Full Cry Column
July 2003

Clint Stubbe (Northern Working Airedale Terrier Association correspondent)

It is the beginning of May as I put this together and spring is in full bloom. The saskatoon bushes are in blossom and the early flowers are out but best of all at this time of year the mosquitoes aren't.
I took the family and a couple dogs camping up to a mountain lake where the snow was just off the ground and though the weather was marginal at best we had a great time. Spring had yet to arrive here except in the hearts of birds and toads. Toads had gathered by the hundreds in the shallows along the lake. At one spot at least thirty pairs had congregated in an area of one square meter and the kids spent hours catching and releasing toads, and frogs and marveling at the numerous eggs that covered the shallows like strings of tiny pearls. The birds were also having a case of spring fever and for a small lake this one seemed to just about have it's quota filled with mallards, mergansers, Canada geese, osprey, eagle and loons in evidence. Although black and white is not the best palette to create a beautiful work of art with the common loon does wonderfully well with such a meager selection and nothing quite says wilderness as the mournful call of a loon on a still mountain lake.

Prior to bear season this year I have spent some time shed antler hunting and found several but nothing of real note except at one small clearing where I stepped out and immediately spotted a nice six point elk antler. It was a left side and I had not walked ten steps when I spotted another, which turned out to be last years, a left side also.

THREE YEARS OF ANTLER

Another half hour of searching that small area turned up a left side from two years previous fairly chewed but still worth packing out. I believe all three were from the same elk and it seemed remarkable that an elk would be in the same very small sunny opening among many precisely when his antlers dropped three years running especially when he had a whole drainage to be in but what is more amazing is that only the left sides were here. I have toyed with the idea of trying to train one of my dogs to locate sheds but haven't started and don't know how successful I would be as a shed antler can't hold much in the way of scent.

Around here I have learned not to waste too much time or gas looking for bear much before May first regardless of the weather or lack of snow but I did take my wife out for a drive towards the end of April just to have a look and the dogs struck on a bear in a low elevation clear cut. I egged them on and got them good and excited but I decided not to run them that day. Several days later I took my step daughters Tamara and Natasha who are twelve and ten respectively out to the same area to see what we could find. We spotted several mule deer licking minerals along the road and had reached the end of the road where we had spotted the bear previously without seeing anything to chase. We stopped for a minute at the end of the road to glass some deer heading up through the clear cut when we saw a bear hit the woods on the far side. I had Buzz (hound) and Airedales Lulu, Grizz, Bar and Ursa along and turned them out as fast as I could get them collared and gone except for Ursa who is under a year old, her we would walk in on a leash if the bear treed. We didn't have long to wait when Buzz let us know they had hit him and not long afterward we could hear solid treeing from not too far away. Now a small ten year olds legs don't cover ground too quickly but the girls made short work of what was less than a kilometer hike and were rewarded by finding a nice black bear treed in a big old pine. After letting the dogs tree for a bit I left it up to Tamara as to whether she would take him or not and she elected to and dropped him out with a perfect shot from an old 303 Lee Enfield with peep sights. She was very calm up to the shot but almost broke into tears of sheer excitement afterwards. This was her first big game animal but from all indications not her last. She loves hunting and fishing and dogs and I envy the young fellow who gets her for a partner in a few years.
Skinning the bear was a chore as he was on a very steep side hill but with the girl's help I got him skinned out and the meat packed up and back to the truck in a couple hours. The bear was a decent boar just over five feet with a beautiful coat and was fresh out of the den. We got a good amount of sausage out the meat, which the kids devour as fast as we will cook it up.

TAMARA AND NATASHA AT THE TREE

Bears are pretty amazing creatures. They are large powerful creatures but at the same time are extremely quick and agile. I have seen a large treed bear jump from one tree over to another in a move that was more akin to a monkey than an animal that spends most of it's time on the ground. I also watched a bear through a survey transit at work one summers day making it's way towards us which was not remarkable in itself but the fact that the bear was walking up upon the four inch rail and looking from side to side while apparently paying absolutely no attention at all to the concerns of balancing on the rail was pretty impressive. If you've ever walked the rails it isn't as easy as he made it seem by a long shot. I guess the steel rail was cooler and easier on the feet than the tar and rock ballast which lined the rail bed. Anyone who has ran many bears can attest to the fact that they are built for endurance as well as speed and if a bear doesn't want to tree it will take more dogs than I have to make him. Bears are omnivores and while armed with the impressive canines and claws of a carnivore they are happy to munch greenery and dig roots although a spring fawn would definitely be on the menu and I have called them in with nothing more than a blade of grass held between the thumbs and blown on to emit a squeak. Their diet is probably widely varied but cow parsnip seems to be a favourite as is tree cambium and skunk cabbage in the very early spring. I have never tried tasting skunk cabbage but the oxalic crystals in it are said to give an intense burning sensation if eaten. This doesn't seem to bother the bears nor apparently do the sting of wasps. In some areas of the bush many digs are obvious where the ground nests of yellow jackets were located and dug up for the juicy larvae. How they locate them I don't know but they seem very efficient at it and few are missed which is fine by me. If you've ever stood on a nest while occupied with other things it is surprising how fast you can go from zero to sixty regardless of how tired you may be. I have a little story of wasps, a rock pile and a bathroom break but won't share that here. I will say that impressive speeds can be reached even with your pants at your ankles :). Bears are not true hibernators but they have some amazing adaptations to allow them to spend almost half of the year in a deep sleep during which they take in no food or water and release no wastes. What is truly amazing is that they awake from this dormant period as strong and vigorous as when they went in. I don't know if you have ever suffered an injury that caused you to lose the use of a limb for some period of time but it is surprising how quickly muscle atrophies and bone loss soon follows. Bears are unaffected by an entire winter of immobility and come out of the den thinner but as muscular as they were upon entry.

