We got up at around 6 and got ready to go searching for the stag. Mark asked if I wanted him to bring his rifle. I said yes, as I thought there would be nothing worse than to see him run off and not find him and to die a slow death. Emma decided to tag along as well, as Mark was bringing both dogs, Duke the black Labrador and Belle the chocolate Labrador.
Ben decided to go for a quick look for a deer, and would call us on the radio when he wanted to catch up with us. We got to the place where we found the last blood spot, and straight away Mark said “He’s gone this way, you can see his marks”. I had to take his word for it, as he took off in the direction pointing out blood along the way.
He had the dogs with him, but Duke wasn’t paying attention and was getting in the way a bit, so Emma took him and held him back a bit. I was following and marking the blood with the GPS along the way. After about 100 meters we lost the trail, so Mark took Belle out in wide circles to try and cut his path.
I stayed on the last sign with Emma and Duke, and we searched all the tunnels in the Coprosma thicket, looking for blood. After about 10 minutes, Mark called out that he found the trail again. We went about nearly 100 meters and caught up with Mark. There were only half a dozen drops over about three meters and it disappeared again.
I Marked it again and looked for the next spot while Mark and Belle went wide again. We tried to get Duke interested in looking by showing him the blood, but he didn’t really get enthused. At one stage I held up a leaf with some good blood on it, only for Duke to eat the leaf, wag his tail and look at me to say “That was nice, got any more?”
Mark had no luck finding any marks or blood, so he went out ahead to see if the stag had crossed an old bulldozed track. As he walked along the track, Belle started to pull him along by the lead. She had smelt where the stag crossed the track. Mark was very happy that she was getting the hang of it. It was a promising sign that the stag had crossed the track, because he was headed downhill towards the open farmland. If he was not hurting, he would have headed up the hill and into the steep thick bush.
Ben got in touch and came over to join the search, unfortunately he had no luck with the deer. Once we were on the trail again, there was good blood and quite a few big patches of bubbles. The trail led through an impressive patch that had some huge scrapes 6ft wide. Fifty meters further on the trail disappeared again. We stopped and had a break, as we had been going for about an hour.
I had a look at the GPS and saw that we had gone nearly 400 meters from the shot. I was starting to worry that we would not find him, Ben and Mark seemed optimistic but after what happened last night with the first stag, I only hoped for the best outcome but was preparing myself for the worst...
Topic: When the Stars Align (Read 1374 times)
