Shade’s 1st find

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  Shade is really shaping up to be one of those exceptional dogs as he loves bailing the boars in the training block. He is now 27 weeks old and I have taken him out hunting once so far where he did not get onto a pig. The last couple of days I have been doing some work on my hut, recladding, putting in batts and building a conservatory around the lean-to. While I have been doing this I have had all of the dogs hanging around while wearing tracking collars so that I could keep an eye on them. Watching Shade on the tracker I could see that he was doing a lot of looking around. When he was 360 meters away up in the native covenanted block he started bailing.

This got all of the other dogs to take off up to see what he had. While the other dogs were making their way up I heard a possum cackling just out to the right of Shade’s barking. When the other dogs arrived and carried on bailing I started to wonder if maybe he did have a pig. I stopped working and listened for a bit and it sounded like they had everything under control as there was no pig squealing so I carried on with my building project to see how long they would keep bailing for before coming off. Snow was the first dog to come back to me after about 45 minutes so I decided to drive the truck up to the house and get a knife.

While at the house I sat down and had some lunch while listening to the dogs carrying on with their bail. I was not too panicked about getting up to the dogs as I expected the pig that the dogs had would have been either a black boar Snuffle’s of about 120 pounds or a grey boar Arnold of about 150 pounds. Both of these boars frequent my house from time to time. While Snuffle’s normally comes in during the daytime Arnold only comes in during the night. The last time Arnold came in it was about 3am as he woke me up with Jeff bailing him and the other dogs barking in their kennels. I walked up to him, called Jeff into heel and put some pig nuts on the ground for him to eat. While he was eating them I slowly moved closer until I was rubbing him behind the ear.
In the whole time that the dogs had this bail going it did not move and I did not hear any dogs getting hurt. The dogs would have been bailing for 90 minutes when I drove back down towards them. This is when Shade did come back to me leaving Fog, Jeff and Sassy still bailing. This hill face is quite step and the part I was about to go up through I have never walked through in the ten years I have owned this place as it is real thick scrub. When I got up to the dogs it was real thick as I opened a gap up with my hands there right before me was the back end of a black and white boar that I had never seen before. I was quick to take control of his tail and slip my knife up between his ribs. To get the boar out was just a matter of dragging him downhill to the creek where I left him to cool while I went back to my hut building work. Half an hour before dark I went up to the house to put the dogs away and when I put Fog in his kennel I noticed that he was not wearing his tracking collar. Looking at the hand piece I could see that Fog’s collar was back up where I had caught the boar so in the near dark I had to try and find my way back up through the scrub before the batteries ran out in his collar. The one advantage of it being dark was that I could turn the lights on his collar on making it easier to find. The boar weighed exactly 100 pounds. I think Shade is telling me that he is ready to start hunting.