Full Cry Column
Sept 2001

Clint Stubbe (Northern Working Airedale Terrier Association correspondent)

It’s been a brief hot summer with not too much for the dogs to do.  One of the nice things about owning a multi-purpose dog is that you can do things with it in the off season.  Going to beach and tossing sticks is a great way for a dog to burn off some energy and keep cool at the same time.  I had an enjoyable spring  treeing some bear and watching the dogs get better each time.  I should have taken a bear for the dogs but didn’t as that is a good way to spoil a nice bear hunt.  I have enclosed a picture of the dogs on a bear tree.  The blur in the picture is Lulu five weeks pregnant at the time.  By the time this is printed I should hopefully have sold the pups except for the ones I may keep and Lulu should be back in shape for another fall and winter.  She handles a litter quite well and while some Airedales look like they have gone through the wringer after a litter because their coat goes to pot her hard short coat shows no decline.

Laurie Macrae from Washington emailed about some pups but in the end decided to drive down to California with Bob McClellan where she picked up two nice males from Don Turnipseed.  Laurie is a wildlife officer in Washington state and plans to use the dogs on problem bear in her work.

Bob McClellan has been busy this summer cataloguing and scanning photos and has placed many of them into a personal website/photo album.  This is a great way to share pictures with everyone no matter how much distance separates you.  Check it out at http://communities.msn.com/BackcountryRamblinwithBobMc/_whatsnew.msnw

Billy Harkins had some bad news to share the other day.  He wrote

“Steel and Lucy got cut down by a big boar Hog Saturday.

Lucy came back to me but Steel went deep into the swamp and we could not get him till Sunday morning. He was laying where the hog cut him down in a big brier patch. I had to leave him in Sandersvill GA. at the vet. I hope to get him this weekend if he is able to come home. Lucy came back and I sewed her back up cause she had two nasty cuts in her ribcage with her lungs showing but thank the good lord the lung wasn’t punctured. She is doing good now but I haven’t even seen Steel yet. My hunting buddy had gotten him out and taken him to the vet, he said that he was in bad shape but was still alive and that it was going to be a while till he mended. All I know about his condition is that he was cut all over and that he had ripped out his lower left K-9.”

He emailed me again the next day

“Steel took a hard lick this last Saturday and looks like he won’t be the same dog he was when I last saw him due to the injuries the he received.  I talked to the vet this morning and he said that Steel was cut all over his body and had his lower left K-9 pulled out. The worst injuries though are a puncture to his neck and his right front shoulder muscle has severe damage and he said he didn’t know how it would mend at this point.  You asked if I used a cut vest, some times I do and I most always use a cut collar too. It was a bad judgment call on my part this time. We were thirty yards from the hog when we packed the catch dogs and nine times out of ten it would have been a caught hog but the hog broke and ran before the bull dogs got to him and he headed for the brier thicket. That’s where he did all the damage cause the dogs can’t get out of his way when it gets thick. I will keep you posted on Steels progress and I believe Lucy is going to be all right now even though she took a hard lick herself.” 

Well Billy we all hope for the best and anyone who knows anything about Steel knows he is one tough Airedale and I am sure he will pull through this well as long as the shoulder isn’t too badly injured.  It would be a real shame to see a dog with that much grit get sidelined.  I talked with Billy on the phone and Steel was up and walking but may be slow to mend.  Billy’s got some good stories and if I can ever manage I would love to make it down there for a hog hunt as he sounds like those boys really know how to have fun.

Wayne Waggoner sent me a short letter he received from a Josh and Steven James telling about their first hunt with their JRT Holly and Airedale Mac.  It read:

“This is Josh and Steven James.  We just wanted to show a picture of great teamwork.  This battle took about two hours, well worth it and it’s her (Holly’s) first woodchuck.  She got cut up.  She was under the ground for a half hour to 45 minutes.  Took us a while to find out where the woodchuck was but after digging a few holes and the Airedale Mac grabbed it and ripped it out of the ground.  They played around with it for a while but we are going back out again soon for another bigger chuck.  Talk to you later.”

That is a great team and these guys showed determination in digging out that chuck.  I am sure these boys will have many more adventures. 

Many of my days as a young boy were spent carrying a bb or pellet gun keeping the local gophers and birds honest.  I just got this year’s hunting regulations and in British Columbia it is now illegal to carry a bb or pellet gun without a special license.  I quote; “Persons who carry a bb or pellet gun and do not have one of the federal licenses (POL, PAL or FAC) do require a provincial bb and pellet gun firearm license.” 