TAMARA'S FIRST BEAR

Al Kranbuhl of New York sent me an email regarding his dogs and a new pup he has acquired.

"Hi Clint, hope things are well with you and your family. This past winter has been just about as bad as they get around these parts and I am seriously thinking about moving to a place with a little bit better climate, at least in the snowfall department. Winter snows here shut down just about everything for several months resulting in my opinion too much wasting of time for man and dogs both. As I was telling you in previous conversations that I had bought a new pup to bring into my line. I had been looking for several years for the right dog for my type of hunting and I think I have done well. The pup is a male and is from very good hunting bloodlines, his dad is Ch. Moraine Prime Minister MHV, his call name is Winston. I investigated this dog pretty well and he is quite the Airedale, he is a show champion of note which really does not mean too much to me personally, what made me take notice was that he is a very good all around hunting dog. He was I believe to be the first Airedale to earn Master Hunter titles in all three areas of expertise as to the ATCA hunt tests, upland bird, retrieving and fur. Winston is owned by Sandy Cooley of Wisconsin, one thing of a sad note is Winston had to be neutered because of medical problems so there will be no more pups out of him, which is a shame. As good as Winston is, the mother of this pup is what really caught my attention, her name is Daisy and is owned by Michelle Schenneker who is also from Wisconsin. Daisy is one of few heavy Mooreland bred dogs left today and you know me if there is something that will get my attention fast it is a Mooreland Airedale. The best hunting Airedales I have owned were of the Mooreland strain and I have tried to maintain some of that blood in my dogs. Over the years it becomes more and more diluted and if this pup turns out like I expect he should carry my program about as far as I will be able to go. I have named the pup Buddy Rex 2 and even though I have had him only a few days he has got me excited. Even though his dad is a show champion Rex would be laughed at by show people as he is a typical Mooreland in his looks, in fact he looks almost like my first Mooreland I purchased in the Sixties who was Rex 1 and the best hunting dog I ever owned period. Rex has those heavy houndy ears one would see in many of the Moorelands and he is going to be big. I have already been doing some preliminary tests with him and I like what I am seeing.
I have been just doing simple stuff such as lead training, loading into the dog box and riding around and walks in the field and correcting any behavior I do not like, just trying to get them to handle well. I did catch a coon I will start with my dogs. I am not in too much of a hurry with this as our running season doesn't open until July 1 and I like to get the dogs in the woods as quick as possible after they are started. I am pleased with everything so far, I am also liking my young TJ better and better every day, he got his first clip and he is a real nice looking pup, I would say he is around sixty lbs and has great movement. Rex is getting huge, even though he is four months younger than TJ he is already as tall and outweighs him by at least ten lbs, he might end up being the biggest Airedale I have ever owned, I call him the Diesel. So far he has shown to have great instincts and his nose is exceptional. I have not been this excited about young dogs in quite some time and I sure got my work cut out for me.
Al"

Thanks for the email Al.
Similar to Al I don't really rush a dog into hunting and prefer to let them grow and build confidence while working on the simple things. I am lucky in that I have a job that allows me to bring my dogs to work in the bush with me where they can really enjoy themselves treeing squirrels, chasing rabbits, not chasing deer, fetching sticks and just becoming good companion bush dogs, which is the first step in my opinion to becoming good pleasurable hunting dogs. Once they have mastered just getting around in the rough terrain and backtracking to my location after chasing something I am much more comfortable cutting them loose on a bear where they may have a long way to return if they get messed up at a creek crossing and get separated from the pack. I think that extra time spent one on one with young dogs pays dividends for years down the road.

