This deer had shown typical wounded deer behavior. He had rested until he got his wits about him, then he headed efficiently back to a safe bedding area to hold up. Deer will often make a button hook, as indicated on the map above, before bedding down. This allows them to watch their back trail and see predators coming so that they can slip away, before any predators are right up on them. That is exactly what this buck did. After hooking back 100 meters and laying on the edge of a bench 70 meters off to the side of his back trail, this buck saw/heard us coming and slipped away before we saw him ourselves. Eibe got stuck for about 5 minutes at his bed in the button hook, I assume because of the abundance of scent from being there all night. Once she got that worked out, she shot off like a rocket, and I suspected right then that we were hot on the buck's trail, but I could not be sure as there was no sign except for the classic pattern the track had been taking.
After 500 meters on the blazing trail with no confirming sign, I was starting to worry that maybe we were not on the correct deer's trail after all. Most of the trail showed no hoof prints or any other sign at all up until I spotted a small set of fresh tracks and some tiny, warm-to-the-touch droppings. Not really a good sign as these small tracks could not possibly have been from our buck. The small prints eventually disappeared, and the trail began to curve around and make a circle. Large prints from a running deer appeared on the line. I believe the buck initially just walked away from his button hook bed, but we eventually got closer and he decided to run, and therefore started making easily visible tracks. I still wasn't absolutely sure Eibe was on the correct deer, but when I saw the path of the deer on my GPS circling back to his original trail from the day before, my confidence level began to rise. What are the odds that some other random deer would take this course? Well, not very high, in my estimation.
I told the hunter that if the deer we were following continued to loop back towards the button hook bed then we could be pretty darn sure it was the buck we were after. Deer, just like rabbits and other prey animals, make circles back over their previous course of escape to confuse their pursuers. Well, this buck did not use that strategy, but he used another that I have seen before. When he got to the place I expected him to circle back to the button hook, he instead ran right through an overgrown field filled with deer paths everywhere. However, he still took the exact course through the field that he had followed the day before, just in the opposite