away from us from the spot where she had shot him. I had started that trail thinking we had about a ninety percent chance of finding him dead when we got back to the truck, felt more like a coin flip. For when we came back in the morning and at first light, we followed our tracks back to the spot where we left the trail and got on it again. Now that little buck had gone and bedded down again during the night, but had also gone through several spots where the deer were rooting around through the snow for acorns, and it almost looked like, from the pattern of his blood and his tracks, that he had been feeding with him. I honestly don't know, but I do know that we followed that trail for a long long ways and got to a spot where it started to get much harder to follow the blood. At this point I made two mental mistakes. The first was that I could hear crows going nuts on a nearby ridge, and I dropped a pin as close as possible at that location, because I knew I was probably gonna end up going over there and looking around. The second was that I started to believe we weren't going to find him. So when we hit another patch of high ground between swamps where there were a few oaks and I finally lost the blood, I wasn't surprised. We were maybe one hundred yards from the crow spot and I just found a set of very fresh wolf tracks. Now we marked that last blood and made a big circle around it. Nothing, So we moved farther out and circled the whole thing again and found nothing. I told my daughter it wasn't looking good, but that we needed to check the ridge with the crows on it, and when we did, we found nothing. I turned off my tracker on on X and we had a little conversation about shot angles and started the long hike out. Now about two hundred and fifty yards into our retreat, I crossed a log and looked down and saw blood splattered all over the snow like a roar shark test. It was clear from the lack of bootprints that we hadn't already been on this part of the trail, so I backtracked it, and I. 00:09:22 Speaker 3: Realized a couple of things. 00:09:24 Speaker 2: The wolf had clearly bumped the buck into a run, and I had missed the blood trail by about six feet twice while circling around to pick it up. You see, I had already talked myself into thinking that it was a lost cause. And guess what, I missed some very easy clues on where he might have gone. And that did not make me feel great. And we can talk ourselves into a lot of shit in life and in deer hunting. And if you were on a blood trail and you go from maybe to it's not going to happen, But I'll keep trying. It's so easy to not keep trying very hard. Now, almost as soon as we picked it up again, the signs showed that the buck had peeled off of a ridge and headed straight for a small alder thicket. I'm talking maybe an acre of alders that were so close together. I was on my hands and knees following him through there. It was gnarly, and he didn't go straight through, you know, probably because you couldn't, but also because it sure felt like he was trying his best evasive maneuvers in there. Now, without snow, it would have been impossible to follow. I promise you that with snow, not only could I follow the blood in his tracks, but the wolf that was clearly between us and the deer follow his tracks too. Now, before I continue to let me break this down a little, because we hear people all of the time confidently proclaim to know what deer know, and what deer do you know? Like old Goalpost always beds in the thicket by the river, and he doesn't rut like other bucks because I never get picks of him chasing, and during gun season he's a ghost who travels four miles away to hang out on the edge of town fill in the blank stuff. 00:10:58 Speaker 3: But you know, we mostly I don't know now. 00:11:01 Speaker 2: Before this blood trail, i'd have told you very confidently that this little buck has a home range that's maybe a square mile, and he's probably going to keep circling to stay in that range, since it wouldn't make much sense to run three sections away to deal with that unknown after you've not only taken a fixed blade broadhead through your chest somewhere, but now have two humans and a wolf on your tail. But this buck knew where he was, I promise you that, and he was a long long ways from where she shot him. When he finally broke from that older patch, he backtracked for a ways, paralleling his original trail, and then he took a hairpin turn and just kept going away. When we would hit a patch of open woods, he'd go straight through it. Then at some point he'd take a ninety degree turn into some swamp. We could walk at a pretty fast pace follow him, because, you know, the blood was so obvious. He clearly had been hit hard in some muscles that were doing a lot of the work to keep him going, and so any movement produced more blood. Now, eventually we were a long, long long ways from the shot site when the buck took another ninety degree turn into another alder thicket. This one was worse than the first, and as we crawled into it, I saw that the wolf tracks split off and the buck's blood was still wet and very fresh, you know, because when blood hit snow, it freezes pretty quickly. And this showed me a couple of things. The first was that we had been on the bucks trail and the wolf's trail throughout at least part of the morning. The second was that he was very very much alive, and he was showing us his best moves, which I'm telling you were pretty good. That alder thicket was a nightmare. I can tell you without doubt that if a big buck hold up there in gun season for the daylight hours, you wouldn't see him and you wouldn't