The day started out auspiciously with a dead hare by the roadside in my hunting area. Damn, I thought. Not too many of them in the fields these days. I threw it in the game tub in the back of the car to use later for training the dog and continued to the forest gate leading to the blind where I planned to sit and greet the dawn. In the week of my absence as I attended a conference in Budapest the boars had been active in all the baited areas, often violently so. Time to make some room in the freezer.

The last time I sat in the blind by the wallow I saw a large raccoon dog, but it was out of range for a reliable kill with the shot barrels of my drilling, and an 8 mm soft point round would probably have made a mess, so I let it go. This time I brought a second combination rifle with a 0.22 magnum barrel to damage the skin less or leave the carcass in better condition for training Ajax.

As I approached the blind at 4:30 am I could hear something large moving away quickly. Probably pigs. Dawn arrived at 5:17 am as four ducks dove past the blind and crash landed in the water, proceeding to make a racket that would surely be attractive to some predator in need of a little lead. But none came, and the ducks eventually moved on, first one pair, then the other. An hour later I moved on myself, let Ajax out of the car, and we stalked the sunrise together. On one path I saw what looked like deer about 200 yards ahead. Without my glasses or binoculars I couldn’t see clearly, so I knelt, checked the safety on the drilling and looked through its scope. Four roe deer, two young bucks among them. Perhaps we’ll see each other again when the season opens on May 1st.

Not wanting to disturb the deer, I remained in my crouch, wondering if perhaps I should turn back. For a quarter of an hour they browsed by the path, moving closer to us. Ajax quivered with excitement as he watched them but remained still. Good training, I thought, given that he usually loses his head barking when he sees deer and boars. Eventually they moved into the trees, and we moved forward together. Ajax walked off leash at heel, paused briefly to sniff where the deer had been, then followed along. We checked a few other baited areas by blinds, all of which showed signs of boar activity within the last two days.

Near a pine thicket I told Ajax to wait. His back was like a compound bow ready to fire, and as I walked toward the ladder chair he launched himself off on a trail. I heard nothing, but looking back through the brush I couldn’t see him. Although I don’t like to call him out of a lie-down, I did so quietly, but there was no response. Thinking of the fawns that might be hidden in the thicket, I bellowed his name at the top of my lungs, hoping that he wasn’t so far lost in the chase that he was deafened by adrenaline. I called several times, surely frightening the game in every corner of the forest, but there was no sign of him. I turned to walk down the path to the car and saw Ajax, out of breath, coming from the direction opposite what I had expected. No blood, thank God. As out of breath as he was, I doubt he could have come more quickly. Given where he disappeared, I realized that he had probably followed a game trail along a fenced enclosure, where a boar well in excess of 200 pounds had once come close to trampling us. Not the sort of fellow I want Ajax to confront alone.

I took him to the car, and we drove slowly to a few more sites I wanted to check, then home to the pancake batter in the refrigerator and a strong shot of coffee before another translation marathon.

It’s been quite a while since I posted here; the past months have been rather turbulent ones with changes in my business and residence and the end of a long-term relationship. I’ve been hunting actively, though not as much as I would have liked to, in part due to a lack of organization and infrastructure in the leased area which is my primary hunting grounds, but also because my dog Ajax was gone for five months, and I sometimes doubted that I would get him back. When I did he was in terrible shape. More on all that another time.

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about some types of hunting is the peace, the quiet one can experience. For the adrenaline junkies here, there are driven hunts (Drückjagde or Treibjagde), and I’ve experienced a little of that, mostly a positive experience. A little stalking, mostly for birds in my case. But the form of hunting here I enjoy most is Ansitzjagd. There I sit for hours, listening to the sounds of the night (there is seldom any point to a daytime hunt where I am now due to all the people running around) and simply relaxing. Interpreting the sounds I hear is an art not yet mastered. A few nights ago I thought someone was approaching the raised blind with heavy steps. Wrong. It was a very large boar, who suddenly charged across the baited area. Not a chance at a good shot, but what a thrill to see him run! A few minutes later, there was a strange barking as a fox ran across the horse pasture and in front of the blind. Probably on his way to an amorous rendezvous. I let him pass.