The cost of this license is twenty dollars.  I don’t even know how to describe how stupid I think this law is and once again the politicians have reaffirmed my belief that they are all suffering from severe rectal/cranial inversions. At least the Grizzly hunt is back on in some areas.

“When the dogs bark treed” by Elliott S. Barker is an account of Barkers adventures as Vermejo Park's wildlife manager in 1930. 

This first book was published in 1946. His other books included Beatty's Cabin: Adventures in the Pecos High Country (1953), Ramblings in the Field of Conservation and Eighty Years with Rod and Rifle (both 1976), and Smokey Bear and the Great Wilderness (1982). Barker also published two books of poetry, A Medley of Wilderness and Other Poems (1962) and Outdoors, Faith, Fun and Other Poems (1968). His best-known book was Western Life and Adventures, 1889-1970, originally published in 1970 and reprinted in 1974 as Western Life and Adventures in the Great Southwest. It won the Golden Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for the best nonfiction book of the year.

The best-remembered monument to Barker's memory, however, had nothing to do with his literary accomplishments. In May 1950 a huge fire broke out on Capitan Mountain, New Mexico. A fireman rescued a small bear cub, badly burned, clinging to a charred tree, and the cub was flown to Santa Fe and nursed back to health. On behalf of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, Barker donated Smokey to the Forest Service in Washington, D.C., specifying that the cub should become a symbol of forest-fire prevention and wildlife conservation. Smokey lived for more than twenty-six years at the National Zoo and became the most recognized animal in the world.

Barker died April 3, 1988 in Santa Fe, he was 101.

Barker’s dogs would have won no awards for beauty by today’s standards but Barker thought highly enough of them to write most of a book about them. 

The following is an excerpt from “When the dogs bark treed” which I recently read and found to be an interesting and credible book and would recommend to anyone interested in reading it.  Barker’s job a Vermejo Park was to rid the area of predators to allow for the increase of game animals.  This is from Chapter 7 entitled “My dogs had what it takes”

  They loved a lion trail; and if it turned out to be a fresh lion track that one dog was testing, the others would quickly recognize that fact by his intense interest and tense actions, and would sometimes have to be told again to “stay back.” There was an entirely different reaction to a coyote track than to a bobcat or a lion. It would always cause the hair to raise on their necks, and they would act resentful that a coyote had been there, and sometimes half snort and half growl as they tested the track. It was plain that they didn’t like it. But when they could catch a coyote, they loved to fight him and kill him.

They were pleased when they found either a lion or a bob­cat track. They showed that they wanted to go and showed no ill temper at all, but all interest and anxiety to find him. The difference between a lion and a cat was in the degree of the same reaction rather than a different reaction. Intensity of interest, eagerness, and an all-absorbing anxiety, born of anticipation for what they knew they would find at the end of the trail, were characteristic of their actions upon finding fresh lion sign. As they were silent trailers, except when the track was very hot, one had to watch their actions rather than listen to the tone of voice, as one does with a hound.

But they were as good bobcat dogs as you will find any­where. I recall one day in late November at the Park soon after a sixteen-inch snow had fallen, we went out in the turkey winter-range country to try to cut down the bobcat population. Ordinarily I have found the bobcat harder to tree than a moun­tain lion. Of course, they don’t travel as far as a lion and many more of them are caught each year because there are so many more of them.  But the individual cat can pull more tricks and get away from the dogs after being jumped, oftener by far than a lion.

      But when there is deep, fresh snow on the ground, they are greatly handicapped, and the finding of a fresh track usually results in a quick catch; so it was that I wished to take advantage of this snow to pick up a few bobcats. The snow was soft and had blown off the trees pretty well and had melted down to six or eight inches on the steep south slopes.

Old Kate was not in condition to hunt and Queenie was slowing up so much with age that I left them both at home. I knew Pup and Puse would get the job done anyway, and with snow on, I could always be sure of following them up to find them if they did make a long, fast run.

After riding three miles or so over into Gachupin Canyon, we struck the track of a very large cat and followed on the trail for a couple of miles before we jumped him. He had been hunting and had killed one rabbit and a tassel-eared squirrel, and then, with a full belly, had taken to some sunny cliffs to “lay up” for the day.

