Round Up by Angela Sullivan

Round Up by Angela Sullivan

Again one larger than I usually paint

16x20 oil on gallery wrapped canvas

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Dirty Dogs are Happy Dogs

You can tell this is Mountain from the black spot on her tail.




Just the tip of her nose here. She's exiting dark ugly stuff along a railroad embankment. To come out head first, you first have to turn around underground. Not always easy!




Mountain exits another pipe sideways.




Happy dogs play dirty!

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Gideon Takes a Short Outing to a Farm

I took Mountain and Gideon to a small farm to see how Gideon would do off-lead, and if he'd be interested in exploring a few settes.

It was a drizzly day, but only projected to hit 88 degreess which counts for cool after the suffocating heat of the last two months.

Gideon was terrific off leash -- he stayed with me and was interested in what Mountain was up to, but not to the extent that he forgot I was his first charge. Perfect.

We busted a Great Blue Heron and a Great Egret in the creek bed; I always enjoy seeing these large birds take flight.

We hit a lot of holes, but Mountain never opened up except for one sette underneath a massive hollow tree (top picture) which cannot be dug and where the groundhog always escapes by climbing up inside the tree. Some places really are fortresses.

All in all a good, if blank, day. We were only out for a couple of hours. Next week, if it's cool, we'll get in some real hunting.


Gideon listens to Mountain inside trunk.


Gideon slides in to check a sette.


Another blank hole. The plastic pipe at left protects a newly planted tree from deer damage.


Gideon checks another sette hoping to find.


Where are the groundhogs?
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Mountain in 2004 ... and 2010

This is Mountain in May of 2004. I think this was the first video I ever shot with a little point-and-shoot camera. Back then (before Youtube) I had no idea what to do with video!

My notes say:

Went out today despite the 35-40 mph winds. Mountain pulled a 10-pound groundhog on her own and bolted another one out of a bank and into a field.

As you can tell from the end of the clip, I'm a bit new to this camera. Oh well.

This sette was in a thorn hedge, and when Mountain got it out of the ground she just kept pulling it back into the hedge -- the groundhog was being ass-pulled at a pretty rapid speed! I finally got through the hedge and dispatched the groundhog before the two of them got into a real brawl topside. This was a very shallow den and the groundhog moved to a pipe exit just as Mountain got there trying to find a new way in. She gripped on and pulled and it popped out about 5 seconds after the video ended. I think she was able to pull this one because the earth was so shallow that the groundhog could not brace itself in very well. The bolt occured in a hedgerow a couple of hundred yards up the way -- I could hear the bolt, but barely see it in the thicket on the bank. I think it popped down another hole, but I was too busted from the wind to pursue it. I'm going to take Mountain out alone for awhile to get her used to hunting without help from Sailor. She needs to learn to trust her nose a little more.

Two chucks worked, no dogs injured, and a serious wind burn for me -- not a bad day.

What I remember most from this day was the wind. It howled!

The same month, six years later, Mountain is still trying to pull one for the camera. I think Pearl was inside, providing the motivation for the bolt.


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A 15-inch Border and an 11-Inch Russell

Two of my dogs, now gone, but not forgotten.

Which one do you think got down the hole with room to spare (and spar)?
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My Teachers: Mountain, Sailor and Trooper

Two true workers.

Mountain and Sailor. Mountain, at left, is 12" tall. Sailor, at right, 11" tall.

You would not think a one inch difference in height (and about the same in chest size) would make a lot of difference in the field, but it does in our very tight earths.

On this day, these two dogs had worked raccoon, groundhog and possum. Once washed off, they were as good as new.

Sailor taught me most of what I know. She will never be forgotten.

Below is a picture, taken from above, of Trooper my 15" tall Border Terrier who recently went to the Great Kennel in the Sky, and Sailor, my 11" tall Jack Russell who preceeded him by a few years.

Both dogs are dead now, but in this picture they can still do a bit of teaching. Size is fundamental, and with true working terriers bigger is not better.


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Mountain is Famous!

This is sort of cool! I just got an email from someone who says Mountain's picture was lifted and used at "Ihasagotdog.com" which is a LOLCat for dogs (if that makes sense).

And sure enough, that is indeed my dog and my picture! Give the link a click and give Mountain a vote.

And YES, she really is that happy underground.
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Digging on the Dogs

Yesterday was a nice day in the field with perfect weather, and three kinds of quarry dug to -- raccoon, groundhog and possum.



Mountain located a raccoon in a dirt den underneath a massive brush pile. I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say I managed to burrow down into the brush pile and sink a bore hole between mountain and the raccoon. I then twisted the post hole diggers so they blocked Mountain from reaching the raccoon, and she got the idea and finally came out. Good thing too, as there was no digging her out, and she was not coming off that raccoon any other way!

I leashed up Mountain and we drove to another farm a short way up the road, where we quickly located a groundhog and dispatched it at the farm manager's request.



I estimate I have taken 200 groundhog off of this particular farm, and there are not many left, though the farm manager says he has lost a few turkeys to a coyote, and the farm across the road took an enormous coyote last month -- the largest in the County so far.



The dogs checked a few more holes, and Mountain located a pretty tough-acting possum, which I pulled before Mountain decided to teach it respect. Possums are pretty harmless creatures, and though Dave the farm manager has chickens this fellow was toward the back of the farm, so I released him with nothing more than a stern warning.


This possum was released unharmed.

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Mountain is "Shovel Ready"

Mountain Girl is "shovel ready."

A Jack Russell Terrier is the original "stimulus package."


They start out small, and if you are lucky they stay that way. Mountain Girl as a pup at Larry Morrison's.
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First Fox of 2008

We had a lot of rain in December, and the ground is still pretty water-logged.

Monday was clear, however, and so I went out Tuesday with Mountain and Pearl, hoping to locate something to ground despite weather that is too cold for groundhog, and too warm for fox.

The first farm I hit had some nice creeks but not too many trees. I was hoping to locate a raccoon. We walked a mile or two, and I checked a fox den that has produced for me a couple of times before, but the dogs found nothing but wet ground and some degraded deer tracks.

We packed up and hit the next place, which I expected to be a little dryer due to the lay of the land. The wind had picked up by now, and it was blowing hard.

Our entrance into the first field raised a massive flock of crows, which took to the air in a rather impressive display.

We walked a small distance to a couple of large new fields which had a lot of great old groundhog holes and excellent drainage. This looked like it would be a very productive place for me in the Spring or Summer. I would be back.

I crossed back towards some fields I had worked before. As we crossed through a hedge, Pearl and Mountain came to a fork in the path on the other side and Mountain headed right up the path while Pearl went left. I stayed at the fork, expecting the dogs to come back and all of us to work the hedge line together.

Pearl came back after a few minutes, but Mountain did not. I waited another 10 minutes, and then followed her up into the field. There were a lot of old groundhog holes here, but no Mountain. Pearl and I called and waited. Nothing.

