injured dog dropped the stuff?

[Kaleva]

I let my dog carry my punt. I sent the dog to pursuit wounded elk. It returned wounded, didnt carry anything, the elk was never found, even it was bleeding.
Might be that i instead just forgot the punt somewhere...
Problem is i lost the punt , any idea how to get it back?   If the dog dropped it it is lost.

[PALU]

I suspect you forgot to load the punt at some crossing, as I've never encountered things being dropped except when the inventory gets full. If injury would cause to dog to be too fatigued to move, it ought to just fail to move, not drop what's carried (I've had an unconscious dog "follow" my character still carrying the stuff loaded onto it).

It can also be noted that animals and companions are subject to the same encumbrance rules as your character is, so it will be at a significant handicap when carrying heavy stuff. Thus, you shouldn't bring the punt with you routinely, but only when you actually intend to use it.

[Saiko Kila]

Actually the animals have slightly different encumbrance rules. They can carry only as much as they weight themselves, while the character can carry significantly more. Also the animals have only 20 "item slots", much less than the character. Still, encumbered dog is very slow, though a single punt won't encumber it that much (a single raft though is enough to slow any dog to a crawl, assuming the dog can carry it at all, only about 50% of dogs can take it).

As for finding a punt, I suppose it is the same situation as I used to have frequently - the punt wasn't loaded after coming ashore, and still lies somewhere waiting for a lucky finder. Retrieving it would be a lot of work, probably requiring combing  the forests near rivers and lakes recently crossed. And another punt/raft for it.

You CAN look into msglog.txt, jump to the end of file and start searching for a "punt" in reverse direction (the line will be like "(000000):jcic:[p]{046D019D}      | punt", the hexadecimal number there is a coordinate of the tile), but it will work only if you have dropped, or entered the tile with it and looked, or something. Not all actions are logged.