by John Kulish
After Tim died, several hounds came into my home, but none came into my heart. If a hound man owns one exceptional dog during his lifetime, how can he ask for another? I had had mine.
The telephone rang my mind back into the warm kitchen. It was a local conservation officer.
“John, do you want a young hound dog? There’s one for the taking up on Black Mountain. An old fella’ who trains bird dogs for a living moved into the abandoned Baker place last fall. I met him on the road today and he asked if I knew anyone who would take a hound dog off his hands. It seems a nineteen-year-old boy he knows up in Claremont just got drafted. The kid brought the hound with him from Kentucky, somewhere up in the mountains. He thought too much of his dog to have it destroyed. Three weeks ago, he gave it to old Corson. You’d better get right up there if you want him. He can’t keep that hound with his bird dogs much longer, and he doesn’t want to shoot him unless he has to.”
I still don’t understand the sense of urgency that compelled me. I usually take plenty of time to make a decision, especially about a hound, despite which I hastily laced up my worn boots.
“Well, Skivvie,” I said, “looks like you’re going to have a buddy. Don’t know for how long. I don’t even know whether this hound comes from hunting stock.”
My truck was left where a snow plow had given up in despair. A five-mile snowshoe hike into a stinging storm ended at an old homestead half-buried in snow. Several feet away from the sagging house, on a low knoll, a ramshackle barn rattled its skeleton in the wind.
Lean, wiry, and walking lightly on his toes, Mr. Corson looked like a middle-aged bird dog himself. I liked him at once. While putting on his boots, he wryly admitted that a lifetime in Arkansas had prepared neither him nor his wife, a full-blooded Sioux Indian, for the rigors of a New England winter, in a fully ventilated farmhouse, on the north side of a mountain. We wallowed through the drifts to the barn. Five healthy pointers were chained to separate posts. Off to one side stood a tall, full-chested, black hound with a penguinlike waistcoat and white spats on each paw. His muzzle was October oak-leaf brown, as were the quarter-sized spots over each eye. His glossy fur seemed as dense as an otter’s. He looked like a hound. Hope and misgiving clashed head on. His not having “papers” didn’t matter, but was he a hunter? Had he sprung from hunting stock? Should I take a chance? Well, I never knew where Tim had come from either.
The dog was handsome, no doubt of that, but what struck me was his dignity. Only ten months old, he stood quietly, his head high, his tail up, not wagging wildly as one would expect in so young a dog. Appraising brown eyes searched appraising blue ones. A dog carries its character, as well as its heart, in its eyes. The dark eyes, looking steadfastly into mine, were calm, honest, and bright with intelligence. But it was something else that glimmered in their depths that put a finger on my heart. I grinned. He wagged his tail. I leaned down to pick up an oversize paw. Exploring fingers ran over the coarse pads. They seemed as rugged as they were big.
“Well, he’s all yours,” affirmed Mr. Corson, as he unchained the dog. “His name is Black. I don’t know what kind of a hound he’ll make. I let him loose a coup’la times and he chased a neighbor’s cat. If he’s no good, you can shoot him.” He did not speak callously, only matter-of-factly. “Come into the house. I’d like your name and address, and I can’t read nor write. My wife does it for me.” Neither apology nor embarrassment toned his voice. “Besides,” he continued, writing his autobiography with a single sentence, “I’d like to give Black a bite to eat before he goes.”
Warming my hands around a near-boiling cup of coffee, I pondered the trek back to my truck. Five drifted miles separated us. Here was a trail hound who had never seen me before. Suppose he took off after the first track we came across. What would I do then? It was late afternoon and I’d rather spend the night in bed than in a snowdrift. I turned to my host.
“Just in case Black doesn’t want to stay with me, I think I’d be better off with a leash. Do you have an old piece of rope I could use?”
He didn’t answer me right away. He looked from me to the dog and back again. He smiled. “That won’t be necessary,” he predicted. “He’ll go with you. You won’t have any trouble.”
I didn’t really believe him, but since he insisted, I spoke to the dog, “Okay, Black Guy, let’s go home!”