Mountain had clearly found, and so I put down the tools, and proceeded to scout around. About 45 minutes later, I found Mountain. She had been underground, only a few hundred yards from where I downed the tools. Now she was covered in dirt and standing on top of the pipe. As soon as she knew I had seen her, she went back to ground again.

Pearl saw Mountain before I did, and got to the hole quicker too. She slid in, and when I arrived there was a lot of growling from below. It sounded almost like a raccoon, but I knew this was no coon -- not in the middle of a field. This was a fox.

Pearl let out a yelp, and exited with a small puncture and Mountain came out again from another pipe, with a big gash on her muzzle. I grabbed Pearl, the first dog up, and staked her out. By the time I had finished with Pearl, Mountain was back to ground again.

I ran back to get the tools, and boxed Mountain down about five feet, almost dead center between the two holes, and perhaps 5 feet up a side pipe -- or that's how I imagined the layout below ground. This was a plain old groundhog hole -- there was no kickout, as you will generally find in a natal fox den. It was still very early in the season.

After a decent dig, I got down to Mountain and pulled her to check her muzzle. I figured the fox had nowhere to go. I was wrong; the pipe broke into a "Y" right where Mountain had been baying. While I was checking over Mountain, the fox took the opportunity to leave the very short end of the pipe it was cornered in, and ducked up the longer leg of the den pipe. Such is life!

Mountain had an L-shaped gash on top of her muzzle, but it looked like it would glue up well, and she otherwise seemed to be in fine fettle. She certainly did not want to be staked out!

I let Mountain loose one more time to locate the fox in the longer arm of the side pipe. After she was up on the fox again, I boxed her for location. Through a small miracle, I managed to grab Mountain's tail as she backed up a little in the pipe -- excellent. I was not interested in having Mountain get injured any more than she was.

The wind had picked up now, and it was blowing about 35 miles per hour, gusting to 40. I did not notice it while I was digging, but if I stopped I could feel it cut into me. I was only wearing a T-shirt and long-sleeve, but a good hat and a neck cowl saved the day. Wind this strong can suck the juice out of you pretty fast.

I blocked the bolt hole while I dug down to the fox, who remained unseen. I eventually got down to it at about four feet, and cut away the edge of the pipe enough to take a few pictures. After that, I filled in all the holes except for the one exit hole for the fox, put both dogs on lead, and pulled off to allow the fox to bolt free when it was ready.

This very healthy and feisty fox would have no problem finding a new location to den in; there were more than a dozen good holes within a few hundred yards.

Long may it run. And may we meet again.



Another fox found and left to run off unharmed for another day.
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Stray Pictures From a Very Small Sunday

Pearl found this possum in a hedgerow dump full of old pieces of metal, tires, boards, barbed wire and even an old chicken coop. This was an undiggable sette, with a huge roll of steel fencing pinned to the top of the earth by a tree that was growing through it. No matter; Pearl had fun, and I was happy she found before Mountain did -- a rare win for her.

Mountain found in this sette which was in the middle of an enormous old Sycamore tree -- another undiggable sette. The side of the tree trunk was covered over with huge rounds of wood cut from the top of the tree which had blown over some years earlier.

At the end of this last day of the groundhog season (they are starting to hibernate), two were found, none were dug, and there was no regret. The dogs came away healthy, and we all had a happy day in the field.

Fox season will start in January.

Digging on the Dogs

Char came down from Illinois to attend the JRTCA's 25th Annual Nationals trial, and I took the day off to go digging with her. The weather called for rain, but I told Char the weather reports did not mean too much around here, and that we'd probably get by with an overcast day before a good evening thunderstorm, which is exactly how it went.

We met up at Stups Market, and then headed a few hundred yards up the road to a little farm where I have been digging in recent months. Pearl is still knitting up from a dig two weeks ago, so I left her in the truck (Char bred her, and she's been a great dog for me), and we took Mountain and Char's Rue up a hedgerow to see what we could see.

Within the first five minutes Rue bolted a nice groundhog up a tree, and Char got a picture. Excellent!

We found the next groundhog where I thought we would -- in a trash-strewn hedgerow in the middle of two recently cut-over bean fields. The dogs bolted this one too (a very BIG groundhog!), and it dashed out and slid under a half dozen coils of old rusty barbed wire and into a cascade of steel and iron car parts, rotting fence posts, old tires, and broken bottles.

Mountain located this groundhog again, but after moving a couple of big rusty barbed wire coils, and seeing what was below that, we decided to give this groundhog best and move on. Why put a dog out of action working barbed wire, broken glass and trash when the day was still so young?

We rolled on across the top of the field, and down the middle. I swear, if we had a dollar for every piece of fox and raccoon crap we saw, Char and I both would have had gas money for a week.

The fox and raccoon are definitely marking every scrap of territory on this farm. And who can blame them with such nice fields of soy and corn bordering a narrow meadow with a stream running down the center? The soil here is pretty friable, and the drainage is very good. There are not too many trees, but the ones standing are often huge. This is about as good a farm as I have found for fox and raccoon. And the groundhogs are thick on the ground too.

We headed down to the edge of the soy field after banging around another recently occupied sette that had a slightly skunky smell to it.

Mountain located in another nice big sette along the fence line. She bayed it up and we downed tools, located, and dug to her. To make a long story short, this sette had two nice groundhogs in it, and both were accounted for, one by Rue and the other by Mountain. Rue did an excellent job of holding her hog while we finished up with Mountain's and could devote our full attention to her end of the pipe. Both dogs came away from this dig without so much as a nick for their efforts.

After the dig, I walked down field for a quick bathroom break, when I saw something white ambling my way -- a skunk. "Lace up the dogs Char," I yelled back to her "We have a skunk coming down the fence line. " The skunk hardly seemed to care about me. I ran back for the camera and took a few quick shots, as this skunk was almost completely white on top. A nice little freak of nature -- the kind of thing that awakes the raging 10-year old bug-collector inside of me.

We repaired the den we had dug up, and had just finished gathering up the tools, when Mountain began poking around a sette about 12 feet away. She slipped underground, and from the sound of it she began to dig on a bit.

No worries. We relaxed, waiting for her to find and open up if she did. In the interim, we took a few pictures of the two hogs, gabbed, and rested a bit.

It was then that Char noticed the white skunk coming back down the fence line, and so I grabbed a heavy board-like piece of bark with the idea of either changing the skunk's trajectory or its perspective on life. I was tossing the chunk of wood at the skunk's head (and missing by about three inches), when Char yelled back to me, "SKUNK in the ground with Mountain."

Oh crap!

I jogged back to the hole, and sure enough there was the faint smell of skunk coming out. Mountain was baying a bit, but then she fell silent.

Oh damn!