I remember a chat I had with the wife of an old hunter, now about 90 and unable to enjoy the activity he loved so much. She told me how he often went on the hunt without his gun and simply listened and watched the young foxes or the hares in the field. Some do hunt for the adrenaline rush, but the fellow hunters who inspire me most are the ones who obviously care about and seek the connection to nature and the responsibilities of taking part in its management. It’s not all about what you shoot; a local hunter where I now live is an active part of the efforts to rebuild the gray partridge population (devastated by current practices in agriculture), and nobody hunts those here any more. I saw one once when I was training dogs with a retired forest ranger; when the partridge was flushed, he stood amazed and said he hadn’t seen one in twenty years. And off he went, with a step twenty years younger, to introduce his young dog to the scent of better days.

Things are starting to get a little more active in the hunting area in Stolpe. I haven’t been out much due to a rather heavy work schedule, but I’ve tried to get out at least every other day briefly to maintain the baited areas and check for signs of game.

On July 14, I was walking Ajax up by the horse meadows looking for the young foxes. I walked the entire circuit (about half an hour and saw nothing. As I returned to the car, however, I noticed little paw prints over the impression of my boots in the sand. Foxes. I put the dog back in the car, loaded the shotgun barrels of the drilling and went walking back up toward the raised blind as the last daylight quickly disappeared. Suddenly I saw a figure with a white-tipped tail scamper over the field toward the forest, and as it crossed the dirt road I fired a blast at a distance of about 20 yards. The fox turned and ran back onto the field, the began to run in circles, presumably from a leg wound. I took careful aim and fired the second barrel and the fox lay still. By the time I reached the pasture gate it was pitch dark, so I set Ajax to search the field, and he quickly found the fox for me.

I got another fox tonight by the northernmost raised blind in the hunting area. It came to investigate some stink bait and was killed with 3 mm shot from the left shotgun barrel of the drilling. All three foxes will be used by a friend to train for the VGP – a sort of  “master’s examination” for hunting dogs. Retrieving foxes is part of the test, and foxes killed by shot or small caliber bullets are generally more pleasant to work with.

I also shot my first boar a week ago last Sunday. It was a male with a gutted weight of 57 kilograms. There was a full moon that night, but heavy clouds, so the visibility wasn’t very good with my old optics. At around 11:30 p.m. I heard the sounds of crunching and saw the silhouette of a large boar sampling a bit of the dried corn I had set out. My old Zeiss 6×42 on the drilling is clouded and in need of repair or replacement, so it wasn’t easy to pick the shot on the scope, but I aimed as best I could and fired an 8×57 mm Geco soft point round through its lungs. I heard a bit of thrashing, the silence. Since I was alone and didn’t have a dog with me, I waited a good hour before descending from the blind to look for the boar. Unfortunately it wasn’t at the spot where I shot it, but I found bits of bright red, foamy blood, so I realized that my guess about the shot in the lung was correct. I looked around a bit, found nothing except a curious fox nearby whom I missed because I had forgotten to switch the front trigger of the drilling back to the shotgun barrel and took a quick, very sloppy shot with the rifle barrel. A drilling is not a weapon to be used in a hurry, especially not by someone new to the use of such firearms.

I was unable to reach my friend with dogs for a search until 4:30 am, when the boar was found in the tall grass about 5 meters from where it was shot. I practically stood on top of it as I shot at the fox. This was another clear example for me of the value of hunting with a dog. Any dog would have found that kill in about two seconds.

My friend took the boar to hang in a cold room for three days, after which I skinned and butchered it. That was hard work compared with deer. After about 7 hours of clumsy work I collapsed into bed, but I learned quite a lot and hope to cut my butchering time in half next time. I hope even more to shoot a much smaller boar and make the work go even faster. We have enough meat to last for several months or longer, although I gave away quite a lot of it.

