My story of a....fruitless? night hunt...
It is 5 AM. I am standing waist-high in thorny bushes, in the middle of an almost inextricable brush. The night is clear; a ¾ moon helps me to see. I am about 3 miles away from the truck, were Leo and Luis are waiting for us to go back. Ricardo and Abel are with me, but we have split, so we can cover more ground. The night is cold; about 20 F, and, worst of all there is a very strong breeze, blowind from behind us. I kneel on the ground so the wind chills me a little less, and it also allows me to hear a bit better...to no avail. I know I won’t be able to hear anything; not with that strong breeze coming from my back.
We are looking for the dogs.
Back at 3:30 AM, we were trailing an old, bumpy and dusty road. We had been hunting since 10:30 PM that night, and we had had no luck. The conditions were not good: It was very cold for us, and too windy for the dogs (so much that we had debated whether we should go out or not). It was also whirly. The strong wind is havoc for the dogs and us. If it blows from the tail, they can’t smell down-wind. And if it blows from the front, they scent too much, and would jump from the truck trying to catch hogs that are too far away. That is risky, and can make the dogs get a hell of a beating, if they find and catch, because without our horses, there is no way we can get so far away in a short time. The whirly gusts also drive them crazy, mixing old scents with new ones.
Suddenly, for the nth time, they go crazy and jump out of the truck. They disappear down-wind, only to come back after a few minutes. They come back panting, tails-wagging. They fool around the truck, and start to jump inside, when “Tigrero” shoots again like a rocket, down-wind. Seeing him run, the rest follow suit. There they go...“Lanín”, “Lihuel”, “Antú”, and our nose-breaking specialist, “Fiel”.
Shit. What could it be? He couldn’t possibly have scented something in that direction; not with that wind....
Our tracker, Luis, limps out of the truck with a small flashlight; as usual, in silence. It has been a mixed-fortune week for Luis. Three days before we arrived he had caught a 100-lb puma while dragging some cattle of the wild with the help of one of his Dogos, Allen, a strong, fit 100-lbs dog, son of Lanín. That is good news, because the Rio Negro’s Rural Society pays $100 per cougar hide, since their abundancy makes them a plague for sheep flocks and even colts. The puma and Luis just bumped into each other, as it usually happens with this elusive, odorless animal. The cat stared at Luis in surprise, for a few seconds, and then Allen shoot towards it. The puma jumped to a tree, and Luis shot it with a well placed .22 caliber bullet behind the shoulderblade. The puma fell down from the tree, run a bit, and Allen caught up with him. It was no fight; the cat was already mortally wounded. Allen finished the job easily. Luis was happy; $100 means a lot down there, and he has many dogs to feed.
But...later that day, a horse fell over Luis’s right leg. His knee was like a water-melon when I saw him, and without an x-ray, I could only say it was full of fluid, probably blood, or sero-hematic. Maybe a torn ligament; maybe a broken meniscus. Impossible to convice him of going to town and do some studies.
So, Luis limped towards the place “Tigrero” left from, flashlight in hand. He spotted some boar-prints. He looked at them for some minutes, walking around in a painstaking, seemingly slow way, like if he had all the time in the world. Then he pointed forward (down-wind) and shuffled in his usual, calm and expressionless voice: “That way. Tigrero is tracking down from these prints”. That was all.
Ricardo, Abel and I realized we could not wait till we “heard” the catch...we would never hear it with that wind blowing from our backs. We had no choice but to enter the brush, and see if we could catch-up, at least enough to hear something. I looked at my watch. It was now 4:00 AM.
Forty-five minutes and 2 miles later, Ricardo called to the truck through his handy to ask if the dogs had gone back. The radio was on it’s range limit, but Leo clearly answered “no”. We decided to split, Ricardo, Abel and I, to cover more ground. Abel is a great guy and a good hunter. His father is a very experienced hunter, and has taught him all he knows. Both had dropped by at Luis’s place with their truck and dogs to go hunting for the tournament, and after sipping a few “mates” we had decided to go all together...Abel and his father would sit in the truck-bed, with the dogs. Other hunters had passed by Luis’s place before we left that night; we all exchanged any info we had...“ there is a big hog down the 24th lot, a few miles from here....cut a dog some time ago”...that sort of stuff. Tournament or no tournament, there is no competition between us fellow hunters. Just a brotherhood.
So, we have split. I am alone in the brush now, and it is 5 AM. I can’t hear anything; no signs of a fight going on, and of course, the dogs do not bark. The silence is total, only broken by the woosh of the wind going through the low brush. The truck is on the dirt-road, 3 miles up-wind.