We boxed, but the collar seemed to be working intermittently, and so while Char cut away at the entrance hole which seemed to have the most sound coming out of it, I barred down to where I thought the den pipe was.

I think the bar had just popped into the den pipe, but I was not absolutely certain, and was about to bar again three inches over when Mountain began to bay a bit closer to the hole where Char had been cutting away.

Excellent. A baying dog is a living dog with some oyygen.

I ran over to where the sound had been coming out, and Char and I both cut back on the pipe entrance until Char said she could see the skunk, trying to exit, head out.

Mountain was baying a bit more now. I relaxed. No worries. If you can see the skunk and hear the dog, it's probably not going to end bad. This was going to be a bolt.

Char backed away from the hole, and I waited for the skunk to clear the pipe before I tried to nail it with the digging bar. I missed, and the skunk bolted for another pipe with Mountain chasing on after her. Char just managed to grab Mountain before she went to ground a second time, and we collared her up and checked her over for damage. She was stinky, but otherwise fine.

Mountain has been skunked a few times before, and does not seem to be overly sensitive as some dogs are. I checked her over, and she did not have the yellow spray marks on her chest or head that would suggest she got a full-on hit at very close range. I suspect the skunk was three feet ahead of her when it blew its load -- a good thing, I can tell you, as a full load to the skin is a lot of toxin (skunk spray is almost pure sulphuric acid) and stink. I collared her up and tied her to the fence twenty feet away, and in a few minutes she was rolling in the grass trying to get the stink off. She was going to be fine.

We filled in the skunk hole, checked Mountain again (no burning of the corneas), and decided to hit the trucks to swap out dogs and get a cold drink or two for ourselves.

At the truck we ran into the farm owners, and after a nice visit with all the dogs, we left them to hit the other side of the creek with Smudge and Sassy.

Smudge is an older dog that has had the good fortune of finding a home with Char, while Sassy is the one-year old full sister (out of a different litter) to my Pearl.

We walked down the creek bank, and there were a lot of holes over the space of 500 yards, but all of them were blank. I have taken about 30-35 groundhogs out of this creek bed over the last few months, and it seems I have made a some small dent in the population. Still, the stream bank is not completely blank, as I have bolted a few that got away as recently as last week, and the week before that.

From our side of the creek we could see some of the exit holes on the other bank, and so when we saw a really nice sette under a huge old elm tree on the other side, we decided to cross over and check it out.

Smudge waded over ahead of us and noodled up the bank through the thick maze of roots. Char followed directly behind, while I rounded and went up the bank a few yards upstream. By the time I got top side, Smudge was in the ground and baying up a storm.

When I say this was a big elm tree, I'm not kidding -- it was six or seven feet through the middle, with the top broken off about 25 feet up. Smudge sounded like he was inside the trunk . I circled the tree looking for a way in. There was a small soft-looking spot at the back base of the tree, and I started to pull away some matted leaves to see if I could find a hole when a large raccoon stuck its nose out. Yow!

I don't know which of us was more freaked out by what we found on the other side of that thick plug of leaves. The raccoon, of course, was not expecting to see a 200-pound human. On my end, I am hyper-aware that we have a lot of rabid raccoons in our area, so I try to stay away from the business end of raccoon with my bare hands. Yes, yes, any mammal can get rabies, but raccoon are positively dizzy with the stuff around here.

Anyway, the raccoon darted back in the tree, and I now knew what we had inside. I reached into the hollow with Char's scraper and pulled out some dirt and a chunk of rotted wood. The pipe did not appear to be very big and it seemed to jog to the left.

I boxed to locate the dog and the locator said Smudge was about two feet inside the trunk from the left side, but it sounded like he was also a foot or two down in the ground below that. Maybe more.

I barred on the left side of the tree, and cut through some smaller roots until hitting hard massive trunk wood. I tore off some pretty decent chunks of wood, but there did not seem to be any weakness to this side of the tree.

While I was slamming the posthole digger and bar into the roots and trunk with almost total futility (and doing some sawing too, it should be said), Char had stuck her spade into the hole where I had seen the coon nose, and pulled out quite a bit of dirt. After looking into the hollow of the hole, however, she decided she had probably blocked off the pipe as she could not tell which way it went. I checked it out and she was right. Where DID the pipe go? I could not tell either, and poking around inside the trunk, everything felt pretty solid. The coon had tried to exit from here, but where it had gone to was a complete mystery.

About an hour had gone by, and Smudge was still baying up a storm, especially when we banged on the trunk a lot. Smudge clearly had the raccoon cornered, he was not backing off, and the raccoon was business-end out. Air was apparently not a problem, and it sounded like Smudge had a good location to work from. What to do?

I suggested to Char that we pull off about 80 feet, sit down, and see if the dog would come out on his own if he didn't hear us banging about on top with our tools. Some dogs will exit after a while if they do not hear humans digging or talking.

Thirty minutes later, Smudge had not moved and he was still baying up a storm. Hmmmm. We seem to have a dedicated working dog here! A new plan of attack was clearly needed.

I went back to the original hole at the base of the tree, and moved a large trunk and branch that had been serving as a porch over the hole. With the branch and trunk out of the way, I had a better purchase on the hole, and I used Char's scrapper to pull out a big piece of old rotten wood and dirt. I dug a bit more, my arm all the way in, and banged out pieces of old rotten wood that were large enough to make an apple crate out of. I put in the shovel and brought out a lot more dirt too. I was digging and banging around inside the trunk blindly, but I was definitely removing material. If nothing else, I was creating more air space inside, and that could only be good. Plus, I was doing something.

Char got a light, and I shined it up into the pipe, and now I could finally see the top of Smudge's wagging tail peeking out over a piece of rotten timber. He was clearly doing fine.

I pulled out a little more dirt and wood, and shone the light about some more. Now I could see that there was a wall of rotten wood and dirt between the dog and us. I explained the situation to Char, who scooted in to take a look. While she sussed out the situation, I explained our plan of attack in my best Ronald Reagan voice: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

And so we did.

More wood and dirt came out of the hole, and in the end it was clear Smudge had the raccoon, still unseen, pinned down in a hole somewhere near his feet.

I reached in with the snare pole to pull Smudge out (he was farther in than I could reach), and he got the idea that I was not happy with where he was ensconced, and so he bolted out of the pipe, very hard and very fast.

In truth, when Smudge exploded out of the trunk, I was not sure if it was the dog or the raccoon coming out. And believe me when I say it mattered to me quite a lot at that moment!

When my heart stopped skipping, we got Smudge leashed up, packed up the tools, and decided to leave the raccoon for another day's sport. As a general rule, raccoon and fox do no harm on our farms, and I find it best to let them go. A living fox and raccoon is the promise of another day.

Smudge looked fine coming out of the hole, but in fact he was ripped up a bit at the gum line, and he started to swell up on the walk back to the truck.