Tonight I got a lesson in being prepared. One never knows what surprises await. There hasn’t been much action lately in the hunting grounds. My friend Uwe has shot three boars over the past month under difficult field conditions where I wouldn’t have dared a shot myself because my scope is poorly suited to night hunting. Other than that things have been quiet. I’ve been making the rounds a few times a week to spread a little corn in the meadows near the raised blinds and to bury a little fox bait. Tonight I thought I’d give the mosquitos a feast and sit for a while to see what comes. Because the exhaust line in my car has developed a hole which makes it rather loud, I parked near the road by the horse stables, intending to walk the 500 yards or so from there to the blind. As soon as I got out of the car, something large fled from the bushes. Probably a deer, I thought.

I shouldered my pack, loaded the drilling with a bullet, a shot shell and a slug, assembled my walking stick and started up the dirt road toward the blind. Almost immediately I noticed a young fox standing in the road looking at me curiously. He kept staring and I decided to add him to the freezer for retrieval practice with Ajax. It was not to be. Instead of making an easy kill with the shot in my left barrel, some voice of inner idiocy whispered to me to switch the front trigger from the rifle barrel to the right shot barrel in which I had placed the slug. I aimed somewhat casually, secure in the knowledge that at such close range precision was superfluous. So when the barrel protector (which I had forgotten to remove) flew off and the fox looked at me curiously, then ran off, I was puzzled at first until I realized my monumentally stupid mistake. I was simply grateful that the angle and direction of the slug shot made an accident unlikely. Still I was rather shaken to have fired the slug from a ground-level position near a populated area.

I figured the noise would have scared of any other game in the area, but I thought having made the trip I should go to the blind for a while anyway. About 50 yards later I saw four foxes, three on the meadow and one on the path. More young ones. I crept closer intending to shoot one, possibly two after all. Then the buck crossed the road onto the meadow. A beautiful six-pointer, probably about three years old. He wandered along a fence line while I watched him through my rifle scope. Shooting was out of the question. There were houses in a direct line behind him. And a stable full of horses a bit to the left. All of this far enough away that firing a shot shell would be safe (especially aimed at the ground), but no rifle bullets, no way. And the buck saved the young foxes, because I didn’t want to scare him off by shooting them. The eventually saw me and retreated to the forest, though a few kept popping out of the bushes to look at me. I wandered on toward the stables and the raised blind.

Then the buck ran back across the road, crossing about 30 feet in front of me. A few seconds later a shot was fired. It sounded like it came from the blind I was approaching, which puzzled me, because I had announced that I would be hunting there and didn’t expect anyone. In fact the blind was empty, so I realized it must have come from the forest. I probably won’t be seeing that buck again.

I sat for a while, but the error with the slug bothered me. I wanted to see if the boars would come for the corn or maybe to take the fox bait themselves, but I realized that I wasn’t in the state of calm concentration that one should have to handle firearms. I also realized that I had forgotten to eat while running errands, so I packed up and returned to the car in the fading light. A rustle of young foxes greeted me from the bushes as I passed the place where they had played, and I resolved to return soon armed with a digital camera.

Ajax at the spring natural abilities test in Gross Kreutz

On April 17th I had the privilege of leading my Deutsch Drahthaar Ajax vom Bernsteinsee through the first of the various hunting tests in Germany which are part of qualifying a dog as a utility dog for hunting and a stud dog. Although I’ve practiced for this test with another one of our dogs and helped a friend prepare his dog for a more advanced test, this was the first time I took a dog through such a test myself. It was an interesting experience and one I rather enjoyed, even if his breeder was dissatisfied with the result.

The final results of the test in Gross Kreutz, Germany were published on the web pages of our local club in Fläming-Havelland. He ranked in the middle of the group that day, largely because when he did his field searches, he ranged too far and was not under good control. This was due in part to the extent to which he participated in driven hunts last autumn; his siblings who had done so had similar issues, and those who had not participated in such hunts did much better on their tests. Overall I was pleased with the results, but his breeder was quite dissatisfied with the score of 8 for the field search, because a minimum of 9 was required to qualify for the international Hegewald trials. I personally have no great desire to deal with the chaos of such a large event at this stage, but these things are important for some breeders.

(to be continued….)

