Hunting was a little slow on Saturday. They’d got a bear on Friday, after a lot of work, but they’re pretty thin on the ground where we are these days. Maverick and Dean looked all day long for a track for their client while the rest of us looked hard in the morning and started to slack off a little around our usual quitting time.

Junior and I were driving to listen to dogs the one time we turned them out, but Grey Fox had picked them up in the road at just about the same time, so it wasn’t urgent that we be anywhere in particular. So when I saw a fat grey squirrel sitting on the side of the road taunting us, it was shooting time. I was all for jumping out and waving my arms at it to make it go up a tree, but Junior said we might as well shoot him on the ground, so he did. Squirrel stew, here we come; I only need a couple more to make a real big batch to share at camp next weekend.

The next time, the squirrel treed right away and clung to the side of a scrub oak trying to be invisible. It was my turn to shoot, and invisible he wasn’t. So when we were next in radio contact with Grey Fox, Junior was giving me shit for trying to bird dog the first one.

And that’s all it took. Grey Fox dubbed me Bird Dog.

A radio handle has to come out of a story like that. You can’t pick one for yourself or you get laughed out of the county. Maverick won his in a poker game. Grey Fox was always after the foxes when another hunter would see him. Polecat got tangled up with a skunk one time. I’ll have to ask Bobcat where his came from, but he’s probably lucky he already had a handle when that mountain lion pissed on him from a tree that one time.

Bird Dog’s not a bad one, as handles go either. I made the obligatory fuss because Grey Fox does love to torment me. If I just let it drop, it’ll eventually go away, but if I grumble about it but answer to it now and then, it’ll stick. Nevermind that I don’t have pointers or retrievers and that I don’t hunt birds; bird dogging is what I was doing to that squirrel. I don’t mind it so much, and it’s pretty cool to have a handle after all of these years. They could have picked one that was truly unbearable, but this one, I can live with.

Normally when we hunt, we start the tracks from the trucks. There are a lot of logging roads around for access, so up on the box the dogs go and we slowly drive around hoping to get a scent or a track where a bear crossed the road in the night. We can cover a whole lot more ground that way than walking, which we absolutely need to do, considering how much ground those bears can cover in a night.

But come Saturday morning we had four rigs scattered out around for miles where we hunt, and nobody was getting any strikes. Finally, as a last resort, Maverick suggested walking the dogs off into the Lumsden canyon. Now, that’s a place we hate to go; it’s rugged and steep and there isn’t any access to the middle to pull a bear out even if you got one. But the bears know that too, and there’s a little bit of feed down in the middle by the Tuolumne River.

There is a trail there, mostly for fishermen, that parallels the river from the road on the west and runs eastward to the Cherry Creek Powerhouse. Maverick and Dusty and Jake were getting ready to go down it; packing packs, gathering leashes, and cutting dogs loose. I looked over the edge at the trail and thought, “Well, why the hell not?” Junior would totally have gone if he’d been there (he’s in Colorado) and it’s not like I had kids to look out for. I was unencumbered for once, and felt in good enough shape to get it done. If there hadn’t been a trail, I wouldn’t even have considered it, but I figured that if it was too rough for me, I could either come back up to the truck or go on forward without making them wait for me.

So I left my truck keys with Bobcat; he and Crawler and some guy riding with Dusty would shuttle our trucks over to the powerhouse to pick us up. And off I went, foolishly thinking I could keep up with three physically fit men, all my age or significantly younger.

It wasn’t too bad at first. It was mostly downhill. The dogs caught a track and went on ahead of us; hearing them always gives me enough adrenaline to get there in a hurry. Looking back up at the trucks, I decided that if I had to split off, I’d go forward and not back up that trail. I’m fine on the flat and just plain quick on the downhill, but even the slightest uphill slope kicks my ass hard.

A couple of miles in, we got to where the dogs were. They were milling around down by the river. Queen and Dance were wet, like they’d gone through the water following the bear, but the rest were dry. Maverick figures the rest of the were barking at the river and confused the two who were on the trail, pulling them off. So we gatherered them up and went on further down the trail.

It didn’t take them long to pick up another track, and off they went. It sure is a different ball game following hounds on foot. Once they get around the corner, you just can’t hear much of the race, and it’s a lot harder to catch up to them at the tree. The guys were really pushing it at this point, and I found myself jogging on the flats and the safer downhills to try to keep up with them. They didn’t need to wait for me – I didn’t want to slow them down – but these rough men are also pretty much gentlemen, and they did. Of course, every time I caught up with them, they’d push on again, so I didn’t get too much in the way of breaks, but that’s OK. I made it without having an asthma attack, which I couldn’t have done last year. I know my regular hiking pace is about two miles an hour, and we were in there for two hours. since we were going so much faster than we usually do and with fewer stops, I really don’t know how far it was. Maverick thinks about three miles, but I’m guessing closer to four. I’ll have to drag out the maps when I get back up to camp.

When we were getting close to the end of the trail, Maverick was in radio contact with Crawler. He’d seen the dogs and a treed bobcat right at the powerhouse, but by the time he went back to the truck to get his rifle, the bobcat had bailed and the dogs hadn’t seen it. So the pressure was off. We’d beat Bobcat back with the second round of trucks, so we all piled into the two that were there, as Dean had a little race going up the hill. Dusty’s little Toyota had twelve hounds in it and two men, and that thing was yawing around the corners like crazy.

Bobcat finally caught up to us with my truck at Dean’s tree, which turned out to be a sow and a cub really close to the road. We took our pictures and left them alone, but at least I got to see something after all of that work.

Poor Bobcat didn’t get to see anything but roads, and it wasn’t even his truck! He didn’t want to hike in anyway, so he was fine with that. I’m really glad I did; I rarely get to do the really physical hunts, as I slow them down too much. This was up at the high end of my comfort level, but it had the potential to be something really exciting. Even though nothing much happened, I still got to see some new country and push myself a little harder.