Char cleaned him up and loaded him up with Clavamox, but when I saw him at JRTCA Nationals the next day, he was still swollen and tender. None-the-less, he picked up his Bronze Medallion for all of his previous work in the field, and I will say that no one could question that he was a true working dog!

A permanent hat tip to Char who has beautiful small workers, and knows what to do with them! Come down when it's cold, lady, and we'll see if we can put something up.

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Digging on the Dogs

First one of the day, quickly and humanely dispatched.

There was a fog out early this morning, and on the back roads I notice that both the Poison Ivy and the Sumac are starting to turn red. Fall in not quite here yet, but it's coming.

I do not expect this will be much of a year for leaf color -- the drought has been too fierce. When it gets this bad, the leaves just give up the ghost and come down in great brown drifts.

In drought, there is never much of a color guard to welcome in winter.

Things are beyond dry. The Potomac River is so low that the rocky gorge at Great Falls look like a foreign river. In the smaller creeks you can find dust on the stones where a pool should be. Not good.

The corn is all burned up, but still standing, while the soybeans have already come off, or are in the process.

I visited Nick's Farm last weekend, but the dogs found nothing in two hours of walking around. I have hunted this farm for a long time, and taken several hundred groundhogs off of this 250-acres, but I think Dave's aggressive plowing and ripping of dens has been what has really pushed things to a low level.

Dave has a number of free-range chickens, and he tells me he has just added a pen of turkeys. He says he lost 30 chickens to a raccoon which he trapped and shot, and I told him about two raccoons I had taken out of an old feed bunk some time back. Raccoons up near the house and the chicken pens will not last long with Dave's traps in action. He says he also took out a skunk with 6 babies. I tell him next time to drown them rather than shoot through the trap. Less stink that way. There are a few small things I know about.

Dave gave my name to a farm owner up the road (Call him, he'll get rid of your groundhogs), and I really like this new farm and appreciate the referral. I notice that the soybeans have already come off. A harvest transport truck is still in the fields, and it looks like there might still be some standing beans above the ridge, but with the fog we had, it's still too early for anyone to be cranking up the machine.

I tape up the locator collars really well, as the dogs will be in and out of water today. We check out a few dens in the bean fields, but the groundhogs have left. Who can blame them? There is not much left to eat in these fields. These dens might hold fox in a few months, however, and I will make their acquittance now.

The dogs and I go down to the creek, where it is still green, and the dogs are in and out of a den, but it's hard to tell if they are interested or just playing grab-ass, when -- BAM-- a groundhog bolts out of one of the holes and runs up a tree. Man that was a fast bolt! Smart groundhog. Good for him -- we'll be back later and see how he fares next time.

The dogs settle down and start working, and a bit later they locate again. It's a pretty shallow dig in a tough thicket of tree roots. After a bit of a saw job, we catch up to the groundhog who is not too enormous. He is quickly terminated and recycled for fox food. That's the deal on this farm -- clean out all the groundhogs along the creek where they are wrecking the stream banks. "Yes, ma'am right on it."

Mountain finds another occupied sette and bays it up good, and it sounds like a raccoon. I try to locate. From the sound, Mountain is staying and baying in one location, but the locator is a little shy about exactly where that location is. The box seems to read equally well in a four foot radius. Not good. I bar down to locate a pipe, and hit one, but after digging down to it, I realize it's the wrong one. Or the wrong bit of the right one. As it turns out, there are several den pipes here that are very close together thanks to the intersecting tree roots which keep the ground solid despite all the tunneling.

I eventually hit the right pipe, pull Mountain, and swap Pearl in. Pearl skits up the tube, digs through some dirt and starts to bay. The critter is making a noise that can best be described as "furniture-being-dragged-across-the-floor." I am pretty sure it is a raccoon, as this is the sound I expect from them. I posthole down between the roots for a foot or two, but hit an obstruction and cannot get in enough to figure out what it is. There's not enough room to cut it or remove it. Lots and lots of roots -- always a problem when digging alone.

I cut another hole in the wrong location, but at least I can get into the pipe here, and I reach in and grab Pearl who has a cut lip. I tie her up, and I am turning around to snare whatever's in the den pipe when a large, dark-colored groundhog crowns out of the den entrance. A groundhog? It tries to bolt, but it doesn't make it very far despite my considerable surprise. Damn if I have ever heard a groundhog make the sounds this one did!



Two down (and one bolted), but I am dead from the heat, and the dogs and I head back to the truck.

The day started off with a promise of Fall, but shook that off pretty quickly. Now it's 90 degrees in the shade -- not that we found any shade.

I am cooked, but we'll be back. Hopefully, it will be a little cooler.

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Sailor, A Working Terrier, Has Gone to Earth

Sailor died one year ago today, and it still hurts to talk about it.

And yet, this was a good death by any measure -- standing up, boots on, doing what she loved best.

The post below was her obituary from this blog, one year ago. Words cannot express how much I loved this small, self-effacing little dog. We had a happy life together.

____________________________

Sailor, the love of my life, has gone to earth for the last time.

Her last day was a beautiful sunny morning in September.

She worked a groundhog at the first hole of the day, only 200 feet from the truck, and she then found again, 10 feet deep, in a rocky sette under an ancient and shattered oak at the edge of the farm.

We moved on, confident that she would exit in a bit, and she did, following us up a slope to a large field sette where she located again and bolted a large groundhog, which was nailed by Mountain as it tried to slip back to ground.

Two groundhogs down, and it was not yet 9:30. It was already a good day.

The dogs noodled around the edge of a steeply sloped and forested creek bed, and Sailor found again in a mess of old iron, discarded rugs, and wood that had been topped over with dirt. This earth was undiggable, and we moved on, confident that Sailor would sense the silence and realize we were not interested.

At the bottom of the slope, I began to pound the posthole digger into the ground like I was digging, and down came Sailor, trotting to where the action was.

Fooled you, I thought, but she did not seem to mind. She traipsed along behind me as we went up the wooded slope to the fields on the other side.

We worked the edge of the fields, looking for settes. All three of the dogs pinged on a rocky set of holes just 100 yards up the edge. Excellent!

Once again, Sailor was in the ground first, moving around and trying to locate. This sette was very tight, and after forty-five minutes of chasing around through rocks, roots and rumble, Sailor came out, walked off a little ways into the woods, and sat down. She was tired.

Sailor giving up in the middle of a dig is a very odd thing, but I reminded myself she was a little dog and she was no longer young. Plus she had worked four settes already. And then, of course, this sette was impossible. Maybe she had the right idea -- move on.

I let Sailor rest for a few minutes, and then picked her up and carried her to the creek for water. She was not interested, so back we went to the hole.

While I was in the creek, Chris had been digging up a storm, and his young dog, Moxie, had at last found a small groundhog squeezed in among the broken slates. I helped Chris move a little more dirt to get to it, and then we dispatched it and decided to call it a day.