The hound followed me out the door. He wanted to come with me. It was almost as though he had been waiting for me. He did not touch me. He did not speak. But, while we tramped back to the civilization of plowed roads, he somehow seemed to become my dog. When we reached the vehicle, I opened a door, and he jumped in. Most dogs jump onto a car seat, but when I told Black to sit on the floor, he obeyed. During the ride home, he did not take his eyes off me. I had never met a dog like this one. I recalled Mr. Corson’s discerning smile. As a dog man, he must have sensed that something special had happened that day in the old barn.
A hound dog needs a short, mouth-filling name. Because bounty hunting can often be dangerous, there is seldom time to shout but one terse command. Besides, you won’t get hoarse as quickly while hollering for an obstinate, “1-know-more-than-you-do” partner. Training Skivvie had taught me that. The new arrival’s name filled the vocal bill, but a man needs to name his own dog. This time it seemed especially important. Ben, Tom, Reb, Pete, every name I’d ever heard, rolled over my tongue, only to be spit out. A week passed.
“Well, Black Guy,” I puzzled, “I guess the jig is up. Looks like you’re going to stay Black. I can’t think of a name to save my soul.” Suddenly, I laughed aloud. That was it. I’d call him Jiggs. I expected him to be confused, but after a first quizzical look, he wagged his tail and galloped over to bump against me.
The family adjusted quickly to its newest member, even the hard-headed Skivvie. After the usual stiff-legged, hackles-up examination that is part of being a male, Jiggs accepted the older dog’s seniority without question. As a traditional southerner, Jiggs had perfect manners. Friendly, but never fawning, he demanded instant respect, with affection naturally following soon after. My daughters had been taught that dogs, like people, are individuals whose dignity must be respected. Because, as children, the girls were about the same age as he was as a dog, the three had much in common. Within days, they became fast friends; but affectionate as he was with them, he made it clear from the beginning that he was my dog.
He wore a new, handmade leather collar with an oversize brass nameplate riveted onto it, upon which his master’s name, address, and telephone number were etched. Big, bold letters are essential. Tags on dog collars are worthless; lost hunting dogs invariably come into the last farm on a dead-end road, and farmer’s glasses are often spattered with either milk or manure.
Before letting Jiggs begin his apprenticeship with Skivvie, I decided to see what “junior” had to offer at the ten-months level. At daybreak, we were up and headed for a chopping on the west face of Willard Mountain. As we began to follow an old, snowed-in tote road, he discovered how touchy I am about sharing my snowshoes. Rarely out of my sight, he cast continuously around me. Suddenly he stopped, faced downhill, and lifted his muzzle into the air. A light west wind had blown the odor of something delightful up the mountain, and he started to cast in the direction his nose took him. Because of his complete innocence, I watched with amused anticipation until he disappeared into a heavy stand of young conifers. The attraction was obvious: several deer always yarded up on this side of the mountain. I waited a few minutes, then resumed my climb. The road corkscrewed around a big chopping before reaching a plateau. There I stopped to wait, uneasy because a half-hour was too long for an apprentice to go unprompted, and because a deer yard was not the place for him to learn how to ad-lib. Then, from my seat in the balcony, I watched the drama unfold.
Out of the heavy spruces, back into the tote road, dashed Jiggs. He looked up, then down. Where had his meal ticket gone? Long ears flying, he sprinted back and forth at breakneck speed. Because he
could not see his master in the flesh, he panicked. Too young to consult his nose, he ran pell-mell, this way and that, hoping to bump into him. After ten minutes of complete confusion, with me grinning up in my box seat, he stopped, moved back down to the road. For the first time he put down his nose. He flew up my snowshoe tracks like a startled grouse, but when the road turned, he did not. Again he went berserk while searching for my body instead of my scent. He sprinted back into the open, found my smell, and dashed up the trail. He made the same mistake on the next bend, came back out almost at once, searched out my smell for the third and last time, and galloped up the last few hundred yards as though on the home stretch in the Belmont Stakes. When he saw me standing by a pine tree, waiting, he bounded over, wagging his tail delightedly. He had just discovered a new world, a world waiting to be explored with his nose as the compass, his brain, the rudder. It was also a day of discovery for me. From the first moment, my voice was his leash; so from now on, he ran free. No other dog ever earned this privilege.
