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Bluetick Fish-HoundDifferent people may have their praises for different dog breeds, but this I know: Coonhounds can hunt anything. I can doubt it no longer. ANYTHING. I mean it. Byron is of the larger strain of Bluetick, the kind they call Big Blues in the eastern United States. I'm not sure how he got there, but my wife and I rescued the poor guy from the local SPCA. At five months, he was all legs and head, barely able to run ten yards without tripping over his own feet. But the nose keeps him going--the nose is always there, telling him where to go even when his feet are at all points of the compass. We bring him out around a nearby nature reserve, letting him cut loose to chase whatever it is that we're always too late to see by the time we catch up with him. At one point we stayed out late, strolling along the river bank in the near-darkness. Byron was putzing around in the shallow water, trying to figure out why the river always feels so wet. Often, I just throw him in the water (I can't stand dogs that don't like water--I can't help it; I grew up with labs), but by now, he was starting to learn that there are no sharks in the river. I decided to leave him be. My wife and I were admiring the crimson of sun on the water (ah, pollution creates such colorful sunsets), when she noticed that Byron was obsessing over something. She sprang toward him. "Hon," she cried, "he's eating some dead thing!". Being male (and thus less swift), I merely groaned. I had already spent hours suffering from Murphy's Oil Soap exposure and great wife-hostility after Byron had anointed himself in the carcass of a rotten carp found among the reeds (and to top it off, he had the gall to be pissed off at me for washing away his hard-earned scent!). As my wife wrestled with the dog...."Byron, leave it! Jeezus! Oh, no!...Hon, you're cleaning it up if...", I just prayed. I prayed lots of things within that brief sliver of time. I prayed, of course, that Byron had merely found a tasty stick. I also prayed that he hadn't had time to roll in whatever garbage he had found. But I think that mostly I prayed that my wife would not leave me for bringing great fish stink into our lives. Then I was shocked when my wife called out something totally unexpected. I think, actually, she had to say it twice. "Hon, come here. Look at this." Her voice, of all things, was wonderstruck. I went to see. Near a part of the river bank, the edge formed a sort of inky pool. I could see Byron, nearly up to the armpits in it, focusing on something. There was a great deal of splashing as he pawed the water. "What's he pawing at?" I asked, peering around my wife, "A stick? If he wants another stick, you'd think he be smart enough to just grab one from--". "No," my wife cut in, "it's not a stick. Look!" No, no, it's impossible, I thought--a dog can't do that. A dog isn't SUPPOSED to do that. Doesn't it break some kind of physical law? But, yeah, he had caught a fish. I didn't even want to believe it, except that the fish was still alive and wriggling in his mouth. It was a bass, about ten inches long, all shiny and pale in the fading sunlight. As we watched, he dropped it back in (probably not knowing what to do with it). Then he began to track something THROUGH the water. A few quick flashes of the right paw and the fish was cornered against the shore again. His head dipped in and came out with an unharmed bass. It must have tasted like hell, because he looked sort of miserable, and turned toward us as though to say, "Do YOU want it?" We started praising him. What else could we do? Tell him not to fish? Now that I think about, my fishing license is expired. If my dog catches a bass, does that make me a poacher? I guess he got pretty proud of himself, because he dropped the bass and started up his long, inimitable bawl of triumph--right at the water under his nose. Even if I get abducted by aliens, I'll still consider this one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. I'll just look those aliens right in the eye and say, "Don't bother trying to shock me. MY dog caught a fish." I think we just stood around stunned for a while. It was a few minutes before I broke the silence, asking, "So does this make him a Bluetick Fish-hound?" So, today, I can say with confidence that I KNOW coonhounds can hunt anything (Byron is currently trying to help me catch crayfish, but that doesn't work too well for him--oh well, it's the thought that counts). Do I let him continue to catch bass? No, I don't. I'm waiting until I can head a little further up north, maybe rent a cabin by the lakeside like my family used to do when I was a boy. There are some pretty large lakes up there. I can hardly wait to try him out on pike.  |
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