The dogs were trailing silently and were right close on to him before he knew it, and they saw him as he left his bed in the rocks and bounded off down the hill. Both dogs fol­lowed in hot pursuit, barking at every jump, and forced him to take a tree within a quarter of a mile. I shot him and quickly skinned him, tied the skin on the back of the saddle, and started on, hoping to have another track soon.

In a short while, on a ridge top we struck the track of, not one, but three bobcats. One was a fairly large one and the others much smaller. I surmised it to be an old mother cat with two half-grown kittens, and that is what it proved to be.

We trailed the three to some big rocks on a sunny slope and jumped them out. They ran along the sunny south slope for quite a distance, giving the dogs a little trouble on account of the great number of deer tracks where a sizable herd of deer had been feeding, and bounded away as we approached.

Finally one of the half-grown kittens took to a small yellow pine and I just luckily saw it as I approached, because the dogs had gone on after the others. I shot and skinned the kitten as quickly as I could and then hurried on after the dogs. I kept watch for the other kitten as I rode along, for I was sure it would be the next to tree.  While a bobcat (or a lion, for that matter) will not stop and fight the dogs to protect its young, it will run on and on, leading the dogs away from the trees in which the young have taken refuge. It is my belief that they do this deliberately, just as some birds will flutter along the ground, feigning a broken wing, to lure one away from their nest or young.

I expected this old bobcat to run quite a distance after the second kitten treed. Soon I heard the dogs barking “treed.” I rode on to the tree and, as expected, found the other young one. I shot it out and when the dogs had wooled it a moment, I made them stop and sent them on after the mother cat. I took time—perhaps ten minutes—to skin the kitten, and then followed the dogs, feeling sure that they would have no difficulty in treeing the mother cat; but I was entirely wrong.

She had crossed the ridge into a deeper canyon with a very steep southern exposure, where there was not much snow left, and what there was by now was pretty wet, causing little scent to be left. In this type of country, the tracks showed that she had circled and dodged and run for some time, keeping ahead of the dogs. I lost some time in trying to make out where they had gone and in getting through some pretty rough areas where she had led. I couldn’t quite make out why the dogs had not finally crowded her enough to make her take a tree, for I could not hear them at all.

At last I came to where she had made a long, straight run along an open slope, with the dogs evidently right behind her.  Of a sudden I rounded a bend, and there, stretched out on the snow, lay a big, spotted, bedraggled bobcat, stone dead, while both Pup and Puse were wallowing in the snow and rubbing their heads and shoulders in it to clean the blood off. From the blood on the snow, it looked as if they must be cut up pretty badly.

What had happened was that the bobcat, a large female, had taken refuge in a hole in the rocks, thinking she could defend herself there rather than take a tree. To get her out required a lot of stamina and intestinal fortitude, and I would have given anything to see it done.

The hole was about seven feet deep in the solid rock of breccia formation, and sloped downward very slightly. It was almost round and less than thirty inches in diameter at its mouth, and tapering to about a foot at the back end. I crawled partly in it to figure out just what had happened.

From the blood and hair at the back of the hole, it was evident that the bobcat had gone to the end and turned around to fight off the dogs. One of the dogs had gone in and faced teeth and razor-sharp claws to bring her out. There was not room for both dogs to work, side by side. Pup had a habit, in a fight of any kind, of boring in and taking all his opponent could give, for the sake of a throat hold. That is just what he had done here.

He had faced teeth and claws in a direct, frontal attack, where no strategy or maneuvering tactics could be employed. He had gone head-on into all that cat had to give, which was plenty, for the sake of getting a neck hold; and when he had got it, he had held it and dragged the bobcat out where Puse could help him kill it. The fact that the cat was dead right outside the miniature cave, showed that Pup had never released his hold.

That act, I believe, took more nerve than anything I ever saw a dog do.

Pup was pretty badly cut up around the head and was bleeding profusely, but was not seriously injured. In his lifetime Pup had to be carried home three times, and sewed up a half dozen times, from cuts received in fights with bears and lions. But this time, he was able to walk in, and needed stitches in only two places near his eyes.

Puse was not badly scratched, but just enough to show he had been in a fight. I have no doubt that Puse would have finally gone in and got that cat, but he was younger and not quite so deliberate and determined in a fight as Pup, and the older dog seized the opportunity to do so first.

The cat’s skin was badly torn, but I took it off anyway, and rode on home with the skins of the whole family tied back of

the saddle.

The quote of the month submitted by Henry S. Johnson Jr. is: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."  (Edmund Burke, 1729-1797).

Well that’s it and as Henry S. Johnson Jr. 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.