I picked up Sailor and a full load of tools and carried her back to the truck in my arms. She looked fine, but she was very tired.

We were about 100 yards from the truck, when Sailor suddenly squirmed and jumped out of my arms.

She hit the ground running, flying down the fresh-mowed hay field like a six-month old puppy. What the hell? Had she seen a rat? A cat? A groundhog? A fox? There was no telling.

Sailor disappeared over a slight curve of the earth, headed straight for the trucks. I was sure she was headed for the vehicles.

When I arrived at the trucks a minute or two later, Sailor was nowhere to be seen. I assumed she had slid under the vehicles to get cool, and so I loaded up the tools and poured her some water.

I looked under the truck, but the grass was too high to see anything. I looked under Chris' vehicle, but she was not there.

Chris walked up with Moxie and the rest of the tools, and Dave, the farm manager pulled up in his truck at exactly the same time.

Chris and I showed Dave the three groundhogs on the hood of my vehicle, and we talked a bit about Dave's chickens and the terrific quality of the eggs you get from pasture-raised hens.

While Dave was still there, I rolled my truck forward, very slowly, looking for Sailor. She was nowhere to be seen, and I began to get worried. She never wandered off. Ever...

Chris and I said goodbye to Dave, and then we headed off with Moxie and Mountain to find Sailor.

We walked the length of the hayfield, which Dave had cut as smooth as a suburban lawn the day before. We saw nothing.

Then, just as we neared the very end of the hayfield, Chris saw something white on the ground in the distance. He began to walk to it and then, as he got closer, he started to run. That was when I knew something was terribly wrong. I did not run.

It was Sailor. She was dead in the field, her eyes open, rigor just starting to set in to her legs. There was nothing at all around her. It was as if someone had put a stuffed toy out onto the lawn. But, of course, it was not a stuffed animal. It was Sailor.

Sailor must have been dead within a minute of when I last saw her. She had continued running past the trucks, taking a sharp right up the hayfield and then straight on to where she had expired.

Chris left me alone with Sailor, and I sat in the field, craddling the greatest little dog I have ever known, completely heart broken and dumbfounded.

There is no explaining it. Perhaps Sailor died of a massive heart attack or a stroke or an embolism. Perhaps the Black Widow Spider bite that she survived in June weakened her heart or brain, and something finally ruptured within. Perhaps she got stung by a bee or a hornet while she was in my arms, and that's what made her jump off and run, with anaphylactic shock setting in a few hundred yards later. Perhaps a Black Widow Spider got her, but this time it caused a very different reaction from the one before.

It hardly matters what killed her. Either way she is dead and gone, and now I have a hole in my life that seems unfathomable. I loved this little dog.

Sailor was wonderful on every level. She was like a cat in the house -- curling up in her bed, and mugging for my wife who adored her. No other dog was allowed on the bed, but Sailor was. It is an unequal world, and Sailor was an unequaled dog, and everyone knew it. She was treated like a queen.

Sailor began her working career at nine months, and got her first working terrier certificate at 10 months, to a groundhog, only an hour or so after being skunked undergound. From Day One, there was no stopping this dog.

Larry Morrison once told me I would die of old age before I ever saw a dog the likes of Sailor again, and I am afraid -- very afraid -- that he might be right.

Over her life, Sailor worked it all -- groundhogs, red fox, raccoon, and possum. We mostly worked groundhogs of course -- they account for better than 90 percent of the terrier work in my area.

It's impossible for me to tally up all the critters Sailor worked, but the number is well over 400 -- a fairly impressive tally for a dog that weighed just 10 pounds with a full belly, and who stood only 11 inches tall.

Sailor was not a perfect dog in terms of conformation. She was a little short in the back, and had almost no coat at all on her belly. Winter fox hunting was hard on her. That said, I have never seen a dog that could equal her in the field. She had a great nose, and could get anywhere, and she never got hurt. Sailor not only knew butt from breath, she knew the power of voice and used it. She also knew when to put in her teeth. On more than one occassion people have gone out with me and exclaimed, after watching Sailor in action, "I thought you said she was a soft dog." Well she is. But mostly she's a smart dog.

Sailor did not know one way to work a critter in the hole, she knew a half dozen. And she changed tactics when needed, depending on the quarry and its temperament.

When Sailor was underground, I almost never worried about her. She was small enough to get anywhere and she was not foolish. She protected herself from real harm, and her only serious injury was caused by a freak accident when a falling piece of steel roofing nearly cut her in half. I scooped her up in my arms that day last winter, stuffed her intestines back in, and sped to an emergency vet who stapled her back together. Miraculously, she rallied and was back in the field again a few months later.

Sailor, you have gone to ground for the last time. I know you are happy down there, because it was your favorite place. Until we meet again.

REQUIEM

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

~ Robert Louis Stephenson ~

Sailor doing what she loved best.

Root of the Problem

The bar is six feet long, the roots were 12 feet wide and over five feet high.

I met up with Chris at a general store in Adamstown, and he had Brick with him, a red fell terrier. I had Mountain and Pearl with me, both in fine shape and anxious for a day in the field.

We crossed the small bridge spanning the creek, and parked behind one of the outbuildings on the farm.

This farm used to raise calfs, but now it's corn on one side of a creek and soybeans on the other, with a narrow pasture down the middle on either side of the creek, and good soil almost everywhere. If there is a more ideal habitat for terrier work, I have not found it.

I did a thorough job of taping up the locator collars, as the dogs would likely be in and out of the water.

Finding holes was not going to be a problem. When the owner of this place first called me, she said she was anxious to reduce the number of groundhog settes along the creek, as they were undermining the bank. I was skeptical of this assertion until I saw the problem, but she did not exagerate or get it wrong; it is groundhogs causing the damage, not muskrats. And there are a lot of holes. Yahoo!

The dogs and I have been doing some abatement work on this farm for the last couple of weeks, and perhaps as a consequence we did not find anything for the first 200 yards or so. At a spot where I had found raccoons on a previous dig, however, Pearl slid into the earth and began baying.

I was surprised this sette was already reoccupied, but not dipleased; I had done a good job rebuilding the den, and I could not tell where I had cut into it before.

Pearl continued to bay, and I collared up Mountain, and then Brick was in another hole and baying, and Pearl came out and I quickly grabbed her and collared her up before she could try another entrance.

Brick was clearly on it, and baying. We boxed her, and then began to bar and dig, but then she stopped baying and came out and tried to get into another hole. I went over and undid Pearl, a more experienced dog, but she too seemed suddenly confused by the sette.

After a few minutes, it became clear that whatever had been there had either bolted off or dug in and bottled itself off with dirt. A bolt was my bet. This sette has an exit over in the ditch somewhere -- one of the coons had bolted out of there a few weeks earlier. I had not bothered to locate the exit then, and now I gave a half-hearted look for it, but still could not locate it. It was not an obvious exit. No mind; there would be other holes this day.

