<-back to articles

Gone Without A Trace

by Harvey Cain :: Featured: July, 2003

Each time we drop the tailgate, open the dog box and let the hounds out for a hunt, we are taking a chance of never seeing them again. We can only hope that they will hunt close, come when called and never be left in the woods. We have that hope, but the truth is that losing one of our hunting buddies can, has and will happen. If you have been training and hunting dogs for a number of years you may have had to deal with this problem. There must be steps we can take to prevent our dogs from being gone without a trace.

Proper training is needed first and foremost to keep our hounds working together as a team. When they hunt with you and pack together chances are that they will be close when it is time to load up and head home. Basic obedience training will ensure they handle well in the field. You need to know your hounds and they need to know and respond to your voice. This training should start early when they are just pups. It would be nice if every dog in your pack was a graduate form obedience school, but they don’t have to know how to heal, sit and stay. They do need to know the meaning of “Down” and “Here or Come”. I don’t ever hope to call an experienced dog off a hot trail, but if I get in their path and they can see me I do expect them to stop and drop when I say “Down”. You may want to stop them from crossing a road or from entering a restricted area. In either case they should learn to stop where they are and wait for you to come to them. Some use of the E-collar may be needed to obtain the desired results.

I like for my dogs to hunt within two hundred yards of me. If the terrain is rolling hills or if the wind is howling, I like to keep them in a little closer. Some hunters may want a dog to range out farther, but I think they should be in the same general area where I am hunting. I have a loud voice that can normally be heard for 1000 feet or more. If the dogs are not in hot pursuit, they should come when I call. I like to decide the direction of the hunt and would like to be close to the action when it starts. I am all for a rabbit that takes the pack for a quarter mile run. Baring any hard lose they will soon be back with the rabbit a short distance ahead of them.

It is always best when dogs hunt together as one pack. There will be times when you end up in a covey of rabbits and more than one race may transpire. This is hard to control and to some extent may be counter productive. You may not have enough guns to cover all the action. When this happens I try to decide which race is the most promising. I normally pick the one with the most dogs running. When possible I will pull the dogs off the other rabbits and back to the main pack. This helps to keep the focus of hounds and hunters all on the same rabbit. When there is a kill, you can then look around and see if all dogs are present. With all hounds accounted for, I then move the dogs back to where I stopped the solo or brace race to try and pick up the rabbit’s trail.

There will be those hardhead hounds that seem to always want to do their own thing. They may have gotten too old to keep up or they may not have the talent or desire to run with your pack. It may be best to cull those hounds that cannot or will not stay with the pack. They may do better with a slower bunch of hounds. Some older hounds may need to be retired to lighter duties of running solo or training pups. I guess we can say, “The pack that stays together gets to go home together.”

The hounds that will not stay with the pack will cause you some grief and aggravation. When you are ready to go they are nowhere to be found. You call and call and they don’t come. You wait for a while. You call some more. Finally you give up and go home. At some point you return to call and wait some more. If you are lucky after a couple of trips your little hold out hound will appear, ready for a ride home. Depending on how attached you may be, you could want to kiss them or shoot them. Some dogs may be gone for days or weeks. Some will be lost forever. Some you may discover their fate. Others you will never know what became of them.

A number of years back, when our area was sparsely populated, I could swing open the dog pen gates and let them all out for a run. One warm September evening, I turn out six fine hounds. They soon had a rabbit up and running. They had this rabbit in high gear for more than an hour as it circled a large thicket just below my house. They were sounding good, but it was quite warm and getting dark, so I started to catch them. My activity broke up the race and the sound of that pack in full cry was replaced by the sound of silence. Five of the six hounds were soon caught and back in their pens. The last hound out was a little bitch named PeeWee. I called but she did not respond. I could not understand where she could have gone. Later that night I was out looking for her but she was gone without a trace. I spent the next several days riding the roads, checking with neighbors and just wondering where she could be. A situation like this generates too many questions and not enough answers. Where could she have gone? Did someone take her? Is she hurt or maybe dead? A week later I was on my way back to the dog pens when I smelled something that I recognized as a dead animal. I followed my nose to the source of the smell and found PeeWee just 30 feet off into the brush. She was swollen to about three times her normal size and there were a swarm of flies and bees on her remains. The smell was so bad that I could not examine her for snakebites or any other injury. I wrapped my face with a wet towel before I could put her into a bag and bury her. It could have been the heat. It could have been a snake. PeeWee could have died from a number of causes. The only sure thing is, she died doing what she loved to do. Dogs come and go but PeeWee will long be remembered for the special way she opened on a track or declared a loose to be found. She would hop up on her back legs and bark with her head up. It was like she was barking at the moon. It was a sweet little “YoYoYoYooooooo….”

As we said a number of things could have caused the death of good old PeeWee. May have been heat exultation, heart failure or maybe a rattler. If a deadly snake was the cause of her premature death, what if anything could have been done to prevent this. You may say that running dogs when snakes are on the prowl is a bad idea.
In the deep south you would have to keep your dogs out of the woods for nine or ten months out of the year to insure they don’t run upon a snake. Since that is not acceptable then what can be done? I spent time this spring providing each of my little hounds Snake Avoidance Training. Using non-poisons king and rat snakes and a recording of a rattler I introduced each of my hounds to the smell, site and sound of a snake. Those that showed any interest were given a hard shock from the E-Collar. After several sessions most of them now show no interest in old Mr. No Shoulders. This training is nowhere near perfect but there is a chance that it just might help to prevent a curious hound from investigating the sound, site or smell of a snake. It could be just what is required to insure all dogs are accounted for at the end of a days hunt.

Penny was gone without a trace...

