Ray Holohan and Roscoe, a tracking team from Illinois

We got this nice e-mail from Ray Holohan from Illinois. Ray's Roscoe goes back to our line on his dam's side. Roscoe's sire is Cameron Kruse's wirehaired dachshund Fred, who was bred by Stefan and Vanessa Fuss from Germany.

My name is Ray Holohan and the proud owner of Rosco, a wirehaired dachshund from the 2009 litter of Chloe Belzar owned by Neal and Debbie Meyers.

I'm sending a couple of pictures of Rosco 's first recovered buck. The track took place last Friday, and it was his 6th track of the seaon. The hit was a straight over head shot in the liver area, the arrow only penetrared about 10 ". There were only about 6 drops of blood at the hit site. I put Rosco on the blood and he took it out of the timber a short distance and into a cornfield, where he turned and advanced it through a hedge row and into a bean stubble. At this point I hadn't found any blood other than that at the hit site. He kept going but still we had no blood, at about 800 yards.

I decided to restart Roscoe at the hit site. This time he took it out to the corn field and went in a different direction. I let him go about a half a mile and still nothing. I told the hunters that I wasn't sure what to do with no confirmation of blood. So I decided to take him back to the opening in the hedge row where we found 2 small specs of blood. So now we had a direction, and I let him track across the bean stubble to a patch of timber about 3/8 of a mile away. I decided to enter the timber in the middle and track into the wind. The timber looked fairly clear from the outside, but I was wrong as it was loaded with thorns and briars .

I tracked into the wind as far as I could then decided to turn back do to the loss of my blood. We were tracking with the wind in the middle of the timber heading back when Rosco started pulling harder and made three checks in the same area. I decided to check the area out and Rosco found two wound beds and the buck not far away. The hunters were extremely happy along with me and Rosco. I should have believed Rosco the first track to the hedge.

This track was a good track because it taught me to trust Rosco. Rosco has had three recoveries prior to this one this season, two were pretty easy.

This very nice Illinois buck was recovered by Ray Holohan and Roscoe