by John Kulish
I know hound dogs as some men know women. Experience has taught me that a good man-dog team is more rare than a happy marriage, because it is as difficult to find the right dog as it is the right woman. No real hunter ever sells a superior dog. When one offers sale a six-year-old dog, “the best I’ve ever had,” he’s either a liar or a fool—probably the former. Money can’t separate the exceptional man-dog team any more than it can break up a good man-woman pair. The real thing is unbuyable, unbreakable, unbeatable. It ends only when one of them dies.
Buying a dog from a magazine advertisement runs the same risks as investing in a mail-order bride. She will be the color and about the age you specified. The impression you got from her photograph was fairly accurate. But can she adjust to you? Can you work together? Will you know how to take care of her?
Your mail-order hound will arrive with long ears, of the breed you ordered, all the necessary shots for distemper, rabies, etc., and perhaps a pedigree that traces his ancestral tree back to the acorn. Don’t be misled. Can he learn? Does he want to work? Do you know how to teach him?
I pick a dog by his eyes. If calm clear eyes meet mine, I speak. Even though I don’t know his name, the dog looks steadily at me, wags his tail, and waits for me to say more. He pays attention. Shouting is not necessary. Even though still a puppy, he doesn’t jump all over me, or dash around in circles. He has the inborn self-respect and dignity of a little child. Sudden, unusual sounds don’t send him scuttling, tail between his legs. If a car backfires, he heads for the sound instead of the cellar.
If we picked presidents by looks, we’d have missed Abraham Lincoln. The same holds true for dogs, for ability cannot be judged by looks. Beauty can boomerang when you least expect it. Whether or not a dog is registered matters little to me. I’ve owned hounds with names like racehorses, and with price tags to match. Heredity plays the same black-sheep tricks on dogs it does on people. Skeletons rattle in the best of kennels as well as in castle closets. Like a good man, a good dog must have courage and character. Blue blood and blue ribbons guarantee neither.
Any hound has more to start with than the would-be hunter. Dogs are born knowing much a man must learn. On the other hand, to assume that all hounds are born hunters is like assuming that all men are born doers. Koffka showed that if a kitten is ever to become an able mouser, it must learn in a given short span of its growing up. Perhaps this is equally true of dogs and people. Be that as it may, to assume that all dogs will become good hunters is like assuming all men will develop into good producers.
We know that good people do not always make good parents. Similarly, able hunters are not always adequate teachers. Fiber and basic personality come sealed in at the factory. Either it is inside the package or it isn’t. Then comes the question of what environment does to the raw material.
A real dog man takes the task of being a teacher as seriously as a Dewey or a Casals. He knows it is easier to teach good, new habits than to break bad, old ones. His pupil hunts only where, how, and when the “prof” dictates. He would no more allow his charge to roam the woods at will, than he would thrust his little children, unattended, into the streets of a ghetto. Many a bright dog has become a delinquent for lack of a master who cared.
Caring is a demanding occupation. The more talented the pupil, the more knowledgeable the teacher he needs. A gifted child cannot develop its full potential unless its shining qualities are recognized. Neither can a first-rate dog rise above a second-rate teacher. Too often I have met a man whose dog had all the makings of an extraordinary hunter: the nose, the heart, the brains were all there. Alas, the same could not be said of the man on the other end of the leash.
A good master needs above-average intelligence; a comprehensive, personally acquired knowledge of wildlife; a sense of humor; and a few courses in psychology. A full-blooded vocabulary also comes in handy. He must know how to apply what he has to offer to the dog’s natural abilities. To over- or to underestimate is to invite disaster. To hunt is a hound’s birthright; to direct, a master’s responsibility. A hound supplies instinct; a master, guidance. A sound man-dog relationship must be a two-way street paved with mutual respect and mutual need. A hound furnishes the means; a master, the end—and vice versa. It takes a goodly part of a man’s lifetime to acquire the knowledge and the know-how, whereas hounds born with the right combination of nose, brains, and heart are as rare as comets. That’s why so few of these wonderful man-dog teams course the countryside.
Some dogs are stupid. They never learn the lessons of experience. Ask any porcupine. Some are lazy.