But luck was not waiting for us at the next hole.

We walked down the side of the creek, checking a few settes in the grass, and then Mountain began baying up a storm just slightly behind us. She was in the hedge along the creek, and as we approached a very large Sycamore tree, we heard Pearl open up as well.

Both dogs were in on it, wherever it was.

Coming up to the tree, I realized that what I had initially thought were stones were actually roots (click on pictures to enlarge). These massive roots had fused into each other, creating a solid floor of wood; you could not get a bar into a crack, much less a shovel or post hole digger.

There were two good-sized den holes at the top, rimmed by tree roots as thick as my calf and thigh. This was clearly an ancient sette that had been dug when the tree was young. How long had it been here? A hundred years was not out of the question.

The roots spread across the top of the bank about 10 feet long and four feet wide. Wow! This place was a fortress.

I slid down the bank to see if I could locate another entry hole, or at least get nearer to the location where the dogs were in and baying

As I came down the bank, I realized the roots of this massive tree went straight into the water.

For a second or two I was confused. Were the dogs on this bank or the other? The baying sounded like it was coming from the middle of the water.

I looked at the bank I had just come down. There was a solid wall of fused roots that stretched to my left, forming a solid wall 12 feet long and five feet high. Wow. It looked like something out of Angkor Watt.

I listened carefully, and now I could tell the dogs were clearly baying from within the mass of roots -- the water had been reflecting the sound off the opposite bank.

I listened and it appeared the dogs were baying right at the water line. I felt along the root structure at the water line, and found a very small hole on the far left side that looked like it might have been large enough for a rat to get into. I figured that might have been where Mountain entered. Or perhaps she entered from one of the holes on top. Who knows?

I listened with my ear next to the root mass, and it was clear Mountain was just on the other side, on the far right, but there was a lot of solid wood between us. A felt along the water line where the roots met the water, and there was a small slit there, about as wide as a pencil. I could feel a larger passage behind that slit. That was where Mountain and Pearl were located. Not knowing what kind of critter was up in there -- or exactly where -- I was not anxious to wiggle my finger around in the dark. The slit was too small to get the dogs out of, and rabies is a serious thing and far from uncommon in my part of America. The dogs are innoculated for rabies, but I am not.

Chris and I poked around for about 40 minutes, looking for any way at all into this sette, but there was no place to even start. We each had key-hole pruning saws, but you cannot saw into the middle of a 10-inch thick wall of wood that is backed by dirt if there is not even a starter hole to stick a blade into.

Poking around right at the water line, I located a small chink, in the otherwise impermeable mass of roots, and we managed to open it up to a fist-sized hole by alternatively smashing it with a shovel blade, slamming the cutter head of the bar into it, and sawing. If I lowered myself right into the water, I could just look up and see a bit of Pearl through the hole. She was above the hole and seemed to have plenty of oxygen and she was not anxious to come out. The action was inside! Though she was a bit shy of dry, she was in no danger of drowning.

Mountain was up the pipe in front of her, and though I could not see her, she was clearly face-to-face with the critter and going at it with voice and teeth. Pearl was behind Mountain and waiting her turn. From the sound of it, I was pretty sure the critter was a raccoon.

What to do?

There was no digging this sette, and after about 40 minutes looking for another alternative, I told Chris we should pull off and hunt Brick up the creek. If the dogs could no longer hear us, there was a chance they might come out on their own. Short of an 18-inch chainsaw (Chris suggested a 24-inch chainsaw would be a better idea) we were not going to get these dogs out through our efforts alone. Even if I had a chainsaw, I would be loathe to use it as I would be working blind and with no assurance I could avoid cutting a dog.

We walked up the creek with Brick and found many more holes, but Brick never pinged on a location.

We went quite a ways up the creek, but my terriers did not follow on after us. They were still that damn root sette.

After about a half hour, we crossed the creek at a low spot, and came back down the other bank towards the dogs. It was here that we located the Black Rat snake and a little farther on that we bolted a nice red fox from the brush. Excellent!

Brick followed the fox into the corn a ways, and I continued on, focusing on the opposite bank, and trying to remember exactly where the dogs had gone in.

And then I heard them -- still baying up a storm.

I stood on the creek bank opposite the enormous wall of roots and listened. Mountain and Pearl had swapped out positions, and now it was Pearl baying. Not knowing what else to do, I took out my camera and took a short video of barking roots (and an expectorating Chris). The dogs had already been in the ground about an hour and a half.

Chris and I waded across the creek and tried a new tack. I found a spot on the edge of the root mass about four feet up the bank. I could just get in a post hole digger -- a simple bore straight down, with no possibility of expanding the hole due to the roots. I got down about three feet, and then Chris spelled me and he dropped down another foot or so with a little help from the bar. In the end, he got down as deep as the water and gravel sand of the creek, but we were too far back from the hole and there was no way to improve the angle or expand the pipe due to the enormous roots.

We had bored a hole to nowhere. That said, the hole was not for naught. The pounding on the ground seemed to amp things up down in the root mass, and the critter and the dogs seemed to reach for a resolution beyond a stalemate.

At some point something happened, as Mountain was now suddenly baying higher up the bank and on the opposite side of the tree, while Pearl was still going at it in the location she had always been. This was not one raccoon, but two! Or maybe it was a pair of fox.

Chris and I discussed the possibilities. I did not think groundhogs would be paired up this late in July, and I did not think they were ever going to go into a sette this wet. Groundhogs want a dry sette if they can get it, and with the drought we have been experiencing, there was no reason for them to settle for anything else. But who knows?

A pair of young fox was a very real possibility, but it was a pretty wet sette for them too. Raccoons made all the sense in the world, and nothing else fit this location quite as well.

While Chris continued to plumb our hole to nowhere, I went up top to see if we had missed something where Mountain was now baying. We hadn't. The locator now said Mountain was only two feet down, but she was under at least 18 inches of solid root, and there was not even a crack in which to slip a saw blade.

I leaned back against the trunk of the Sycamore and tried to slow down my breathing. This was going to have to be a waiting game. At my age, you learn to wait things out. This too will pass. The dogs were not in distress, Mountain was a very experienced dog, and Pearl was pretty soft and would probably be fine despite her youth. The dogs could get out if they wanted to, and they would get out in time, of that I had no doubt. This was not a skunk, so no worries there. Except, of course, that I did worry because after a long time underground with two raccoons there was likely to be some damage to the dogs.

An odd noise came from over head, and I looked up to see a blue heron flying overhead squawking, legs trailing out the back. A nice bird, and very common in this area. I noticed a corn cob on the ground -- more sign that this was a raccoon, especially since the corn field was about 100 yards away. I leaned back against the tree trunk, closed my eyes, and tried to focus on my breathing. Time more or less stopped.