get him out. If a year and a half old six pointer can figure that out, imagine the spots of mature buck knows about that are just like that. 00:13:03 Speaker 3: As I was. 00:13:03 Speaker 2: Crawling through that shit, I started to think about all the places I've hunted deer where they just kind of had those options, and I realized it was most of the places I've hunted, you know, not all of them. And I honestly think that is one of the secrets to states like Iowan Kansas being just kind of a little bit easier to hunt. I'm not saying there isn't easy cover in other states. I'm not saying that it's only easy cover in those states. There's a hell of a lot of variables at play beyond that stuff too. But I've spent quite a bit of time in certain states in various bots, and it's just not the same game cover wise generally any Huski. When we got to the middle of the Alders, I looked at my daughter, who was definitely not having a good time I just said, this is a lost cause. Following a live buck that doesn't want you to follow him is not only insanely frustrating, but a total crash course on what they do to stay alive even when the odds are stacked against them. I didn't feel great about giving up on that deer, but I didn't know what to do. But let me put this into perspective. I didn't start either of my on X tracks on the actual hit site. We were already several hundred yards into it when I started the first one, which measured one point three miles. The second one, which I started after losing the bucks trail and picked it up down the road. That one measured three point two miles. While he didn't go in a straight line, he went in a continuous direction away from where we started. So when I say that we trailed that buck for five miles, I mean it. And I know that sounds like when your meth head cousin says that they see mountain lions all the time in the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee, or whatever, But this one is true. To frame it up another way, I don't take my pheasant hunting lightly. I'm not just a lazy stroll through the grass kind of fella, if you get my drift. So two days after that blood trail, I met up with a buddy and we hunted roosters almost all day long, and my step count for that whole day was slightly lower than what my daughter and I had racked up by ten am the morning we went after her buck. What the little deer did and what we put him through, and how even a wolf couldn't quite bring him down in that moment, just it left me with like a weird feeling. We say they're survival machines, but they are survival machines, no doubt. But we also look at them, especially a little bucks, and honestly, any deer that isn't whatever we'd call a shooter, as something kind of less than, and that they are easier to kill and so on. And they can be, but that's because we have so many advantages over them. But they are also something else. Not three hundred yards from where she shot that buck, I shot a nice buck in mid November that had a relatively recent arrow wound through his chest. Two holes, a whole bunch of us, the whole thing. The area is covered in predators, and the hundred density over there is really hot, yet they survive. Yet a scrapper buck in December and shake off a hit that definitely didn't do him any good and then spend twenty four hours avoiding us and a wolf. It just blew me away. And maybe I'm wrong here and it was just survival instinct and nothing more. But what he took us through felt like intention. It felt like he was thinking through his moves, and if he wasn't, his moves were good. It made me realize why we have such a desire to try to make hunting easier, because if we really did it on their terms, we'd kill a lot fewer of them and have to work a hell of a lot harder for it. 00:16:38 Speaker 3: Now. 00:16:39 Speaker 2: I don't know if that buck made it because my camera's over there are all dead and I don't really have any other way to figure it out. I don't know if that buck made it because my cameras over there are dead and I don't really have any other way to figure it out. I don't really know whether I believe he's alive or not, because I genuinely believed. You know that not only had we killed him, but that when we left, he was probably compromised enough to draw the attention of someone else, you know, big and toothy. But I also know what he survived from us, and it was just so damn impressive. So even though it doesn't matter to him or anyone else, I really hope he made it. I doubt he did, you know, or will throughout the long winner up there, but he proved me wrong a lot my brief time with him, So who knows. I know that he taught my daughter a lesson on shot selection, and I know he taught me more about deer than I've probably learned from any one human, and I've been lucky enough to spend time with some of the best hunters out there. I don't know anything else to say about this one other than it was just humbling, crazy and one of those things that just changes you as deer hunter. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening, and thank you for all of your support. Maybe you don't see it enough, maybe we don't say it enough, but I truly mean this without you guys, you know, showing up to watch the films and listen to the podcasts and read the articles. We don't have anything, so thank you for that. Thank you for showing up for us. If you want some more content, you know, if you want to kill these long winter hours and entertain yourself a little bit or learn something, the mediater dot com has you covered. We literally drop new content there every single day, so go check it out at the medeater dot com