I also received another letter from Max Searls of McLeese Lake BC who ran a guiding operation there for many years and ran Airedales for bear and cougar. Max wrote:
"This story tales place in late may in the late eighty's. I had guided a few hunters for bear earlier in the year but they had finished up and I had none at this time. I also ran a trap line and could take bear as a fur animal as a lot of trappers did. Early in the day I worked on one of my trails and then headed home in the afternoon.
I spotted a small bear and turned my Airedales Emma and Bill loose, they were mother and son. They put him up in short order and I took him. I got him back to the truck and headed down the road just over a mile and there stood a big brown bear. As I shot he was moving and I just got him low in the brisket and the off shoulder. He didn't go down so I put the dogs on him and they caught him in a half-mile. After cleaning him out I decided to go home and eat supper and return with a pack board and meat sacks as he looked like a good one to eat.
After eating I returned and immediately Emma and Bill went crazy. I got them settled down and went in to the kill. I set my 30-30 against a tree and started to skin the bear, which was laying about fifteen feet away. I was about half done when who Emma was between me and my rifle let out a deep growl. At about the same time I heard a bear coming and when you've been around a lot of bears there is no mistaking the sound. I was bent over skinning and looked over my shoulder and it was coming hard fifty feet away. At the same time Emma jumped over me brushing me hard and Bill was right behind her. They turned the bear and finally put it up a big fir tree. When I got there it was slobbering and growling and it was very angry. I shot it out and later figured out what had happened. This was a big sow close to six feet and I had taken her two year old and she was mad as a hornet. She had followed my pickup up to where I had taken the second bear and was there when I returned. Now I think those dogs saved my life.

CORKY, EMMA AND A HAPPY HUNTER

By the time Bill was three years old he would tree four out of five bears over six feet. The only Airedale I ever saw that could tree most of the big ones alone.
Here is a tip for people that spend a lot of time in the bush and mountains. When dry wood is hard to find stack your wet wood on the campfire before hitting the sack. When you get up the wood will be charred and maybe even a little warm and will start much more easily the next day.
Max Searls."

Sounds like a close shave and lucky for Max he had a couple faithful Airedales checking his six while he was occupied. Max sent me a picture of his Airedales Corky (left) and Emma (right) with a happy hunter and a nice tom treed by his dogs. Max also makes knives and sent along a beautiful handmade Bowie in exchange for some elk antler, which he will use for knife handles. Max if your reading this, thanks it's a beauty.

Billy Harkins of Georgia is also no stranger to knives as his latest letter demonstrates.

"Clint I had been hearing some stories about a big hog that had been killing bulldogs right and left for some time now in an area close to my house. There are some younger boys getting into the sport of hog hunting and this old hog was giving them an education from the sound of things.
One of the stories that I heard was they bayed him up with a bay dog and when they turned their catch dogs in on him the old hog just dropped the bulldogs dead in their tracks. Then he ran their bay dog down and killed it and ran the boys out of the woods too. They shot him two or three times with a twenty-two pistol but it didn't even seem to bother the old hog.

I had gotten permission from the landowner to hunt a 500 acre tract where the hog had been ranging so I started scouting for him.
Well it didn't take long to find hog sign because half of the land was nothing but a big brier patch with a creek running right through the middle of it. It did however take three weeks for me to finally to get up with the big boar because I could only hunt on Saturdays because of my workload. The first Saturday I started out about six in the morning and found fresh sign but my dogs couldn't find a hog. The dogs that I had were hot nosed dogs for the most part and I new I would just have to figure out what time they were coming through. I know that hogs will travel a long ways sometimes from where they bed down to where they feed and I wanted to time it to where I could catch him on the property that I was hunting.
The next time that I got to go my hunting buddy Frank Queen had gotten a new plott hound and we both were anxious to see how he would do. So we went out Friday night from about nine till eleven o'clock and didn't do any good other than to tree one coon.
Well I figured that he had to be coming in the briar patch between twelve and five am. My cousin Ben Hooper came over Friday evening and I told him about the hog that we were trying to catch. He told me that he had a young pit that he wanted to try out so I told him to bring it the next morning and we would give him a try. I figured the more help the merrier.
I got up about four AM and Ben got to my place around four thirty and we met Frank at the property around five AM.
Ben said that he had only gotten about an hour's sleep that night and I was still trying to rub the sleep out of my own eyes when we pulled up at the briar patch. I figured that the cool morning air and the sweet smell of honey suckle would wake me up after we got to walking. We unloaded the dogs and we already had cut vests and tracking collars on them so we would be ready to go when we dropped the tailgate. We kept my Airedale (Steel) and Ben's pit bull on leads and just turned Boozer ( my cur/ bull dog cross ) and Homer, Franks plott loose. I guess we had walked about sixty yards or so and started to cross the branch and found where the big hog had just crossed in the same direction. I pointed them out to Frank and Ben and we crossed on over the branch hoping that the dogs would pick up the track. I could tell that the hogs were traveling up and down the branch and that is what we had planed to do, just walk the dogs till they could get up with them.

