John's dog of a lifetime - FC Clary von Moosbach

F.Ch. Clary von Moosbach was a dog for all seasons. Dachshund people who had heard of Clary during the fourteen years of her life (1971-1985) thought of her as a field trial dog, and her field trial record was more than respectable. Others, without knowing her name, may have seen her as the hunting Dachshund on the opening slide of the old DCA slide sequence on conformation. From 1973 to 1980 Clary dominated field trials in the East, before the field trial fever had spread very far into the West and Midwest. With her dam, F. Ch. Carla vom Rode and her half sister, Dual Ch. Uta von Moosbach, Clary was on the leading edge of a wave of European Wires that began to win trials in the late ‘60s. She won at least eleven field champion stakes, but had passed her field trialing prime too soon to follow the field trial boom west. In 1984 she was honored in Philadelphia at the AKC Centennial Celebration as the hunting and field trial representative of the Dachshund breed.

 Clary was the product of an outcross of two German-bred dogs, Bobo von der Schofielden and F. Ch. Carla vom Rode, whom I imported as a puppy in 1965. The genetic component behind Clary's aptitudes was the product of pure luck, rather than any breeding skill on my part. She was a good producer when bred to compatible studs, but she never replicated herself. As is often the case with outcrosses, her best offspring resembled the sire as much as they did Clary. Her puppies were all of the same general psychological type, however. In field trialing, the fun of these European Wires was in their abundant voice, their desire to trail and their enthusiastic, slambang style, which we had to condemn as judges, but could enjoy in private company. The development of the Dachshund in Europe never involved selection for the slow, close-trailing style, off lead, which is the standard for American Dachshund field trials. Our trials here are modeled upon American Beagle brace trials, rather than the German tests. Still, Clary and her best daughters, Field Champions Eda, Gerte and Giesele (Goose) von Moosbach, did very well in their own decade, even beating, on occasion, Glary's own distinguished cousin, F. Ch. Adelheid von Spurlaut.

To put it all in perspective, not everyone was delighted by these working class European Dachshunds, who usually lacked the aristocratic good looks of American show stock. Field trial competition from these Wires, many of whom were Clary's relatives and descendants, irked some breeders and inspired others. For certain, the stir and controversy raised the level of competition and helped to end a certain complacent approach to performance.

However, Clary was more than a field trial dog, and those who knew her well realized that rabbit brace trials were not even her best event. The selection process behind her German breeding probably prepared Clary better for natural hunting than for the precision tracking work of field trials. What really distinguished Clary was an uncanny intuition of knowing what I wanted and what was needed in any season or situation. Even for Dachshund lovers who have no interest in hunting whatever, her history can broaden our awareness of Dachshund psychology.

Dachshunds, particularly the Wires, were developed by German foresters as solo companion/hunters. Never used as pack hounds, they were bred to relate and respond to the needs of their masters rather than to pack members. They were used as flushing dogs, trackers of wounded big game and for underground work, usually on foxes rather than on badgers. At twenty pounds, Clary was too big to work the underground game of the Northeast, but she exemplified the other character traits bred for in Germany. It was something that came naturally to her with a minimum of discipline. Quickly she learned that hunting was more fun and more productive if she worked with me as a team. She hunted pheasants in the fashion of a slow spaniel, quartering back and forth ahead of me to flush within shotgun range. Yet she had a hound's nose for a track. If she crossed the feeding trail of a pheasant she would give voice and I would follow. We might go 200 yards, through cover, but it was almost a sure thing that the bird would burst into flight at the end. Pheasants and rabbits usually like a similar habitat. If rabbits were the game, after the pheasant season, Clary would quickly sense what we were up to and extend her searching range accordingly.

Clary loved to hunt grouse, and she was invaluable in locating downed birds which had burrowed under the loose, dry leaves of autumn. She was a little small to retrieve in heavy cover and she had never been trained to do so. One morning I shot at a grouse as it cleared the treetops, and apparently missed. The grouse showed no reaction to the shot that I could recognize, and I watched it fly high and strongly out of sight. Clary disappeared in the same direction and was gone for a long time. I was mildly irritated; this was hardly teamwork. Finally, the brush parted and Clary struggled out, stumbling on the wing of the dead grouse, which she held in her jaws. She had known, somehow, that the bird was hit and that it would certainly be lost if she did not make a difficult retrieve, for which she had never been trained.