I hear some noise in front of me. I see a white-shadow approaching. It is Lihuel. He comes to me panting, tail wagging. Seems to have ran a great deal. I look for blood or injuries in him; I see none. I grab his muzzle, open his mouth, and point the flashlight to his teeth. Nothing. No blood, or brown hair, or anything. It seems he has ran a lot, but didn’t catch. If Lihuel didn’t catch, the rest probably did not, either.
I keep walking, now with Lihuel at my side. It is 6:30, and the horizon is starting to show some brightness. Dawn is approaching fast. I am cold and cut all-over by the thorns; and I haven’t even run. With the additional light, I see Ricardo and Abel, about 500 yards from me and from each other. We group together. Antú and Fiel are with them. Lanín and Tigrero are still missing. Suddenly we hear some branches breaking...and Tigrero appears. He looks tired; seems he has also ran a lot. We search for injuries...he seems to be ok.
Now only Lanín is missing. Damn. Three months ago Lanín had ran so hard following a trail that he got lost...for 15 days. I would call Leo and Ricardo and they would tell me he had not appeared, but he should be fine, since no buzzards had been seen circling the sky. And they kept telling me...“if he is alive, Luis will find him”. And Luis indeed found him, alive and kicking, after 2 weeks on his own in the middle of the wild.
But, luck does not last forever, I thought; and after that occasion Lanín had lost an eye in a fight with a hog...so now he was a little more “handicapped”, so to speak. Although with that SOB, you never knew...
We walk back to the truck. Lanín is the only dog missing. We load the rest of the dogs in the truck, and we start driving. It is still very dark; dawn is just breaking in the horizon. Luis guides; Ricardo drives, I sit with them and help with the tracking. We drive for about a mile, back over our own tracks. The conversation is monosillabic. Suddenly, with is usual, expressionless and shuffled voice, Luis says: “Those are Lanín’s tracks. Go and see”.
Ricardo and I drop down from the truck, wondering how the hell could Luis see the tracks of a dog from the truck’s cabin at night and on a dusty dirt-path full of cattle prints. We focus our flashlights and yes, we see the tracks of a dog. Luis comes limping, and starts walking in circles, using his flashlight, silent. He finds some fresh hog-tracks (or so they seem, it’s too difficult to read them because of the sandy road; it is being too dry a winter), over our previous tire-tracks. They are heading the other way, that is, up-wind.
“Lanín must have followed this. Let’s go back”
For the next 3 hours, the routine repeats itself. We drive a few hundred yards, we stop, Luis’s limps with us in front of the truck, and then gives us short, monosillabic directions. We have done so many circle-turns, and the area is so vast, that I no longer know where we are (and I thought I knew the area pretty well). Abel and his father are sleeping in the truck bed. We are not hunting now, just looking for our lost dog. It is 9:00 AM, broad daylight. We have been hunting non-stop for the last 11 hours. We are tired, but in spite of the pain in his right knee, Luis seems impervious to tiredness. We have a dog to find and bring home, and his unrelenting, yet calm persistency reminds me of a bloodhound.
Finally, we get to a Y turn. We are about to take the left road, when Luis softly says...“Take the right turn. It goes all the way down to a water-mill, in the valley. He might have gone to drink”.
We do that. About 500 yards further, Luis calmly says: “There he is”. That’s all. At first, Ricardo and I can’t see him...after focusing, we see a tiny white spot trotting towards a distant (1 km) water-mill.
We drop from the truck, since the road had come to a cliff, and it is almost impossible to keep going. We walk and yell for Lanín. Aside from our calls, the silence is total, almost perfect. The sky is softly bright and sunny, and the early morning breeze is cold and refreshing. The sun is on our back, and the valley in front of us looks like a postcard, tenuously glowing with the light of the rising sun, and stretching towards the horizon.
Lanín hears us, and turns around. He comes to us trotting, ears down, looking sideways, like if he felt guilty for the last 4 hours we had spent tracking him down. I just rub his head, and kiss him some. He looks at me with his 2-colored eyes; the normal one, and the useless, almost white one. The moment is magical. Ricardo says to me: “Let me take you a picture”.
This is that picture, of Lanin and me:
BTW, we didn’t catch anything that night. It didn’t matter to us. We had left Luis’s house at Saturday 10:30 PM, and we were going back sleepless and tired at Sunday 11:00 AM. We arrived home, prepared some food, and ate almost silently. I felt tired, yet I felt good. I asked my friend Luis how did he know Lanín was going to take the right turn on the Y intersection. Without stopping his eating, he calmly looked at me and said something like...“the wind was blowing towards his nose, and I thought he would be thirsty and go for the tank of the water-mill”...the truth is, he should have told me...“I just knew”. But that wouldn’t be him.After lunch, without sleeping, he went out to feed the dogs. There was no more hunting to be done, and the dogs no longer needed to be light and hungry. That’s Luis, my friend.
Dogoman
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Written by DOGOMAN