Some Digs are Easy ... and Some Aren't

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Went out for a few hours on Sunday.



Mountain found a small groundhog is a forest sette.  That dig went fairly uneventfully, though it was in a kind of "secret garden" in the middle of a couple of downed trees that had vines covering them. The photo above looks like it was shot at night as a consequence, but it was taken about 1 pm (I went out late due to the very hard rain that we had the night before).



At the next farm, Mountain found again, this time on a ridge above a pasture. High-tension wires were about 150 yards off, and the Deben box would not work (it would work 20 feet away, but we were right on the edge of the radio corona from the lines).



I listened to the dog and managed to find the pipe with the first hole I dug, but I also discovered that the ridge was almost solid rock -- it took me more than an hour to drop a hole 2 feet. I tried to guess the location of the pipe for the second hole, but after another hour of digging through even harder rock,  it appeared I had missed.



I decided to pack it up for the day after both dogs took some injuries from this fortified groundhog in his rock-solid one-eyed sette. Score one for that groundhog! We won't be back next weekend -- the dogs need to knit up, especially Mountain who took a rip near his eye and wore away small patches behind each ear from banging on the rock ceiling of the pipe. 



The picture below  is of stone klitter kicked out of another hole we passed by on an earlier ridge.  This stone is white, but the stuff we were cutting into one ridge over was dark blue or even black, and much harder.



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