On another occasion, we were invited to go pheasant hunting in a neighboring county. The designated canine star of the hunt was a huge Weimaraner, but Clary ended up finding more pheasants. She could work the cover, which was too high and dense to see the big, gray dog on point. Clary's barks let us know that she was trailing one pheasant up the long length of a swale. When the pheasant ran to the limits of cover, he took to the air; my companion shot - not well - and wounded the big cock The pheasant flew heavily across a wide field, staying about ten feet high, and landed in a dense brush lot 200 yards away. Almost certainly, it seemed, this was a lost bird. Clary followed out of the swale; she had been too far back to see the bird take wing, but she had heard the shot. Apparently, the low-flying pheasant had thrown off scent, which settled to the ground as he flew. In "S" curves, following the diffused band of scent, Clary tracked her way across the field to where the bird had landed to run once more. This pheasant was too big to retrieve, but Clary had him anchored when we arrived. Few Dachshund owners have the joy of seeing their dog carry off a stunt like this.

Clary's abilities extended to raccoon hunting. She understood that this was what nights were for, and she paid no attention whatever to rabbits, which she loved to chase in daylight. Deer were also of no interest. Once, on a moonlit night, I saw her come to the tree where the coon had gone up. She made one short bark and then cast a broad circle around the tree. Then, sure that the coon had not "marked the tree" and continued on, she settled down to steady tree-barking. When I hunted with friends who had specialized coon hounds, Clary treed her share.

Clary and Carla

Clary did have her failings; she would leave almost any game for certain small, black and white creatures of the night. She seemed to relish being drenched with skunk spray. After munching on the skunk, she would get back to work and, somehow, her nose would still function. For her, at least, this was no inconvenience.

Clary was four years old before we discovered together the challenges and intricacies of tracking wounded deer. Deer Search, the New York State-based organization, began as an experimental program to see if the European method of using leashed tracking dogs to find wounded deer was feasible there. Since Dachshunds are one of the major breeds used in Europe for this work, it was natural for me to begin the research with Clary, and it was my sheer good fortune that she turned out to be one of the most talented dogs to ever work in the program. Clary was a natural, but I did not fully appreciate how exceptional she was until years later, when the Deer Search had grown to involve many dogs and handlers. Training and experience are important but, in addition, the best dogs must have an exceptional nose and the intelligence to use it well. Since we humans are "challenged" with very poor noses and little awareness of scent, it helps if we imagine scent as microscopic particles which are cast off by the animal being tracked. Each deer, like each human, has a distinctive scent signature. On an old track, dried by sun and swept by wind, the only scent remaining may be the particles, which have filtered down among the dead leaves of the forest floor. Clary would work her nose down under the leaves and painstakingly inch along the difficult sections of the trail.

I remember tracking with her one bitter cold night in a howling wind. There was no visible sign that the wounded deer had passed, and Clary had to work a broad zone for scent, zigzagging back and forth from hollows at the bases of trees to piles of leaves swept up against rocks and stumps. It involved something more than having a good nose; Clary had learned from experience where scent might linger under such conditions, and where traces of it could be discovered through active and aggressive search. It was her desire that kept her focused and permitted her to use her experience so effectively.

The desire showed in other ways. Many of the deer, which we tracked, were not seriously wounded and, after a mile or so on the trail, a decision would be made to back off and let the deer recover on its own. When I picked up Clary on such a scent line, after she had tried so hard, she would struggle and cry like a puppy. On the other hand, if she were allowed to overtake or find a deer, Clary clearly expressed her feelings. After an hour's drive home from a deer call, Clary would still be "up" and would perform her "happy dance" on the kitchen floor. She would end, four feet in the air, wriggling contentedly and thumping her tail in self satisfaction. This came from an ordinarily laid-back house dog with a plain vanilla personality.

In a tracking dog, the desire to find the quarry must be balanced with discriminating intelligence. The outstanding dog also has the powers of concentration to keep focused on a day-old track, even when a healthy deer crosses the scent line just ahead. For Clary, the quarry was the designated deer that she had been asked to track by her handler. Other deer were of no more interest than a cow. One early November morning we tracked a deer shot the day before. Looking ahead, I could see a field, white with frost, upon which more than a dozen deer were grazing. White tails flaring, they bounded out of the field as we approached. Even I could smell their musky scent, but Clary remained strictly focused on the old, cold scent of the day before. There were very occasional blood droplets, just visible through the frost, to show that we were on the right track. If I had not seen and smelled the herd myself, I never would have known from "reading" Clary that fresh deer scent was everywhere present. For Clary, on the track, it must have been like following the thin thread of a flute solo through the whomp-whomping roar of a live rock concert.

