Digging on the Dogs

Austin clears dirt banged out with the bar.


My son decided to go digging with me, which has never happened before. I respect that hunting is not everyone's cup of tea and I do not push it. It is what I do; I do not expect everyone else in the world to salute it.

We went out to a small farm I thought we might have a reasonable chance of finding something on. The weather report said it would get into the high 40s in the afternoon, but it was 24 degrees when we got out of the car, and the fields were coated with a slick coat of ice.

Mountain and Pearl had a hard time keeping traction, and we were not much better, but no one fell down, and we walked a short ways up the farm before Mountain disappeared into a small hedge. She did not come out, and so Austin and I walked over, and sure enough Mountain was underground. She came out after a bit, tried another hole, and Pearl started walking around on her toes as well; something was clearly to ground.

We downed tools. It seemed a simple dirt sette. No problem.

Well, no problem until we tried to dig! The ground was frozen as hard as iron. And I mean really frozen. Normally, even on a really cold day, I only have to chip four or five inches of icy dirt off the top before I get diggable soil underneath. Not this time. This ground had been saturated with water when it froze up, and it was solid as rock more than 12 inches deep. The digging bar bounced off the ground after cutting a chip smaller than a dime, while the shovel could not get in at all. It was going to be a slow dig.

Austin and I banged on the ground, first with a digging bar, and then with a posthole digger, and after about 45 minutes we popped a small bore hole into the den pipe which, while not enough to work with, would make sure the dog had air while we sussed out the exact location of the critter.





Mountain was tied up, and Pearl was baying inside. Whatever it was she had underground, she seemed to have pushed it to a stop end, as there was no movement. Whatever it was, it was not going anywhere.

Pearl was only a little up from the bore hole - we could very occasionally see the tip of her tail. All good.

Rather than expand the hole we had just bored, I decided to drop another hole right on top of where I thought the critter was. Of course, doing that took a little longer than I imagined. We tried to make this hole a little bigger around, but that took more time as the matrix of ice dirt and clay was as tough as it gets. By the time that second hole was finished (a still not very big hole to tell the truth), I was stripped down to two T-shirts, and Pearl had been underground for almost two hours.

As we popped through the hole and cleared the dirt, Pearl decided to exit and we grabbed her up and slipped Mountain off her leash. Mountain, dived straight down the bore hole, took an impossible hard turn by arching her back, and grabbed hold. Unbelievably, she started to back out of the pipe the same way she came in, with her feet straight up in the air. She was, quite literally, standing on her head while she pulled the critter with her mouth. I have no idea how she did it, but it was pretty clear to me that she was not going to get beyond a certain point without assistance, so I grabbed her by the tail and slowly pulled. Out she came up the piple, with a large possum in her teeth. A quick dispatch, and it was all over. This farm's resident fox would eat well tonight! All things are recycled, and on my farms the fox eat well.



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