I do not know what made me open my eyes, or how long they had been closed, but when I cracked them open, Mountain was just slidding out of the pipe at the top of the sette about four feet in front of me. She was crouched low, trying to sneak out in order to find a new and different way back in, but a word from me and she knew she was busted.

I scooped her up. She was very muddy, and bleeding from her muzzle, but she did not look too bad. When I got her down to the creek and washed her off, I could see she had a good puncture on top of her muzzle, and a smaller one below; a classic raccoon or fox bite. With the cold water on her wound, Mountain began to bleed, but I knew it was mostly colored water, and nothing serious. The bleeding brought on by the cold water would help clean out the wound. I tied out Mountain on the opposite bank, and waited.

Pearl had stopped baying now, and I was pretty sure she would come out soon. And she did -- Chris scooped her up as she exited up top.

Pearl was in considerably worse shape that Mountain, with the right side of her muzzle pretty knackered. I got her down to the creek and checked her out; she was skinned up pretty badly on the right side of her muzzle, and there was at least one decent rip under her right lip. All in all, however, my first impression was that her injuries might look worse than they actually were. There did not appear to be any huge wounds, though it was a mess and a bit hard to tell with all the mud and blood on her. I would have to check her over more carefully at the car.

We packed up the tools and headed back to the vehicles, where I flushed Mountain's puncture with ProvIodine. I decided to glue her puncture shut, since it had been self-cleaning so well. I loaded her up on 500 mg of cephelaxin to obviate any chance of infection.

We washed off Pearl, and I looked her over as best I could, but there was nothing to be done with her wounds but to let time sort them out. There was some damage inside her right lip, and there was going to be a lot of swelling, but there did not appear to be any really deep damage. I pressured 500 mg. of cephelaxin into the back of her throat to obviate any start of infection.

At home, while washing Pearl, I found one good deep canine muzzle gash on the top of her muzzle, which sealed the deal that this was a pair of raccoons. A little ProvIodione, and then a crate was what she needed. And time.

Now, two days later, all seems to be moving forward to a place called fine. Mountain already looks and acts as if nothing happened to her. Glue is a wonder.

Pearl still looks pretty knackered if you look closely at the right side of her face, but you would not know there was a problem from her body language alone. There is still a lot of swelling on the right side of her muzzle, and there is a very large scab over the debraided parts on that side, but it appears to be healing well, and I have continued to load her up on antibiotics as a precaution. She is eating well, if a bit carefully. In fact right now she is in her little bed next to my computer, licking her paw and looking up at me in expectation of a possible Cheerio. Come on Dad, I'm an invalid!

I figure it will be at least three weeks off before Pearl sees the field again, but August is not a bad month for a vacation, even if you are a dog. Mountain can fill in the slack in the interim.

All in all, the dogs did three hours underground and never stopped working the whole time. For a small and young dog, Pearl did well. If we humans could have gotten to them, it would have been a 15-minute thing, but sometimes God tests humans as well as dogs. No one panicked, and each side of the team did his job as it could be done that day. All is well that ends well. More or less.
.

A Nice Day on the Creek

No pictures this time, as I gave my ancient digital camera (an eBay cheapo) to my son for his Utah rafting trip. If it dies, it had a good life.

My idea was that I would get a new camera, but I haven't done that yet as I had to order a new computer this weekened as this piece of ... Microsoft ... is about to die. On the upside, I managed to keep Windows ME (that used to stand for "Millenium" back when everything was being named after The Millennium). The new machine should arrive at the end of the week with Microsoft "Vista" on it, and I am sure it will be a total disaster. In the meantime, I am using dial up. Welcome to the 20th Century.

The good new is that out in the field I use the kind of medievel equipment that Jacques de Fouilloux would recognize, and I know how to maintain it.

The first groundhog of the day was almost a "gimme," as there had been two young ones in this sette last weekend, and Mountain nailed one while the other bolted. This time Mountain entered the same eye as before, and Pearl grabbed the remaining little bolter as it exited.

The rest of the day was nice, with another small one accounted for along a fenceline sette, and a larger hog bolted out to ... well, my posthole diggers.

That one was a little odd.

The groundhog bolted, I yelled, Pearl ran ahead of it, and then the groundhog froze on the other side of the fence, right in front of me, not moving a muscle and trying to blend in to the dirt pile. Pearl did not seem to see it, and was nosing around about 15 feet ahead. Mountain was still in the ground.

Thinking quick, I reached over the fence with the posthole digger, and clam-shelled the little bugger up over the fence like it was a piece of Dim Sum caught in giant pair of chopsticks. A quick tap, and it was all over.

The dogs located a fourth groundhog, and it whistled quite a lot underground and then it disappeared. Seriously -- presto, change-o, gone. My guess is that it bolted from an unseen hole, but with groundhogs you never really know; it could have dug away in the soft earth. No problem; we'll be back soon enough.

.

A Fast Day on a New Farm

Mountain in a pipe working a raccoon. There were two down there -- a smallish female and a mid-sized male. Mountain came out without a scratch.


On Sunday I stopped at a new farm just up the road from where I normally dig. The owner of this place called me last week and said she needed someone to knock down her groundhog population as they were chewing up her stream bank. No problem -- only too happy to help.

Coming on to this place I was first struck by what a nice house it is -- a two-story brick edifice built in the 1920s I would guess, and kept in excellent shape from the look of things. There was a pretty garden on the side of the house and a number of large barns and outbuildings. Everything looked to be ship shape -- especially the blue Farmall tractor in the shed next to where I parked. I liked the look of this place right away, and even before I had finished taping the collar, I envied the owner.

I collared up Mountain, and shouldered up the tools. Within 5 minutes Mountain had found along the stream bank. The owner of this farm did not lie; she has a lot of groundhogs. The wide swale of uncut grass on either side of the stream seemed to be loaded with holes, and the ground was soft and the soil excellent all the way down. If I was a groundhog, I would want to live here too.



This one bolted up a tree and whistled and whistled and whistled.

Mountain had no trouble finding critters on this farm. I was just finishing repairing one sette, when Mountain was in another and already baying. In the end, we knocked out two groundhogs, bolted another up a tree, and dug on two raccoons found together, all in the space of just two hours and 45 minutes.

By the time I had repaired the raccoon sette, and gathered the tools it was 12:15, and I decided to call it a day while Mountain will still in fine fettle. In truth, five holes dug solo is about my limit these days. It was a good call on my part -- rain started to fall when I was only 10 miles down the highway. We'll be back next weekend, for sure.




A peep out from one of the raccoons. This was one slow to bolt - most are out and gone before I can get a picture.

.

Schooling Brick

Sunday was a short day in the field due to the weather.

It had started to sprinkle as I left the house, but it was still dry and merely overcast as I approached Buckeystown. I met Chris at the Flint Hill General Store, and he said he had a new dog he wanted to show me.