A few days later, he learned his second lesson on the slopes of Bald Mountain. Although the track we found smelled of cat, a great deal could not be expected. Jiggs was too young, but what he lacked in years, he made up in enthusiasm. He wanted to try. Excitement charged my command of “Get him!” He bolted. Within moments, he began to bay and disappeared over the mountain. “Too good, too fast,” I said to myself as I clambered up to check. To my dismay, he had followed Big Kitty’s trail into a deer yard, jumped the tenants, and because a half-dozen deer use more perfume than a lone cat, the choice had been easy. Fortunately, the deep snow became my ally, for the deer made a loop, then headed back for their yard. A dead sapling was hastily broken off. I reached the yard just in time to have seven deer almost trample me. A minute behind bawled my junior partner. A flying tackle and a mountain-shaking oath were followed by the only thrashing I ever gave him. One of the most important lessons any hound dog must be taught is that, for him, deer are forever sacred cows. Jiggs cowered at my feet and took his beating. He did not try to run away. When I finished, he was a subdued dog.
“Okay, young fella’,” I encouraged. “Let’s go home. You’ve learned enough for one day.”
Lesson number three put theory into practice. We had been hunting for several hours, a tractable Jiggs using his nose continuously as he cast about. Across a hardwood clearing I noticed tracks. We were walking through a deer’s front parlor. I broke off a switch, waited until my pupil got in ahead of me, then continued behind him. He pushed his muzzle into the old deer track. Down came the switch. He yelped, jumped behind me, and looked up as I admonished sternly, “Not supposed to, Bad Guy.” Looking to neither right nor left, he followed me across the deer’s trail. A half-hour later, fresh tracks, reeking with scent, tested him. Ahead of me, Jiggs suddenly dropped his tail, slipped behind me, and remained there until we were well beyond the forbidden fruit. This is all it took to teach him deer were off limits. During the ensuing nine years, many, many times he cold-trailed cats through the middle of a yard harboring more than a dozen milling deer. They might just as well have been a neighbor’s cows.
The first time the two dogs hunted together, Skivvie proved he was as proud as I already knew he was stubborn. Pressed by a merciless subordinate, he gave the quarry as little quarter as Jiggs was giving him. Within an hour, the blast of my shotgun ended the chain reaction. A week later, the same stubborn pride resulted in tragedy.
Both dogs had bulldog tenacity, but where Jiggs persevered, Skivvie persisted. He had pride. Jiggs had self-respect. The inevitable contest lasted five days and four nights while they hunted within a thirty-five-square-mile triangle. On the first day, when they had not returned to the truck by dusk, I was worried. To keep them away from the highway, I put down a blanket smelling of me and of home. They never used it. On the second day, an ice storm armor plated the area. For three days, I rode every boundary, asked every farmer, hiked every tote road, and hollered from every mountaintop. On the fourth day, an old-timer, who lived in the isolated area, raised my flagging hopes.
“Come to think of it, John, two days ago a coupla’ fella’s from the village were hunting porcupines six, seven miles down the pond. Said they heard two dogs drivin’. Figured sure they were chasin’ deer, so they went in to look around. The hounds were runnin’ a bobcat.”
I hiked down along the lake. The three-day-old tracks were theirs. The smaller ones showed red. Much of myself had gone into training Skivvie. As for Jiggs, quite by accident, I had acquired a once-in-a-lifetime dog. Now I had lost him—maybe for good.
Around noon on the fifth day, the phone rang. A voice twanged, “Mr. Kulish? Say, I got your dog here. No, just one. He’s black. I drive school bus up here. This morning, when I stopped to pick up the kids on Route 9, a big, black hound trotted out from the shed and got on the bus with the kids. He jumped right up on the seat and sat down as friendly as you please. The kids wanted to take him to school, but I brung him home and fed him. He sure was hungry.” He paused, “Say, you wouldn’t want to sell him, would’ja?”
When Jiggs saw me, he stood up. Tall, skinny, tired, he wagged his tail and bumped his muzzle against my leg. He never did get giddy about anything.
