Month: November 2020

Memories 3: The Best Hunting Dog In The World

“Do you think Aika will be able to find my deer?”

We were standing on a cut line in the municipal forest where my uncle leased the hunting rights on some 700 acres. My cousin had shot a small buck that had jumped off the trail into a stand of immature pines. Thick stuff. He’d looked in the first rows of trees, but found no sign. So he backed off and waited for me to show up after the morning sit.

Aika was a German Hunting Terrier, six months old. I had picked her up at a breeder near Hannover, Germany in late winter. The pups were born in a small unheated kennel in the heart of winter. There were six pups. More had been born, but the breeder had killed them, because he “didn’t want to deal with bottle feeding”. She was so small, fitting into a shoe box. Hard to see at the time how she would grow into a fierce little hunter, flushing pheasants from thorny cover that bigger dogs couldn’t (or wouldn’t) enter, retrieving anything up to the size of a big hare, crazy about working in water, never losing the drive to hunt during long, taxing days in the field. But that was still uncertain future when we were zipping West across the Autobahn, with a furry bundle in my wife’s lap.

Aika and I had barely moved beyond training on continuous-drag scent trails to a trail with discrete drops (more like small gushes) of blood. She’d been doing just fine, but it was all still pretty playful; short trails in easy terrain with no distractions. After all, at six months old, she was still all puppy-brain.

“Do you think Aika will be able to find my deer?” my cousin asked again.

“I don’t know. It may be asking a lot of her, but let’s try.”

We drove back to the cabin to pick up the little munchkin. About 90 min later I rolled out the long line, trying to relax and send calming vibes to the bouncing pup at my feet. As we walked up to the first blood, beyond where the yearling buck had been standing, the change in the dog was striking. She went from playful to business in a heartbeat. During practice sessions on a fake trail she usually was borderline disinterested, but now it was all concentration.

With a final confirmation from my cousin about the direction the buck had disappeared we entered the thicket. About 30 feet in, the little dog sniffed up a clot of blood. Perhaps 100 feet beyond that, she found a patch of bloody hair, rubbed onto a tree. This was actually working! Five minutes later I was not so sure. Aika lost intensity and started meandering. We were off the trail.

I took her back to the beginning for another try. She pointed out the same blood, and the same hair, but again lost interest a little later. It was just too much to ask for such a young and relatively untrained dog. We started to circle back to the cutline, when Aika took a sharp left and pulled hard. I almost told her to stop playing around, but something told me to give her a little more time and trust. Moments later we were standing next to the dead buck.

Opportunities to work on lost or wounded deer don’t come very often. Aika’s star really shone brightly when hunting small game. I fondly remember so many great retrieves of pheasants, ducks and hares, that I gladly forgive her for the time she made me swim out into a beaver pond. She had not found the duck but instead had grabbed onto a branch, and was determined to retrieve it, even though it was attached to the beaver’s lodge. Her tiny brain had momentarily locked up, and I was afraid she’d drown before letting go. I swam out, and she cheerfully greeted me, happy for the support. With mixed emotions I pushed her into the direction of the duck that floated a ways beyond the lodge. We swam the loop around the pond, she picked up the duck and after some drying off we continued to hunt.

Unfortunately Aika died too soon at the age of nine. Kidney failure. I still miss her.

F.

Memories 2: Making Fire

My office wall has photos of over three decades of hunting, though the memories go back much further. In this series of posts I'm recounting some of the stories that go with them.


I acquired a PhD in Chemistry, so I am pretty much an authority on the subject matter. In order to make a fire you need three components: a combustible material, oxygen, and some way to overcome the threshold of energy required to let the two react; AKA a lighter, or a flint and steel, or a stick that you rub between your hands vigorously, or a lightning strike. For most people a lighter will do.

Oxygen is available, in varying quantities, depending on altitude, all across the globe. Combustible material, on a morning of hunting in a forest setting in an Eastern European country, two decades and a half ago, can also be called ubiquitous. That leaves component #3. Right? You had one job…

We headed out early that morning, sights set on pushing a few sections of forest. Not a big affair. Just my uncle, cousin, and myself carrying the rifles, my dad as independent observer, the local forest warden and his little Dachshund, and one of his friends with another dog whose progeny was hard to guess. We were hoping for wild boar, but expecting to settle for a roe deer. I think we got skunked.

But no room for despair or disappointment, because we were about to enjoy a good fire, and even better fresh-roasted sausages-on-a-stick, washed down with some questionable vodka. Con gusto we attended to the task of collecting one of the three prerequisites that would keep us from having to eat the sausages raw: fire wood. We were counting on the fact that oxygen would be available. OK, light it up!

Despite the language barrier it became clear fairly quickly that we had failed to provide for the third component of a good fire: the lighter. I gave up smoking when I turned twenty-one. My dad gave up smoking long before that, when he found out his father had lung cancer. My cousin only smoked a cigar or two at parties, and I’m not sure if my uncle ever smoked. And by some stroke of coincidence we were accompanied by the only two non-smoking males East of Berlin. Our situation was dire.

But wait! We came here by automotive vehicle. A vehicle contains fuel. That fuel is ignited by a spark. All we needed to do was to somehow combine spark and fuel, outside of the vehicle’s engine, and create a flame that was transportable to the wood pile, without blowing ourselves up. Hunger sparks ingenuity! Old newspaper was crumbled into a ball, doused in gasoline which was sucked from the tank through a rubber tube (standard emergency gear in Eastern European vehicles?), and the battery terminals disconnected, while those with more good sense than a sense of adventure (me) were busy sharpening sticks on which to impale the sausages, a fair distance away from the possible source of third degree burns.

It all worked beautifully! In no time we had the fire roaring, and the big sausages sizzling. We each had two. Fine sausages too, if I may be the judge, leaving us wanting nothing more. We then drove home where we drew the ire of the forester’s wife, who had prepared a big lunch meal for us. We tried our best. I don’t recall if there was any napping in the tree stand that afternoon, but there may have been.

F.