BILLY HARKINS (centre) AND FRIENDS

Boozer crossed the branch with us and headed up through a marshy area and so we stopped to listen for a minute.
It wasn't a second till he set in baying every breath about sixty yards or so up the branch from us. We got to looking for Homer to come on across the branch and join in. I could tell that Boozer was excited and baying harder than he usually does. I heard him hit the hog one time and you could tell that it was a good hog cause he went back to baying just as hard. Well Homer came by us just a getting it and shot up through the marsh to get in on the action. Steel was about to jerk me down so we busted out towards the hog to get as close as we could before we turned them loose. It was still not light enough to see and as soon as we got in the marsh it slowed us down a bit. Ben and I turned Steel and his bulldog loose and all of a sudden I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. We heard them hit the hog about thirty yards from us and all you could hear was terrible thrashing taking place.
The hog broke and went another thirty yards or so till it hit the branch. Wading through the mud and the briars it seemed like it was taking me forever to get to them. The closer we got the thicker the briars got. We finally got to the branch and the hog had drug the dogs across the branch and in under a blown over stump on the opposite bank.
The branch and the stump were both carpeted over in thick briars and wild rose bushes. The creek bank dropped off about three or four feet and the water was about two feet deep. I new that the dogs were in grave danger and I had to get in and help them out as soon as I could. So I jumped in and worked through the briars and vines till I got to the other side. I tried to climb up out of the creek and get on top of the stump to get to them but I couldn't get a foothold. Ben was in the branch with me now and Frank had gotten there and was shining his light from the bank so we could see better.
I told Ben to just climb up over me and see if he could get up on top of the stump and cut a hole down through the briars and stick the hog. He tried and just couldn't cut through the briers. It was taking too long and I knew that something had to give pretty quick or we would have some dead dogs. The creek was grown over real thick with briars and it was hard for me to move around and I didn't want the hog to come back out in the water with me. Finally against my better judgment I started cutting me a hole through the briers to where I could get to them. When I got to where I could see in the farther I looked the more hog I could see. As luck would have it the hog was facing directly away from me and it had its back wedged up against the bank. It was all most like a little cave that he had crawled into with just enough room for the hog to turn around in and it was filled up now.
As I looked in I could see that the dogs were cut up but still giving it all that they had. Ben's bulldog had a mouth full of ear and Steel had the hog by the nose and Boozer had him caught by the other ear. I held my wheat light in my teeth and crawled in and got the hog's tail with my left hand to hold in case he tried to turn around. Then I just crawled on in till I could get to his shoulder and stick him good. It didn't even seem to faze the old hog so I kept on cutting. He was a tough old bird and didn't seem to want to give up. Finally I got tired of him cutting my dogs and got both hands on his tail and went to dragging till I got him out to where I could get my hands on him. I got him out in the branch and Ben jumped down in the water with me and went to sticking him on the other side while I held him by his tail. The old hog still didn't want to give up so Ben got up on his shoulders and held him under the water till he drowned him out.
Man what a fight the old hog put up! And all four of the dogs couldn't have done any better.
As soon as the rodeo was over we had to check out the dogs and see what shape they were all in. Ben's dog took several cuts in the chest and a nasty one in his left shoulder. Steel just missed getting his eye cut out and took a good lick in the shoulder and neck and it nearly ripped out one of his upper K-9s.
Boozer got a cut in his neck but not too bad and luckily Franks plot didn't get any wounds.
It just was getting daylight so we tied the dogs and I headed back and got the truck. It doesn't happen this way very often but I was able to drive the truck right up to the edge of the creek bank and we didn't have to drag him more than twenty yards.
I knew that he was a good- sized hog so we took him and had him weighed on the scales and he weighed in at 280 pounds.

Billy"

Just goes to show that some folks really do, do more before six a.m. then others do all day. That sounds like a hunt that will stick in the mind for a while and it's good that no man or dog got beat up too badly. I don't know how much more damage Steel can sustain before he just falls apart at the seams. He's kind of like the Eveready bunny on steroids.

Well that's it for this month. I sure do appreciate the Airedale reports I received this month. Please feel free to send Kevin or I any stories of Airedales past or present.

The quote of the month is: "We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills and winding streams with tangled growth as "wild." Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery." - Chief Luther Standing Bear

As Henry Johnson always said: "Until next month, let me hear from you Airedale people and don't forget to put your arms around those black and tan dogs with the beards and the moustaches and talk to them. They are people dogs and family members.
Respectfully submitted, Clint Stubbe, Northern Corresponding Secretary for the Working Airedale Terrier Association. No rules, regulations, officers, dues or formal affiliations. It's more a state of mind.