Lost and found

Throughout my years of tracking work, so many times before I or a colleague start a trail we have been told something along the lines of, “I hit the deer, so it must be dead.”

What happens next is something I’ve seen play out hundreds of times. We start the trail, sometimes we find some blood, sometimes we found nothing at all. Whatever happens at this point, the hunter will stick with his story.

This continues to the very end. When we follow a trail – whether short or long, on deer or wild boar – and we end up admitting that we didn’t find anything, some hunters look to us with suspicion in their eyes. What they inevitably say next is, “How is that possible? I have found blood, so it must be dead.”

For these hunters, I think it would be useful to go back to basics: what we look for