Some dogs are rugged individualists. Unafraid to stand up when everyone else is sitting down, they scorn the pack. Unwilling to run at anyone’s heels, they never run for the sake of running. They always know what they are chasing and why.
Bugle-voiced, with warm topaz eyes, Tim was one of those. He cared only about me and hunting foxes (I’m not sure in which order). He figured we made a tough team without any bolstering. He was a smart dog.
Some dogs are joiners. They can’t stand doing anything alone. Upon hearing a pack of mouthy strangers several miles distant, this type will leave a fresh but lonely track, to join the bandwagon as it howls through the woods. The noise and excitement are what count. What’s being chased isn’t important. If accidentally separated from the pack, he is lost. Because he has never made an independent decision, he doesn’t know how to find his way back. This gutless character is the backbone of any pack. He thinks with his mouth.
Some dogs are drifters. Unreliable creatures of impulse, all the training in the world can’t change them. They rarely finish anything they start. After a dozen frustrations you are tempted to shoot them. Then a perfect run sends your hopes soaring. Happily you trudge home exulting, “Now he knows!” The next morning the newly-snowed-on mountains are a cat hunter’s dream that borders on the idyllic. You stare down at a track less than an hour old. Off dashes your “new” hound, baying like a bloodhound about to corner its quarry. That’s the last you see of the reformed character until hours after dark, when he casually reappears to greet his half-frozen master with a “Gosh, where-have-you-been-all-day? ” look in his artless eyes.
Some dogs are politicians. Handsomer than most, this type is expert at lobbying. He has learned which side his bone is marrowed on. Humbly, he licks your hand; eagerly, he jumps into a car; impatiently, that perfect muzzle sniffs at spoor. After finding a still steaming track, you let him go. Three days later, a dog constable in the next county calls you. A charmer, this type means well. He starts out wanting to do what is expected of him, but it’s those delightful diversions along the way he can’t resist.
Some dogs are stubborn. Too opinionated to learn, they make the same mistakes over and over again. Whenever this type runs game into a burrow, it digs and howls around the Alamo for hours, until dragged away on a leash. Three miles of rough going later, when released, he makes a beeline back to the fort. The pathetic part is that stubborn animals often have good minds, but something goes wrong on the assembly line, so that they think with their hearts and feel with their brains.
Some dogs are phonies. As with people, it’s easy to mistake size for endurance. A big, rugged hound, with rangy legs built for speed, seems to have all the qualities needed for clambering over snow-covered ledges at top speed. Straining on a leash, he dances about on his hind legs, yowling, “Let me at ’em!” Unleashed in the woods, he makes a half-dozen senseless orbits before falling contentedly into step behind you. He’s tired. His muscles are all in his tongue. He’s saving his energy for his next meal.
Some dogs are late bloomers. Time after time, while training him, you try to keep a young dog on a leash in step directly behind you, as you follow an old track, mile after mile. Every time you go over a log, the dog goes under, and when it’s easier for you to go under, he goes over. As you go on one side of a sapling, he goes around the other, all the while still on a leash. The struggle of wills ends only when the tracks bec
ome fresh enough to make the dog sniff, then strain on his leash. You let him go. Within minutes a hot chase ensues, but something seems peculiar. He’s not going anywhere; he’s running in circles! The day is ruined because Tom’s trail happened to wander too close to a bunny’s bedroom, and once they take a track, most hounds forget they have a master. One trains and trains such a dog. Sometimes, after six or seven years, it develops into a respectable hound, but it has only a year left to hunt. It’s like people who struggle all their lives to get good at something, to no avail, and then suddenly, just before they die, they blossom.
Once in a million litters, a genius is born, a happenstance as rare among dogs as it is among people. Being a blueblood has little to do with it. Neither Leonardo da Vinci nor William Shakespeare was produced by selective breeding. A genius hound has many talents. He is as loving a pet as he is valiant a hunter. Smart as a circus dog, he acquires a repertoire of tricks which he eagerly shows off on command. His nose can distinguish any smell. Whether it runs, crawls, or flies, he can identify any creature by its scent. But he follows only that for which he has been trained. His brain and his nose are connected by a street called Clear Thinking. He has more than a superior brain; he has a superior mind, and he uses it to observe, to compare, and to remember. Like an army veteran who understands the whole, almost second-nature routine of action, a good hound comes running whenever you pick up a shotgun. A genius will help you to lace up your boots.