Clary was a blood-tracking dog from when she began at age four until a series of mini-strokes incapacitated her at fourteen. She probably reached her peak at ten years of age. By this time she was slowing down physically to some degree, but she more than made up for this through her experience gained in taking over 200 calls and finding more than 70 deer. It is impossible to state the exact figure, because she was used often in her last years as a back-up in the field for young dogs who were learning the game. If an inexperienced dog faltered on a difficult check or dead-ended when the deer backtracked, as sometimes happened, it was Clary who would be brought forward. Almost always, she solved the riddle in her patient, conservative style. Then, without complaint, she would give up the lead to the younger dog once more. Clary was a professional.

Clary was so professional, so focused on her work of finding wounded deer, that she would tolerate almost anyone at the other end of the 30-foot tracking lead. She simply required that the stand-in handler respect her greater wisdom and not interfere with what she wanted to do. Lightheartedly, I lent her out to other Deer Search members, never thinking of all the things that might have gone wrong. If skunks were not involved, she had an uncanny sense of doing the right thing and staying out of trouble. There were no mishaps.

Dachshund people tend to communicate primarily with one another; our Dachshund world is rather inaccessible to those not already in the loop. Generally, outsiders who do not know the breed well, have no sense that Dachshunds today are useful hunting dogs. Perhaps the name "Dachshund" leads them to suspect that , back in the mists of distant time, ancestors of our breed did somehow hunt badgers, but certainly there is no link in their minds between past and present. Clary made hunters and scent hound people aware that the right Dachshund can be a serious and versatile hunting dog today. Actually, no other breed carries so many possibilities in a twenty-pound package. It is fortunate that the first Deer Search dog was one of the very best. For her owner, she was a partner for all seasons and the dog of a lifetime. For the Dear Search members who knew her, she was the right dog at the right time.

Breeding disappointments

by John Jeanneney (April 2006 for Full Cry)

At least two breeds of German origin have been imported into the United States specifically for tracking wounded deer. Wirehaired dachshunds from Germany came into the country in the 1960s and 1970s. Much more recently Bavarian Mountain Hounds, which were developed as tracking specialists, have been arriving in response to the legalizations and expansion of blood tracking into many new states.

I was in right in the middle of the first invasion of wirehaired dachshunds, so I had an inside view on what went on. Back in the early days of Deer Search we had some pretty good tracking dogs, and some of us began breeding puppies without much understanding of what we were doing. Within three or four generations the breeding program was going down hill. Very good dogs were occasionally being produced, but the majority did not show much aptitude for tracking. In my own litters I found only about 20% that pleased me. It’s curious, but not completely surprising that almost none of the wirehaired dachshunds tracking successfully today trace back to those imported wires of the sixties and seventies. Those were the original dogs responsible for launching wounded deer tracking in the Northeast. What went wrong? Why was it necessary to take a fresh start with new imports in the 1990s?

At the beginning we were dealing with a small gene pool of standard wirehaired dachshunds that were separate and distinct from any wires that came down from lines that had been in the United States or England for a long time. They were really two different types of dogs although all were registered as “dachshunds” by the AKC.

There were two outstanding bitches, my Clary vom Moosbach and Don Hickman’s Adelheide von Spurlaut. These two bitches were as much co-founders of Deer Search as Don and I were. They put wirehaired dachshunds on the map, at least in our small area of eastern New York State, and they demonstrated to skeptical observers, and the Fish and Wildlife people, that good dogs were capable of finding deer that could not be found by any other means.

Clary von Moosbach and her dam Carla vom Rode (Carla was imported from Germany in 1965)

Clary von Moosbach

Clary and Addie were products of random outcrosses to German studs belonging to a German war bride, who was widowed a few years after she came to live in the United States. It is mostly luck that both of these bitches were outstanding; they were naturals, and educated their owner/handlers in the art of tracking wounded deer. The problem was that Clary and Addie were never able to produce many offspring that were in their league in terms of ability. As is often the case with out-crossed dogs, the second and third generations did not have a concentration of the genes, which had made their parents great. Breeding the descendants of Clary with the descendants of Addie did not seem to produce a high percentage of good dogs either.