Still in our trucks, we talked about where to go, and he suggested an area I call "the Unexplored Country," because it is at the very back of a good farm, with beautiful fields as verdant as any place you can imagine. When we first found these fields back in the cold early Spring, there had been a lot of center-of-the-field holes that suggested a lot of groundhogs had been at work. Chris thought if we visited this location now, when the weather was much warmer, we might be able to find fast action. Sounds like a plan.

I drove up the road and parked as close as we could. While I taped up a collar, I checked out Chris' new dog. He was a pretty large (13") red fell. There are not too many red fells in America -- only a handful -- and I guessed that this dog was Brick, a fell terrier out of Texas who (if memory serves me) was once in North Carolina (and maybe Florida too). Brick's a nice looking dog. Chris said he had gotten her from Linda Q., and he wanted to see how she would do in the field. Chris said he did not think Brick had seen too much underground work in Texas. No problem -- if he'll fit in a hole, he'll find work in this part of the country. In any case, it would be just Mountain and Brick in the field today, as Pearl was at home resting up after her spay.

We walked down a long hedge and over several fields on our way to the back of the farm. Mountain disappeared up a brushy slope, but came back after a bit -- she had clearly gone to ground, but it was not clear if she had found. We moved on, only to find the Unexplored Country standing tall in green barley. There would be no digging in the middle of these fields today. Too bad. In two or three weeks, when the barley is off, it might be different.

We knocked about in the woods on the edge of the field and got ourselves soaked in high brush and a light rain. There were plenty of holes along the edge, but nothing to be found to ground.

As we headed back to the truck, however, Mountain found in a shallow earth. She was in and out of one hole and then another, and it was pretty clear she had bottled a groundhog between them. It seemed as if she was only about 10 inches from it on either side of a connecting pipe, and the space between was only about 2 feet, so that's where the groundhog had to be. This should be easy ... and it was.

Chris and I cut away the top bit of the earth and and as fast as you can say it, Mountain was out of one hole and down into the cut and trying to pull the groundhog free. We broke Mountain off this groundhog and tied her up -- Mountain does not need the work, and Brick needed an introduction to quarry in a hole.

After clipping up Mountain, we let Brick off and he was down into the cut pretty fast, and hard on to the groundhog. We broke off Brick and I tailed out the groundhog, who seemed unscathed, and put him back in the sette through a regular den hole. Mr Groundhog dug away a bit, but he could not go very far into the collapsed pipe because the soil was so rocky.

After a short interval we let Brick go, and about 3/4 of the way underground he managed to stretch out his neck and grab the groundhog again. He tried to pull it free (good luck with that!), but could not, and so we broke him off the groundhog, and pulled out the groundhog for a final dispatch. While Brick had taken a gash to the muzzle for his troubles, the groundhog was in pretty fine shape -- a testimony to a hide as thick as the sole of a moccasin.

Back at the truck we doctored up Brick with a bit of proviodine and a little superglue. He should be fine in about 10 days.

Since the rain was coming down harder now, we decided to call it a day. There's always next weekend -- I have a new 170-acre farm to go to-- a reference from one of the other farms where I have knocked down quite a few groundhogs over the years. The lady who owns the farms wanted to know what I charge. Charge? Now there's an idea. No charge, Ma'am -- just glad to have a little more land to work. I'll be over on Sunday. Promise.

A not-very-large Spring groundhog with Brick attached. The digging bar is to the right.

Low Impact Hunting

This old truck at Nick's is slowly getting consumed by Virginia Creeper.


Hit a farm today, but after two hours in the field I had only succeeded in finding a lot of empty holes and getting myself soaked from the waist down due to the fact that the vegetation was very high and wet from a thunderstorm the night before. The fields themselves were off-limits as they have been planted in barley right up to the edge and the crop is tall if still green. In three weeks that barely should be gone, and then corn or soy will probably follow.

I decided to pack it in on this wet farm and head over to Nick's place where I knew the fields would be shorter and dryer. Pulling into Nick's I could see that the first cut of hay was already starting to come off. The hay is coming off at MackIntosh's farm too -- big round bales tossed across the fields like pieces of candy on a pool table.

As I was unpacking the tools, the farm manager came up and we chatted a bit. Apparently he knows a lady that wants her groundhogs gotten rid of, and I am only too happy to help. I asked him what the long wide strip of purple flowers was, and he said it's Hairy Vetch -- it fixes nitrogen in the soil, and they are growing it for seed. It's a pretty flower that makes for a pretty field, that's for sure.

I mentioned that corn prices were going up due to the push for more ethanol production. and he said chicken feed was way up too -- he was now charging $3 a pound for free range chicken. While we were talking, the farm manager pointed out two groundhogs on the edge of the woods several hundred yards up the way. Ah good! It might not be a blank day after all.

Mountain had been free while we talked, and as I finished the conversation, she came down from the flinty ridge where she had clearly been to ground in a very dark earth. Follow me, she seemed to be saying, and so I did.

Mountain slid into a rocky pipe about 50 yards up the hedge, and I could hear her moving stones, and then there was a short bay and more moving stones. There was a groundhog in there, but the stones were slipping and she was having a hard time catching up to it. I probed with the bar ahead of Mountain and found the pipe, and sunk a two-foot hole to it. Mountain came out and re-entered the sette where I had sunk the hole, and after about 15 minutes of digging and poking on both our parts, we finally found where the pipe exited the hole I had dug.

The groundhog had filled in the entire pipe with stones, and the only sure sign there was something down there was the fact that even with Mountain out of the hole and tied up, I could hear something moving rocks underground. This damn groundhog was a stone mason!

I pulled more rocks out of the hole until it seemed as if it was more-or-less clear. I then shoved some more rocks up the other side of the pipe so the groundhog could not bolt up into there. I then kicked in my shovel, as best I could, to block a bolt out of the main hole itself. That accomplished, I barred into ground just ahead of the location where I thought the groundhog would be, and I broke through at about two feet.

I had just started to posthole down into the rocky soil, when something hit the shovel blade blocking the main pipe. It thumped it hard again, and then, before I could even set the posthole diggers down, the groundhog had the gap at the top of the shovel opened up, and it was up and out, and running fast down the slope. It was a big one, and I was pleased to see it as I have hunted a little too hard on this farm in the past. Mountain strained against the end of the leash, and I went over to let her off to chase the groundhog to ground again despite the fact that I had already decided to let this one go.

I filled in the holes as best I could (there was less fill than hole), and we headed down to the place where the farm manager had spied two groundhogs on the edge of the forest. Mountain found again in another very rocky sette, but she could not get up to it. Instead of digging up this sette, I decided to call it a day with one bolted, three seen, and none killed.

We'll be back; it's a long summer and there's no hurry to bleed this farm white. Secretly, I'm more than a little happy that groundhogs are back on this farm.



Mountain slides into a pipe near where two groundhogs were spotted.