Anyone else like tracking animals? When I encounter the tracks of an animal, I feel compelled to follow them. I can't say I like to track wounded game--because that means I didn't kill it DRT. Still, I enjoy the challenge.

Below is a longish excerpt from a book of true hunting stories that I work on periodically, about a tracking experience on my safari in Zambia in 2016. Anyone else have any good tracking stories?


On the second day of our hunt, we started out late and hadn’t gone far before we came upon a young impala ram standing barely twenty yards from the road. I was riding on top of the bakkie's bed. ("Bakkie" is what they call a truck used for hunting in Africa.) Leaning out of the window of the cab, Gene asked me to shoot the ram. It was no trophy, but he’d already explained that he wanted a young impala ram for a leopard bait station. Neither the bakkie nor our voices spooked the impala, which struck me as extraordinarily compliant and stupid for his kind. I took my rifle from out of the rack and started to climb down a ladder welded to the bakkie’s side.

“Just shoot him,” Gene said.

“Not from the truck?”

“If you get down, he’s going to bolt,” Gene told me.

Shooting an animal from a vehicle in a fair chase hunt simply isn’t done, old boy. What the heck, it was for leopard bait, not a trophy. I took a rest on the roll-cage of the bakkie and by habit shot the impala behind the near shoulder. The impala leaped away, showing no indication of a hit, and disappeared around a copse of trees.

“You hit him too far back,” Gene said.

“I don’t think you hit him,” Theo said.

“I'm sure I hit him.” My call, based on my having done all the fundamental things you needed to do in shooting and on remembering the sight picture at the time I pulled the trigger, was that the shot had been on target. Anyway, I wouldn’t believe I could miss at twenty yards, especially shooting from a rest.

We unloaded from the bakkie and followed the direction of the impala, spread out, looking for blood sign, following the edge of the grass and the trees, where the impala had run. My wife was with me. I might not have much of a game eye, but my tracking skills are fair. I’d gone to the near side of the field, walking along a line of trees and brush, and along the edge of the trees I found blood, a good-sized smear on the tall grass, and a fragment of lung tissue.

Standing on a dry flood-plain in Zambia, I knew the smear of bright red blood on the tall grass meant blood had run down the animal’s sides and under its belly. I called to Gene and Theo, who were checking the other side of the clearing.
They joined me, and I showed them the blood. They looked around and forged rapidly ahead. I raised my eyes from the ground and saw what they had seen: a patch of white in a stand of thick brush. The impala ram lay dead a hundred yards away. I kept tracking anyway. I like to track animals, ever since I’d learned the skill for a merit badge in Boy Scouts.

An animal’s passage leaves a story on the ground and nearby vegetation. A good tracker can read what the animal had eaten recently by its dung, whether it was injured and where by how it walks, and almost what the animal is thinking as it travels. From the sign left by this impala, it had been shot through at least one lung, and the bullet had probably hit an artery, judging by the bright-red blood that had run down one foreleg to leave red where a hoof had landed. Also, it had blood on its stomach that had rubbed off on the grass, the first sign I’d found.

Even though I knew how this animal’s life story ended, I wanted to read the final page. This impala was getting no respect. Shot for bait at point-blank range by a man sitting in a truck.

The ram was stumbling now, I saw from the imprints in the grass.

Gene and Etiene waited in the stand of acacia. I never claimed to be fast at tracking, but I am stubborn. I finished where the impala lay on its back as it had fallen. Its white belly and one leg were bloody.

“See, you hit him too far back,” Gene said, pointing to the wound. The bullet had gone right through, and there was lung tissue on the exit wound. “African animals have their vitals farther forward than North American animals.”

I knew that, had read it, and been told it by Victor Watson, my South African PH. I’d like to say that the ethical dilemma of shooting from a vehicle distracted me, but the truth is I just forgot and shot from habit at a spot behind the ram’s leg.

“Follow the front leg up, one-third to two-thirds of the way up from the bottom of the body,” Gene continued. “That should be your target.”

Ah, but Gene was a perfectionist. I may have shot the ram too far back, but my bullet did manage to inflict lethal damage, and the impala piled up a few hundred yards later—no farther distance than a white-tailed deer often runs when mortally wounded. The vitals of African animals might be located more forward, but not that much more forward, I concluded. Still, if I shot a tougher animal like a sable the way I’d shot this impala, the story might end very differently, with a lost animal or even a charge from an angry, wounded bull.

Gene told me the impala would be hung in a tree where a leopard would find and work the bait. Like the terrain where I shot my buffalo, the ground here was level and dry and had enough patches of open grassland to allow the bakkie to drive right up to the kill. No dragging a carcass or hauling its boned-out meat on your back in this country....

Jim

Hurry up and finish the book, I want to read it now!

Sounds like a good book

In an overt effort to highjack Jame's thread.... here is an idea:

While waiting for Jame's book to come out, buy a copy of MINE! PM for details on how to do just that.

there is an old book about Hunting in African many years ago.
It has lots of stories of tracking game.

Great read, your story reminded me of it.

The book is "Hunter", the authors name is J.A. Hunter.

Got some time to spare? Wanna learn more about a particular animal? Follow the tracks and you can learn a lot.

In South Africa, our tracker was a San bushman. The San are said to be the best trackers in the world.

I shot my trophies DRT, except for the nyala, so I never saw Michel at work. The wounded nyala only went twenty yards. Michel walked right up to the thrashing antelope, grabbed one horn, and shoved his pocket knife into the base of the skull.

Jim

Anyone else have any good tracking stories?

Jim

People that pay attention to detail can usually read sign, especially if they grew up in the woods learning from it.

Tracking and the Art of seeing by Rezendes is a good book.

Mark Elbroch has some very good stuff as well.

I will put my wife's, ability to find a drop of blood or hair or broken branch, against any person around here,

I've tracked and found numerous deer that was "missed"

A few hands and knees jobs on freshly fallen maple leaves that were mostly red, lol, those were tough ones...

Tracked a beach deer on pure sand once for a mile before it went into the water, it mingled with a lot of other deer and existing tracks.... That one was disappointing, it can be done with patience and an eye for detail...

A little bit different Animal to chase, but it worked to me.......


https://www.jhardin-inc.com/home

That's interesting, wasn't aware there would be a service like that, assuming he's not a self proclaimed "expert"

I'm a good tracker- here's one a little different.

He started calling me number one scout after I tracked a pair of coyote over the dried hardpan of the sagebrush hills that was baked in the Montana sun. It had been 103 degrees and then it rained. Not just a nice little rain but a rain with giant cold drops of life giving water that stung my shoulders as it hit me. I shivered as the temperature plummeted to the mid 60's. It felt like hail. He'd walked the east hillside while I walked the west and when we came back to the truck he said he had nothing and for the first time during our two day trapping instruction he asked if I saw any sign. I pointed with my hand and said ''two coyotes came through here three days ago and trotted over the saddle right where you got out of the truck. What's down that ridge?'' '' Giant Prairie dog town''. He started to mumble things that sounded like '' there aren't any bleepin coyotes here, getting too old for this bleep, '' but then he said '' show me''. I wanted to set some traps but he said they were not his problem. I asked why not and he looked at me over his sunglasses just below the rim of his hat and said '' because I said so. I had three Indians here last week and not one of them could have found those tracks. From now one- your name is number one scout. '' '' let's go find some white man dirt''.

If you can track coyotes across hardpan like that, you're a better tracker than I am.

Jim