Don Hickman with Addie. Though best known for her tracking, Addie pushed this grey fox all around a brushy 50 acres until Don got his shot.

The breeders in Deer Search all went through a period of outcrossing to any wires from Germany that they could find. Our naïve thinking at the time was, “If it’s German, it’s got to be good.” Of course, many of the German dogs that we located around the country had been purchased as pets from German breeders who were trying to get rid of them to Americans who did not know any better. Generally, what was lacking in many of these pet dogs was a strong desire to track, combined with the calm steady temperament and patience needed to work out old, cold lines. Correct double coats tended to deteriorate from tough and wiry to soft and fluffy. Curiously, the size of the dogs went up as the quality was coming down. After two generations, almost of them were well over the 9 kilo (20 pound) German standard.

A myth prevailed within Deer Search that bitches were much better trackers than males. This seemed to be based on good evidence and experience, but almost no one tried seriously to evaluate or develop males. For the backyard breeders the male in a breeding really didn’t matter much. The best stud was simply the one closest in distance to your own house. Why not? Breeding dogs should be as simple as breeding rabbits.

By 1990 there were more than 75 German wirehaired dachshunds either tracking and running some rabbits or living in pet homes. Most of them were related, some pretty closely. Every dog, like every human, carries some undesirable recessive genes. Problems arise when the same undesirable genes come together from each of the parents of the litter. If the gene pool is small, the chances of that happening are greater. You get puppies, which actually have the defect because they got it from each of their recessive carrier parents.

In the case of the German wire colony in America a deadly genetic malady, osteogenesis imperfecta (O.I.), appeared. Puppies that manifested this disease had brittle bones because the collagen that held the bone material together had a molecular defect. Puppy teeth, when they came through the gums, were a translucent pink instead of a healthy white.

Translucent teeth are one of the symptoms of osteogenesis imperfecta.

These pups were usually incapable of living to maturity, and they were put down young as soon as a diagnosis was certain. As luck would have it, the recessive gene for O.I. came in from four or five different dogs imported from Germany. At the time, the Germans did not recognize the disease; they simply put down unthrifty puppies, which kept the disease under control. In recent years the Germans have taken serious steps to eliminate the breeding of dogs who have proved to be carriers of O.I. There is no way of eliminating all the carriers of O.I. because there is not way of identifying them until a DNA test is developed. However, in the United States puppies affected by the disease seldom appeared once we understood how it was transmitted.

This genetic problem did not seriously compromise the “old gene pool” of German wires in America. From a hunter/tracker’s point of view the weaknesses in temperament and “hunt” were more disturbing. Dogs in the third and fourth generation after the great founding bitches often had to be coaxed to track and sometimes they just didn’t want to do it. Desire, especially early desire, is strongly determined by genetics, and it just wasn’t there in many cases. I can remember working a veteran dog right behind a young underachiever. The idea was to get the young dog to track out of competitiveness, so that the old veteran wouldn’t have a chance to take over. Today, we don’t have to play these kinds of games.

Some of us sent bitches back to Germany to be bred to well advertised stud dogs with many tracking titles. We also formed a partnership to purchase a well-known and much-used German stud, whose owner subsequently had been challenged concerning the true pedigree of that dog. None of these steps really turned the situation around for us, although one son of the famous stud from Germany produced consistently well when bred to a certain bitch. This son, named Cato, was, 2½ times the weight of his little German sire and he did not track very well himself! However, bred to the right bitch, Cato produced some excellent dogs.

What we learned from our many experiences is that a great stud dog may or may not produce well from a certain bitch. It not just a matter of comparing strong working pedigrees, and putting the best together in a new litter. Breeding the “best” of what we had to the “best” that we could find, did not necessarily work. We found that you had to keep trying until you found what did work. That doesn’t sound very scientific, but it was much more effective than a theoretically perfect breeding on paper.

Our experience with one of our own bitches, a German import Gerte vom Dornenfeld, is typical of what we learned. Gerte came to America as the old German gene pool was dwindling. She was very intelligent and had an excellent nose; her weakness was a certain lack of toughness and drive. To preserve her good qualities and to improve on her weakness we bred her to two different studs of the old gene pool. The offspring were not as good as she was. Then my wife Jolanta, who is a trained geneticist, heard about a Czech-born wire owned by an old Czech tanner on Vancouver Island off the Pacific Coast of Canada. The Staccato kennel, from which “Zalud” came, was well known for producing very hard dogs for tracking and for underground work on the big East European foxes. We bred Gerte to Zalud, and this bitch, who had never produced anything special, produced the best litter we had bred up to that time. The pups became tough but careful workers very focused on the scent line. We shipped Gerte out a year later for a second breeding, which also produced well. The Zalud/Gerte breedings marked the transition from the old gene pool, which was dieing out, to the new, more successful dachshund gene pool that is expanding today.