By some strange magic he respects what his master knows, senses what his master feels, trusts what his master tells him. That is, if he has a competent and kind master. Otherwise, he is disgusted and shows it.
As a bounty hunter, I depended on a dog to help me to support my family. Many hours of my life went into training individual bobcat hounds. In order to do it right, one can train only a single dog at a time. Among other things, one needs a leash, lungs like bellows, and luck. On snow, you find a cat track, usually several hours old. Under normal conditions, fox or cat scent permeates tracks for about an hour after the animal has passed. With your pupil on a leash, you start following the trail, moving as fast as possible, because you must get close enough to your quarry so that some body scent lingers. The cat is not sitting down waiting for you to catch up. Unless it stops to eat or to sleep, or, unless you can outrun it, the spoor stays cold.
Only a rare dog ever learns to identify tracks by sight. Few learn, by themselves, to follow a specific track, ignoring all others, no matter how alluring. Whenever a creature other than the one you are hunting crosses the trail, and you never before realized how numerous they can be, you emphasize their unpopularity by a painful jerk of the leash whenever a muzzle yields to temptation, accompanied by the stinging rebuke of a switch over and over again.
If your stamina and luck go hand in hand, you’ll get close enough to warn or to “jump” the cat. Unsnapping the swivel, you command your pupil to “get him.” Don’t expect him to—the first time—or the second, or even the third or the fourth time. Each time he will make mistakes, and it’s your job to help him understand what these are. If he’s as smart as you are, he’ll learn from his errors, and rarely make the same ones twice. Finally, the delightful day will dawn when patience, persistence, and pluck are rewarded. Once a good hound has sunk his fangs into the warm, odiferous, flea-ridden carcass of a cat, he matriculates. Within a couple of seasons, if he works like a dog, he should be a graduate of Canine College. If he’s like Ol’ Kitty Guy, by the time he’s three, he’ll have an honorary degree. So will you.
Ol’ Kitty Guy had perception. He soon learned that cats are unpredictable and hard to get. He not only grasped what I wanted, but what he had to contribute in order to get it done. He understood that one cat differed from another. He neither relied on any rule of paw, nor took his quarry for granted. Like all geniuses, he had superb self-discipline. Straddling spoor, still as a statue, ears cocked, he would wait for me. While I studied the sign, asking myself where this cat came from, where it was now, where it was going, how far it was to the nearest rock pile offering cat refuge, Jiggs would never even blink. He was all attention, waiting my command.
Sometimes, my judgment said it would be a useless pursuit. I would pat his black head and say, “Not today, Kitty Guy. Maybe tomorrow.” If, on the other hand, the track looked workable, two words were spit out. Excitement, zest, and confidence put the accent on the first syllable.
“Get him!”
Wh-o-o-o-o-sh. He would disappear in a spray of snow. No matter how hot the track, he always waited for my command.
My dog must be as much of an individual as I am. He must be as sensitive as a baby, yet as tough as a combat Marine. He needs to know when to coo and when to charge. My hound never gives up—unless and until I do. Then, it is always a truce, never a surrender. My dog understands my thinking. He understands my hound dog dialect. After a wrong move on my part, a cat would outmaneuver us by running into a ledge. I’d peer into the hole. “Well, Kitty Guy, that was a bum move I made. The son-of-a-bobcat gave us the slip.”
The dog would look up at me, then peer into the ledge.
“Never mind, ol’ man,” he’d wag back, bumping his head against my leg. “Not today. Maybe tomorrow.”
Talking to my dog has shortened long miles trudged through the woods after dark. To me, a good dog is a companion, a friend, a confidante to whom I can tell things I wouldn’t tell a psychiatrist. Whether or not my hound dogs understood, they all responded. As of now, I speak English Walker, Redbone, and Black-and-Tan. Who knows, maybe I still have time to learn Bluetick, Plott, and Leopard Cur.