Knowing the fate of little PeeWee gave me some peace of mind. I have lost a number of little hounds that I never knew what become of them. They were just gone without a trace. While hunting an Army training area I lost an older hound that was just like a member of the family. This area was open to hunting, but had an A-10 firing range near by. Every time we have hunted this area, we have had to endure the sound of the planes as they circled a few hundred feet over-head. You could hear the heart stopping noise of the planes firing off hundreds of rounds into a target area nearby. We have always hoped they don’t receive orders to shoot at orange hats. Then there was some concern that they would accidentally fire off a burst into our area. This trip we did not have any planes in the area. The thick over cast must have kept them away. The clouds were rolling and the wind was picking up. When we finally decided that we should go home, the wind was blowing and howling at about 20 plus miles per hour. We had all the dogs loaded except Penny. She was ten years old and one of the best rabbit jumping hounds to ever hit the woods. She never wanted to quit. We could hear her fine little bugle voice between each howling gust of wind. It seemed she was just down the hill. Knowing she would not quit the rabbit and come to me, I went to her. As I moved down the hill, I could no longer hear her. She may have lost the rabbit or maybe she is over the next little ridge. I kept looking and calling but Penny was gone without a trace. I waited until way after dark, hoping the wind would lie down or she would find her way to me. I finally gave up and drove the more than 50 miles home. I was back before daybreak the next morning. I spent the better part of the next day looking for Penny. She was not to be found. Every afternoon for the next week I drove that 100 mile round trip in hopes of finding Penny.
I will always wonder what became of this fine little hound.

Some loses are seemingly unpreventable. No amount of training or preparation can ensure a dog will not be lost. Some situations do contribute to dogs becoming lost. One such situation is when dogs run deer. This is a good reason for not keeping or hunting with combo dogs. Combo dogs are those that will run rabbits one minute and deer the next. Deer like to take off and may run for miles. They will take a willing dog across streams, thru private lands and down busy roads. When the dog breaks off the race he may be many miles and many obstacles away. Most serious rabbit hunters have gone the way of the E-Collar or other training methods to break their hounds from running deer. A deer running hound will disrupt your rabbit hunting activity and will keep you busy looking for them. The best plan here is to break them or cull them and hope that those you hunt with do the same.
When your dog strays away from you they will most likely run into people. That is one of the problems of a modern day hunter, not enough woods and too many people. Some people have good intentions while others do not. On more than one occasion I have spent the day out looking for a dog that someone had picked up and taken home. I would get home to find a message on the phone that my dog was safe at someone’s house 30 miles the other side of where I had been hunting. I have considered putting “Do Not Pickup” on my collars, but that may not always be best. There have been a few times when someone picking up a dog was very helpful, but most of the time I would have found my little lost hound sooner if they had been left alone.

I have had the unfortunate experience of hunting in an area heavily invested with deer hunters. What normally happens is we are in a section of government land when a group of deer hunters move in on top of us. They are quick to tell you that you are in their spot. The problem comes when they pick up several of your dogs and haul them around for the rest of the day. This forces you to stop hunting and start searching for your dogs. About dark when the deer hunters are busy catching their hounds, they will turn you dogs out and they will come trotting down the road fresh after sleeping all day in some dog box. While I am sure this must happen, I have been lucky enough to not catch one of these so called sportsman in the act. I am always happy when deer season comes to a close and even then I try to hunt in secluded areas far away from houses, roads and people.

My brother likes to tell a story about the Delta Dog Snatchers. Now he has been known to stretch or embellish a story just a bit each time he tells it. One version of this story is that he was hunting along the edge of the Mississippi Delta. I am not sure what the dogs were after, but they ended up some distance ahead of him. When he came out of the woods into a large plowed field, he saw his dogs being loaded into the back of a car. The car was in front of an old shotgun house about ¼ mile across the field. Realizing his dogs were about to be gone without a trace, he turned and ran back thru the woods to his truck. He took off down the dirt road at top speed. When he reached the house the car and his dogs were gone. As he rolled out of the truck with his snake-shooting pistol strapped to his side, an older woman stepped to the door. My brother, who I know can be hot headed, demanded to know who was in the car and where did they go. The woman did not hesitate to tell him everything he wanted to know. He knew the neighborhood she described. He took the back roads and drove at top speed trying to beat the dog snatchers home. When he turned down the street where they lived, the car was already parked in front of a rundown house. Several tall lanky young men were on the porch and several more were in the yard. He climbed out of the truck with his gun strapped to his side. He announced that he was there to get the dogs that they had just picked up in the Delta. They told him they did not have any dogs. With that said, he proceeded to a small shed behind the house. He pulled the door open and low and behold there was his four dogs along with three others. He recognized one of the three and knew the man it belonged to. He loaded his dogs and the other three into his dog box. He told this bunch of dog snatchers that they would do well to stay out of the Delta or any other place he may choose to hunt. He returned one dog to the man he knew and he advertised and was able to find the true owner of one of the others.

As a closing note, I must say that as long as we continue to turn our little hounds out to hunt the woods in search of Mr. Bunny, there is a real chance that they may not return to us. They may end up hurt or even dead. Some will be picked up by good, honest folks, who will make effort to return them. Others will fall into the hands of some sorry no good heathen that would steal the nickels off a dead man’s eyes.

I do not have any personal experience with the tracking devices that are now available. They may very well be an excellent solution to this whole problem. I tend to believe that the high cost of the receiver along with multiple collars may be justified for distance running deer dogs or expensive coon dogs. For now I am going to continue to train my hounds to pack up and to hunt with me. When one refuses to be part of the team I will with some regret find them another home.

Someday, when you are sitting on your dog box waiting for a lost hound, you may want to sing a song I have sang so many times before. Sing loud and they may just hear you. “Where oh where did my little dog go, oh where oh where did he go?”

He Is Gone Without A Trace.