"Gustav" (Zalud Staccato) in 1994. He was owned by George Krs who resided in British Columbia, Canada

Gerte was one of the key dachshunds of the genetic transition in the ‘90s. She bayed these two red foxes underground and then tracked the wounded buck, all in four hours.

The problems that we had could not all be blamed on our ignorance and backyard breeding practices. Underlying the history of breeding mistakes were personal tragedies that curtailed promising breeding experiments. For example the death of Don Hickman ended the activities of one of the most active and dedicated Deer Search breeders. There was no one to replace him. Don was also a superb handler, who could get more out of a dog than anyone else.

For tracking dog people there is something to be learned from this story of mistakes and bad luck with the first gene pool. It can happen again when small numbers of a European breed are imported and then interbred. At the beginning of this article we mentioned the Bavarian Mountain Hound. The new American breeders of this great hound seem a lot smarter than the tracking dachshund people were twenty years ago. But no doubt they will face problems similar to what we experienced. Here are some suggestions:

- Don’t believe that all dogs of a certain breed, or from a certain foreign country, are good ones. Unless you have excellent connections, you will not have the opportunity to buy the best. - You can get lucky with intelligent outcrosses, but it is hard to carry your good fortune into the following generations.
- Be aware of the pedigrees, the faults and the strengths of the dogs you use in your breeding program. This is especially important for minimizing the appearance of genetic defects. It will also give you a better chance of introducing the working qualities you are looking for.
- Never breed two dogs that have the same physical or psychological weaknesses.
- The best stud dog is not necessarily the one who lives closest to you.

In wirehaired dachshunds, it was the old gene pool that helped introduce the idea in America that a dachshund could be more than a companion dog and couch potato. As a group, these dogs did not entirely live up to their early promise. There were always some very useful dogs, but the percentage of good ones was not what we wanted. However, much was learned, and probably I was the one who learned the most. We’ll continue this story of tracking dachshunds in another installment.

Staying on the right line

by John Jeanneney, 199?

The hardest thing about tracking wounded deer is staying on the right line. Dogs get excited and confused just like we do sometimes, but they do have the ability to recognize other individual animals by scent just as they do people All cats and all coons don’t smell alike, and the same is true for deer. I didn’t read this in a book; my dachshunds taught me right in my own back yard.

At one time we owned a cat; I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but it was my daughter’s idea. I remember this cat named Hofstra well, mainly because she preferred the flower pots in our house to her kitty litter box. Aside from that she was plain as mud, sort of a gray tiger, and she looked pretty much like half the cats in the village. The dachshunds didn’t like her, but they learned to leave her alone. Even outside the house they never gave in to the temptation to do away with her.

One day I was working in the garden down below the house when I saw old Hofstra come prowling across the lawn. Then I realized it couldn’t be Hofstra because Hofstra was in the house. Anyway this cat was a dead ringer for Hofstra and dachshund Clary got fooled too…. until she trotted over and cut the cat’s trail. Then there was some fast action. I can’t remember all the details; it was so long ago, but it seems to me that the cat got the worst of it.

Then we had a baby “house coon” which grew up to become a yard coon that lived in an empty dog kennel. Her best buddy was our dachshund Oslo. Sometimes they would play pretty rough together, slamming one another around, but it was all in good fun. Oslo was a pretty good coon dog for a dachshund. He ran silent and treed hard .I saw him come in low on a big boar coon once and throw him right over on his back. But Oslo never tried this real rough stuff with our Cecily Coon. He knew the difference and never went for her when she roamed around the place. The two got along fine; she was not like an ordinary woods coon. All was bliss until Cecily came into heat, but that is another story.

This ability to discriminate comes in handy when a dog is tracking a deer.
I remember once we were tracking or trying to track a leg-hit deer in dry, dusty snow. We could see the tracks all right, but it was an averaged-sized deer running with a small herd of other average sized-deer; there was not enough track definition in the loose snow to tell which deer was which. Clary the tracking dachshund was the only one who knew what she was doing.