8. A “Genius” Hound Comes to Stay
It was one of those February days when going to work was impossible in my profession. I turned from looking at the frost-bound kitchen windows to giving attention to my white-and-yellow hound. He lay with his head on his paws. I bent over to examine one. He licked my hand and I scratched a special place behind his ear.
“Well, Skivvie, it’s napping behind the stove for you. Yesterday’s hunt cost you too much.”
Raw, bloody, his pads had no skin. If only his feet matched his pluck! I had raised him from a shivering, terrified-by-a-two-hundred-mile-train-ride pup, a dog whose blood was as blue as it was expensive. Stubborn as witchgrass, he served the longest apprenticeship in my hunting history. Now, at seven, he had blossomed into a better than average cat hound—except for those tender feet. I wondered if being a blueblood had anything to do with it. Who ever heard of a mongrel with delicate feet?
As a bounty hunter, I couldn’t afford to take a week off because my partner’s pads hurt; I needed another dog. The slow search for a young hound that suited me must begin. If I bought a six-months-old, registered dog, chances are he would arrive with a good nose, strong legs, and a bay my neighbors would soon complain about. But papers wouldn’t guarantee brains and common sense. A brainy dog is like a brainy man: how much he’s got isn’t as important as knowing how to use what he has. My memory backtracked over the forty odd hounds I had owned. Most of them weren’t worth remembering. I let them disappear behind the first rise of forgetfulness, but one dog stopped to stand in the middle of my mind’s eye.
Rangy, cinnamon brown, and barrel-chested, with paws like a young lion’s, Tim had cost me fifteen dollars. Hound-dog men eat macaroni and beans for weeks in order to pay ten times that for a top hound with a fancy name and a family tree that might put the royal Stuarts to shame. Where this yellow-eyed, wrinkle-faced, redbone orphan originally came from remains a mystery, even though I spent as many hours as dollars trying to unravel it.
We were two of a kind, for Tim disliked hunting with other hounds as much as I disliked hunting with other men. A pack hunter must have a pack personality. My grain runs the other way. I taught each of my hounds to hunt one specific animal. This private tutoring was wasted on some of the students. They never graduated anyway. But Tim was a Rhodes scholar. He remained a dedicated maverick throughout his life.
Year
after year, we matched characters and dovetailed personalities while hunting together from the first of October until the first of March. He resented being left behind during November, while I ran a trapline, as well as during the December deer hunting season. Each evening, when I went out to his kennel to feed him, his tail would wag, but golden eyes reproached me. He thought I was chasing foxes alone.
During our second season as a team, another subject was added to his curriculum. On sunny October mornings, our fox hunts evaporated with the frost, so I taught him to hunt for game birds by scent. He was an apt pupil, but any bird hunters I took out never believed they could shoot their bag limits behind a bawling hound dog until they had seen big Tim in action. He even learned to retrieve partridge, woodcock, and pheasant. He picked up a duck once, to spit it out immediately. Then, coughing and sneezing, he lowered his tainted muzzle to the ground, and pushed it around in the marsh grass as though he were pushing a vacuum cleaner.
Hound dogs are not bred for “soft” mouths. Their silver tongues are all business, and Tim was all hound. Because he wanted the tasty wildfowl for himself, every bird resulted in a mad dash, followed by a tug-of-war. He was just naturally possessive.
In those days, a red fox jacket was to a woman’s ego what a mutation mink is today. Whenever a fur dealer arrived to do business, the fox pelts were brought out of storage and laid on the kitchen floor. There the buyer would examine each one before starting to haggle. Tim had seen neither hair nor hide of his victims since he had shaken their limp, warm bodies. With a “so-that’s-where-you-are” look on his corrugated face, he would jump up from his special spot in the living room and come over to smell each of his dead enemies. When the dealer leaned over to pick one up, Tim would straddle the orange-red pelts and snarl, his yellow eyes glittering. Those foxes were his. He allowed only me to touch his treasures; he did concede they were half mine.