Another Sunday in the field with the dogs, this time with a very high hole-to-quarry ratio (i.e. a lot of holes and not too much quarry at home). Shannon, Blair and Elizabeth and I hit half a dozen holes in a hedge and then another dozen across a field, and another dozen and a half across another hedge and small woods near a creek. Nothing home. Lore finally found in a small sette on a slope above the creek. The two small dogs could barely get into the pipe, and when we dug down to them it turned out that the groundhog had collapsed the pipe behind it. The entire sette was in loose powder, as fine as talc, which was held up by broken slates arrayed like a house of cards. It did not take much to collapse the tunnel, and after a while it became clear this groundhog was doing that all the way down the pipe. Smart hog! We gave this one best and looked for a better situation.
The dogs found again in a field sette on top, and Sailor bayed it up and moved it around. I dropped a hole down to it and tailed it halfway out, but we decided to let it stay in the stop-end so the dogs could school on it. Lore and Roxy bayed it up and it eventually bolted it out a side pipe. The dogs followed it back into the earth and bottled it up again in a stope-end. I tailed it out of this second hole and dispatched it -- a condition of hunting this farm.
We moved on to the next farm, but not before meeting the new farm manager at Nick's who advised me that a number of groundhogs had moved into holes up near the buildings. We'll hit them next time. There are some raccoons in there too according to Sean, the previous farm manager.
At the next farm we walked down the the high ridge above the flood plain, and Sailor found again on a slope covered with grape vines as thick as my wrist, and under a large black walnut tree. Shannon and I boxed her at 10 feet -- too deep to dig in this tangle of roots, rock and vine. We listened to her bay for about 15 minutes and then moved down the slope looking for new holes. Sailor eventually caught up with us and the dogs found again low on the slope. This hole did not appear to be very long or deep from the sound of the dogs baying, but it was under a solid wall of massive black walnut roots. It would take a chainsaw to get to the dog and it was a very tight hole. I scraped the pipe out a bit, but there was no digging this one. We checked about two dozen more holes down the bank, but they were all empty.
Roxy bays down the pipe
We headed back to the vehicle, but when we got there we noticed that two of the dogs had gotten sidetracked in the field. Looking back, we could see Mountain and Roxy nosing around a sette we had missed. We walked back to the sette, and Mountain slid in and began to bay. This sette was underneath massive powerlines that were sizzling hot, however, and the Deben box would not work. Mountain would not come out, however, so we left her in the ground and walked back to the vehicles about 150 yards away. Mountain came out of the sette eventually, but she would not abandon it -- she just looked back at us as if to say "Come on, fools, it's over here!"
I went back to the sette and found no other bolt holes. A quick probe with the bar suggested the pipe was dead straight for at least 5 feet. We decided to dig without the benefit of a box reading. After three 4-foot holes in very hard and dry earth, we accounted for a nice and very agressive groundhog with a 15 inch chest and a scale weight of 11 pounds. All the dogs schooled on this one a bit, but Mountain punked out after getting a long thin rip to her lower muzzle.
The farmer drove up at the end of the dig, and I talked a bit with him about cows and fertilizer and hay -- a really nice fellow with one of the most beautiful farms in Maryland. We filled in the holes well, as these were in the middle of a field where the cows should be grazing soon.
As we packed up the dogs and tools at the end of the day, a flock of wild turkeys sauntered past to go down to the oak trees down by the river. These are truly magnificent birds. Seeing wild turkeys always gets me happy and excited, as they are a living monument to the success of the hook-and-bullet conservation movement.
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Shannon and Lore with the last one of the day
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