The tiniest drop of blood would have shown up on that pristine white snow, but there wasn’t any blood at all. One deer cut off and left the rest, and that was the one that Clary followed. Trust your dog! We followed and the long tracking leash kept us together. After a hundred yards we saw one drop of blood. Of course the dog knew the scent of that individual deer.

A tracking dog often has to deal with cross trails where a deer has been dragged out of the woods. Even young dogs learn to handle this pretty well. There was one case last year that was tougher than this.

Aunt Sabina dachshund was tracking behind her young nephew Alec. There was some tidying-up to be done, but basically we let the young dog do the work. I wrote a year ago about how disappointed Alec and the hunters all were when we tracked up to a still-warm pile of guts. It was from a paunch shot deer just like the one we had been tracking. The only one in our group who understood the situation was Sabina. She trailed past the pile of guts, went another 50 yards into real thick stuff, and there was the deer we had been trailing, also shot in the paunch.

I have one more pile of guts story, and then I’ll let you go. Years ago I was tracking with Clary, the best dog I ever had. We went out to find a deer that a buddy in my gun club had shot and lost track of the afternoon before. We got started on the line at first light, tracked about 300 yards and you guessed it; there was the pile, but no deer, and no drag marks. Dachshund Clary was the only one who could figure out what had happened. She tracked on through a big patch of cedar trees and into a trailer park. There was the deer hanging in a tree. It wasn’t a very big deer, and the finders-keepers boys had simply tied the legs together, strung it on a pole and carried it out on their shoulders.

John and Clary von Moosbach (1974-1985)

What I learned after school

© John Jeanneney, July 2008

For most of the natural world spring is the time of renewed energy and growth after the long winter lay-off. This is not the case for hunters. Fall is the time when everything comes together after a summer of preparation. My problem, during my working years, was that I could not take time off in the fall when it mattered most. I was a teacher; unfortunately, this meant that hunting and tracking with my dogs conflicted with my job. Teachers can’t take vacations during deer season. Like a coon hunter, I learned to get by without much sleep.

During the day when I wasn’t in the classroom, I would deer hunt, often sleeping in my stand, eyes closed with only my ears turned on. Some brain mechanism would sort through the woodland sounds, tuning out the intermittent leaf rustling of squirrels, but putting me on alert at the steadier cadence of a walking deer.

In the evening, well after dark and after the wounded deer call requests had come in, I would start tracking. The increased humidity of the night made scenting better for my tracking dog Clary. The adrenaline factor was a good substitute for sleep.

It was a good setup except for one thing. I worked in the suburbs of Long Island, one hundred miles from where I chose to live in upstate New York. Gas was cheap in those days, but the lost time hurt. Later on, books on tape alternated with Blue Grass music helped to fill the long hours of driving.

Sometimes I taught evening classes, and it was after one of these had just ended that a deer call was relayed to my office. I had my Clary and my equipment with me, and I soon was on my way through still-heavy suburban traffic, headed for my destination and the wounded deer eighty miles north. I was still quite new to the tracking game, and I had no one to give me advice. I was pretty excited because for me finding a deer for someone else was as important to me as shooting one for myself. Come to think of it, this is still true some 30 years later.

I met the hunter at the gates of a big estate where he had been given permission to hunt. He was an Old World Italian with a heavy accent, and he was quite agitated. He knew exactly the direction that the big doe had headed after the slug hit her, but there was no blood. Clary and I were his last desperate hope.

I buckled the tracking collar and leash on Clary at the hit site and started her off toward the north as the hunter urged me to do. Clary would have none of it. She wanted to go in the other direction. I had driven all this way, and now she wouldn’t cooperate. I insisted; Clary insisted. After the third try, I gave up and let her do her own thing. Very sure of herself, Clary went about 150 yards through thick cover, and there was the deer. Trust your dog!

Dogs aren’t always right, but they are much more likely to be right than excited humans. Some dogs will just shut down when overruled by a human with his pitifully weak nose. Clary was a good and patient teacher who didn’t give up on her inexperienced and unbelieving handler. Her patience inspired me then in the woods and later in the classroom.

There was great joy as we gutted out the deer. My pleasure in the hunter’s happiness erased my own feelings of incompetence. What closed the deal was the old hunter’s reaction as he pulled forth the liver. He held it and admired it. Then he sank his teeth into that warm, raw liver without benefit of tomato sauce.


John
and
Clary
1977