Hunting Wide

Saturday morning started out with the kind of fog they write about in Sherlock Holmes novels, which I suppose, is just a small reflection of how warm it has been. Before the day was out, it would almost hit 60 degrees -- far too warm to find fox to ground.

Since the area I had scoped out by aerial map had a lot of trees on the edges of larger fields, I did not expect to find too many raccoon to ground, and it was unlikely we would find a groundhog out and about despite the warm weather -- their cycles are driven by daylight more than temperature. Bottom line: If we were going to find anything on this new land in this part of the season and on this warm a day, it was most likely going to be possum. The fox would come later.

By the time Chris arrived, I had taped up both collars and gotten the tools out, and switched from David Crosby to Tanya Tucker. Pearl had just finished her first heat cycle, so she was ready to be out.

My goal today was to scout some new fields along the Monocacy River. Chris and I followed the river bank, and found plenty of holes, but no one home. This was going to be fertile ground in the Spring, however.

A very long island was just off shore from the river bank, and at the very end of it were a couple of duck hunters in a blind working a mechanical robo-decoy. I am not much for these contraptions -- it's just a hop and a jump to mechancial callers, and it seems too much like cheating to me. There's nothing wrong with hunting and coming up with a blank day once in a while. There is a place where technology should end, and it's a bit short of mechanical decoys with flapping wings if you ask me.

We passed the long-gone remains of a gutted deer hanging from a tree. It was perhaps several weeks old, and it did not look like much was taken other than the head and the back loins. The carcass would provide food for fox, but it looked like quite a bit of meat had been left in the forest.

A short distance from the deer, and on the slope up from the river to the fields, I realized Mountain was not with us. We stopped and waited, but she did not emerge, and I was pretty sure she had found. Chris moved down the slope, and I moved up towards the fields. where I found her just outside a beautiful sette. She had gone to ground and extracted, and killed on her own, a mid-sized possum. It was a bit anti-climactic, as Mountain had not bayed, and there was no dig.

Mountain has always had a problem with self-hunting and staying close. I think when Sailor was alive she ventured farther out than Sailor did just so should could find something in the ground for herself. Unfortunately, that practice has not ended with Sailor's passing. I guess finding quarry is the ultimate reward for the bad behavior, and that makes it particularly difficult to end.

I would not care except that it wastes time, the noise of calling for her scares quarry away, and it is very dangerous should Mountain find a skunk in the ground without me knowing exactly where she was. That said, it was a beautiful sette, and it looked like the kind of thing a fox or raccoon would use when the weather turned colder. I put this one in my memory book.

We headed up the slope into the fields, and I was thrilled to find a beautiful rolling field with a short grass winter cover, and a long hedgerow at the top, followed by an even larger field, also in a short grass winter cover, and another nice hedgerow beyond that, and another beyond that. Excellent. When it gets colder, I am sure we will find fox here.

As we walked up the fields, we found groundhog hole after groundhog hole. Some of the larger settes had eroded into large funnels at the entrance. This was clearly good friable dirt. I was pretty sure these fields had been in soybeans or alfalfa for at least two or three years -- you generally don't get this kind of groundhog density without those cover crops.

We walked up the fields a pretty long way, coming to a section parallel to an area we had hunted in the past. The new fields were separated from the other area we had hunted by an upland area of forest a few hundred yards wide. That may not sound like much distance, but in this part of Maryland the soil can change dramatically from one area to another over a couple of hundred yards. That upland piece of forest land was not an accident -- it was the remains of a rock and shale uplift, and it had existed here since the time of dinosaurs. The bend in the river had existed here just as long, and my theory -- based solely at looking at the maps -- was that the soil on the other side of that uplift and closer to the river would be deeper and richer due to river deposits and down wash. It looked like I was right.

Despite all the dens, the dogs failed to locate. Groundhogs move out of their field settes in the winter to seek harbor inside the tree line; very few winter over in field settes. We headed back down the fields along the edge of the trees. A deer hunter fired very close to us when we were inside the tree line, and I was reminded, once again, that hunting on Sunday is always the best plan, especially in deer season.

We headed back down the edge of the river, and then up again into the end of a large field. We had worked the other end of this field before, and as we approached that end, Mountain suddenly began baying furiously as if he had caught something above ground. Game on! I ran down the field with pack, shovel, bar and posthole digger, but was brought up short by a downed tree in the hedge. By the time I had gotten through that, the dogs were quiet. I called for Chris and found him on the other side of the hedge, looking a bit perplexed. What happened? Apparently Mountain had caught a very large deer sleeping or resting in the hedge, and the deer had as hard a time getting through that downed tree as I did. Mountain and Moxie had been right on the deer, and had chased it out of the hedge. The two dogs and the deer had bolted in directions unknown.

Chris and I whistled, and we took turns walking a large circle. It was about an hour before I found the dogs on a farm path not very far from where we had lost them. Mountain was unscarthed, but Moxie had a line shaved into her fur where a deer hoof had grazed her. The skin was not broken, but a thin line of fur was gone, as neatly trimmed as if it had been done with a Wahl shear. That was close.

All's well that ends well, but it's clear to me that I am going to have to do something about Mountain's self-hunting. I have never had a dog riot on deer before, and I have never had a dog hunt as wide as Mountain does. Time to end it.

That night, I ordered an electronic collar from Innotek to help me break Mountain of bad habits and to help train in new ones. The problem is that Mountain is smart, and she knows that off the leash there is no "correction." It does not help, of course, that she also gets a maximum reward for hunting wide -- she finds quarry more often than most. At this point, my natural aversion to electronic collars has to take a back seat to safety. The collar is cheap compared to the price of a new dog -- or losing an old one. One thing I am sure -- it will not take Mountain long to figure out that she can no longer hunt wide.