BP: Someone needs to spend time learning how to track an Elk, before they go out shooting them. I am surprised that his " guide " was not able to track that wounded elk. IF the elk was hit in the lungs with that heavy slug, the slug should have created both an entrance and exit hole. I suspect the hit was high, and went over the lungs and under the spine.
An elk leaves a lot of sign and deep prints in the ground. If its going down hill, it leaves long skid marks, too. Even some novice from New York City ought to be able to follow those tracks! Blood is great conformation, but its the icing on the cake, and not something you should expect to see and follow when tracking a wounded animal. Learn to identify, age, and follow foot prints left by the animal. If you come upon blood spatters or drops, fine. That simply encourages you to continue with the tracking, knowing you are on the right tracks. Elk have big feet. The toe nails are just as hard as your own, and they chip out when the Elk runs across rocks. The chips are irregular, and unique to a given animal. When you look at Elk tracks at the place where the elk was shot, look for these accidental marks in the track, and use them to identify a particular animal, even if his trail crosses the tracks of other elk. Then there are pitch angles, gait patterns, straddle, step intervals, and stride lengths that will all tell you that you are tracking one animal and not another, but you are going to have to invest some time learning to track an understand these things. Read Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking. Then put in the dirt time between now and next Fall's hunt.
