That’s your Lotte
Lotte has come of age. In his report a colleague recorded he had despatched a kid and taken a shot on the doe. After searching the area for blood signs he found nothing and considered it a miss.
I was up on the same ground in the Borders the week after and decided to take Lotte in to see if there was any sign of the deer. I went to the eastern end of the wood so that the west wind would be in our face, making the task easier for man and dog.
We were confronted with fallen mature trees on top of each other, the result of damage wreaked on Northumberland by Storm Arwen a few months ago. But the little tinker can just about go anywhere, including under trees with only inches of clearance and over trunks, so long as they are not too high. She can certainly reach places that I can’t.
However, such were the obstacles and dangers, I decided to leave it that morning and return in the afternoon from the less cluttered western end.
Lotte was on the tracking lead and after about 50m her nose was stuck to the ground on a trail. She did not remove it until reaching a point where she pulled hard on the lead, yipping, determined to go under two large fallen trees only to stop underneath them on a deer carcass. The deer was fresh as it had been cold over the week. The badgers had taken the chest organs and stripped a few rib bones clean. I got down on my knees to look at the chest and there was bullet damage to two of the ribs; an exit wound.
Was it the deer in question? The fresh condition of the carcass and the exit damage seemed to confirm it. I rang my colleague and asked him which way the deer was facing when he shot it and he confirmed it was facing to his left.
The exit damage on the deer was on its right side and the fallen deer was only 20m from where he had taken the shot. For me that confirmed it, and my colleague was pleased to know that the deer wasn’t wounded and that his shot was bang on target.
To be fair, where the deer had dropped it was unlikely he could have found it without a good dog.
And a good dog is what Lotte is. Her performance was superb, straight on the trail right to the deer. That was five days after the shot, scenting blood I could not even see.
Clever girl treats were in order, and she proudly paraded around for the rest of the day as if she was a duchess, which, on this day at least, she was.