The Spaniel Annals

Tracking with Reardon and Gael this winter has caused me to become much more intrigued with this sport. For some years now, I’ve been searching for a second sport for my dogs other than obedience.  I wanted the sport to be good exercise and call upon their natural instincts.  I also wanted it to depend upon a completely different mindset and preparation than obedience, where so much is about precision in human-dictated boundaries. 

I might have found it with tracking.  Beyond its fit with my requirements above, I’m deeply enjoying the training.  (The tests and certifications still make me nervous as hell, but this too shall pass.)  It has a meditative, almost otherworldly quality about it, where I am encouraging my dog’s instincts in a realm I can only glimpse: the world of scent.  I love this old photo of Hank, my TD dog now passed, who was a driven tracking dog.  You can see the intensity in his movement (I had to wrap the line around my waist and hang back so that he didn’t pull me over).  His eyes are open but sightless; the world is entering his being through his nose.

Hank earned his TD in Wenatchee in 1998, so he would have been 2 1/2.  We had trained for a year to prepare.  In this award photo, you can see the terrain we tracked in: dirt, brown dead grass and sagebrush.  Up to this point, we had been training in the grassy fields in the first photo; we had no idea the test in Wenatchee would be so different.  Amazingly, it made no difference to Hank.  He finished his 400+ yard track in just about 4 minutes.  As the judges huffed and puffed up to us while I held up the glove, one of the judges exclaimed, “He’s crazy!”  I don’t think she was being entirely complimentary.  Hank ran tracks like the devil was…well, not after him, but certainly encouraging him.

Hank was my heartbreak kid in many ways, and one way was coming 75 yards away from the glove in the TDX test at the Springer Spaniel National a few years later.  He had tracked magnificently for close to an hour.  (A TDX track is around 800-1000 yards and is aged several hours).   For much of track, I had the soundtrack from the movie Glory playing in my head, which has many rousing marches.  Much of Hank’s effort on that track truly took my breath away.  But on the last corner, he got distracted by a deer track, and after several attempts, he just could not finish that last leg. 

For reasons I no longer remember, we didn’t try again for the TDX.  I wish now we’d made more effort towards that goal.  I’m beginning to hope Reardon will be the dog to fulfill that dream.  More in Part II of these ruminations….