The next month was torture. No one had seen Skivvie. I scoured the area, but he had left no traces. He must have followed a cat into a ledge and not been able to get back out. I blamed myself. I should have realized that, when challenged, Skivvie’s tough heart would outrun his tender feet. I slept badly. I ate little. The veterinarian told me it might take a dog thirty days to die of starvation.
9. He Earns His Ph.D.
By the time he was three years old, Jiggs had several encounters in combat severe enough to take him to a veterinary. Young Dr. Donovan, who had recently moved into town, tended all his wounds. My partner always knew when he was going to the “vet’s.” “Well, Kitty Guy,” I’d drawl, dragging out each syllable in the special Black-and-Tan dialect I used when talking to him, “it looks like you are going to see Dr. Donovan again.”
Several skirmishes with wounded bobcats had ended on the doctor’s operating table. One time an ear, punctured and torn by a dying cat, had to be stitched. Another time, after a cat had ripped off a big chunk from the other ear, Jiggs had to spend seven days in the hospital under sedation. Once a day, he was roused only enough to eat. Jiggs hated going there. Separated from me, confined in a cage, and surrounded by cat smell, he was miserable. But he never rebelled, and the “vet” said he was the easiest dog he’d ever attended. Each time he had received a Purple Heart, it had been preceded by a trip to Dr. Donovan’s.
Sooner or later, all hounds, especially those trained to hunt cats, have a face-to-face encounter with “Prickly Porky.” Jiggs was three years old before his first joust with Sir Porcupine. They crossed swords on Round Mountain, six snowshoe miles through cat country from a plowed road.
Just before noon, Jiggs entered a blowdown above the glacial rocks buttressing the base of the mountain. A hundred yards behind, I struggled up, over, and under the tangle of dead trees. I had stopped for a breather, when a growl, followed by grunts, snarls, and thrashing noises startled me. What had my partner encountered? I clambered up to reach him. Pieces of porcupine, quills, and blood were strewn over the snow. His head down, Jiggs swiped desperately at what looked like ten thousand Tom Thumb spears that had penetrated his muzzle, jaws, and neck.
I grabbed the writhing dog by the collar and forced up his head to look him full in the face. My heart tightened. Pain-filled eyes pleaded from a grisly pin cushion. As porcupines grow older, their quills grow longer, and Jiggs had not assaulted a baby. These spines were four inches long. Junior packs a .22; Grandpa carries a broadside of 30-30’s; Kitty Guy had the full charge at point-blank range.
He hurt so I could hardly bear to look at him. Even his paws looked like chestnut burs. For a terrible moment I raised my shotgun, but could not pull the trigger. Could I get him to Dr. Donovan before it was too late? I
n his anguish, Jiggs paid no attention to my commands; so I snapped a leash onto him. He still wouldn’t budge, but lay on the snow and clawed at his grotesque head. He moved only when the collar pulled so tight that it was either walk or choke. Spurred by fear, I tugged, dragged, pushed, lifted, and carried him the longest six miles of my life. When we finally reached the road, the truck was barely discernible in the gloom. The twenty-five miles to Dr. Donovan’s seemed like a hundred.
It was long after hours, but since the doctor’s office was attached to his home, he told me to carry the dog into the operating room. The shocked look on the veterinarian’s face undermined what little hope I had. He said he’d do all he could. I held Jiggs in my arms while anesthetic was injected, then gently lowered him onto the table. The doctor opened wide the flaccid mouth. The tongue was nailed to the floor and roof of his mouth by countless quills, some of them broken off. They pierced his jowls and nostrils. Battalions of them marched out of sight down his gullet. The doctor called his wife in to help, then promised to call me as soon as he could.
Hours later, the telephone rang.
“John, Jiggs is alive, although I don’t know why. It took the two of us three hours to pull out the quills. There must have been more than a thousand. I’ll never understand why he wasn’t blinded.” Then, with a smile in his voice, he added, “You can come get him in the morning.”
Each day, as Kitty Guy’s mouth and tongue began to heal, my searching hand would pass over the swollen muzzle, feeling for any broken quills that might have worked their way to the surface. When three days had passed without the emergence of a quill, my breathing became easier. Each morning, when I started to lace my boots, Jiggs would bang his tail on the floor, telling me he was ready to go back to work.