It’s been almost two full months since I began hunting in the local area in Stolpe. It’s been an interesting time in which I’ve been able to learn some things I had hoped to learn in my apprentice year and in which I’ve learned first-hand some of the challenges of hunting in an urban area. The hunting preserve is mostly crop fields – no forest worth mentioning (though there are forest lands adjacent to it) and very little water. It is directly adjacent to one of the richest quarters of Berlin, with an enormous number of joggers, Nordic walkers, dog owners letting their pets run off the leash to chase game, bicyclists and pedestrians of every other kind. All of us in the group who hunt there spend a lot of time on “PR” getting to know the locals and persuading them that we have more in mind than simply murdering Bambi. At least when it’s not deer season….

One of the first things I started to do when I found out that I would be hunting there was to walk through most of the 400 hectares and do a GPS survey of the hunting facilities, many of which are in need of repair. I then used Google Earth to create a map (here’s an old version) with the various stands, baited areas, wallows, etc. coded on it. I continue to discover new areas of interest all the time. I find it interesting that the previous lessee for the area did not maintain an inventory, or if he did, that he did not share it with his successor.

I got my first buck a few days before the start of the season. Actually, the dogs that chased it into the fence got it first. I just got to clean up the mess afterward and salvage what was left for dog food:

I really wish people would be more responsible and keep their dogs under control so that things like this don’t happen. The hematomas I found on the back, shoulder and neck of the deer as I butchered it indicated that it had been attacked quite a bit before it was finally finished off and gutted. It was not an easy death, and I wish I knew who the dog owners were so I could share this photo with their children.

The buck hunt in Germany starts on May 1st, and I was out at 4 am in the Mathiasburg (see the map, above) to try my luck. No roe bucks were seen by anyone that day, but I shot a large male fox at about 5 am as it approached the raised blind.

I hit him with 3 mm shot from the left shotgun barrel of my drilling. He’s in the freezer now waiting to be used for training my Deutsch Drahthaar Ajax for his advanced hunting tests later this year or next year. (The dog checking him out in the picture is Daniavizsla’s Barack, the current European Champion for his breed and age class.) Part of one test (the VGP, which Ajax will probably do next year) involves carrying a heavy fox for a distance of 400 meters, and the Bringtreue (retrieving reliability) test also uses foxes. Not really a great idea given the prevalence of fox tapeworm and its horrible consequences for the liver, but that’s tradition for you.

I shot my first deer on Pentacost at about 8:30 pm. I was up in a raised blind overlooking a meadow when I fell asleep for a short time. When I woke I saw a yearling doe at the salt lick. After observing carefully for a while to be sure that it was indeed a yearling and not an older doe with fawns (which would cost me my hunting license if shot), I fired an 8×57 IRS soft point round through the spinal cord in the neck, dropping it instantly. The weight after gutting was 10 kilos, and I took great pleasure in sharing the best part of the deer with Oskar, who had sold me his cherished drilling rifle. In the short time I have used it, I have really come to appreciate the advantages of this traditional German combination gun.

The wheat in the fields is growing quickly now, and the corn has been planted, so we expect the wild boar to make their presence known again soon. So far there have been no sightings this year, but tracks have been found in a number of places. Hunting these to minimize the considerable damage they can do to the crops will be a challenge to approach with great consideration and caution. It’s a necessary and popular form of the hunt in my area, but casualties among dogs and hunters are not infrequent.

One of my personal projects which I enjoy greatly is translating choice passages from Diana, Hubertus und Ich by the once-famous equestrian and author of sports literature, Oscar Caminneci. I know some of his surviving family through breeders’ circles for wire-haired vizslas, and Oscar’s nephew Manfred and his wife Ingeborg have an excellent kennel in Germany, Haus Schladern.

The author had the misfortune to be caught up in the intrigues of the Third Reich when Ulrich Scherping, the regime’s Oberstjägermeister, conspired to confiscate his hunting lands. Oscar was subsequently murdered in a concentration camp.

This light-hearted tale from his book of adventures demonstrates a lesson that all men must eventually learn if they are to succeed in life. Here is the German original, published in 1935, and my free adaptation in English, published with the permission of the Caminneci family.

That’s the German word variously translated as adjustment fire, trial fire, test firing, registration, sighting and the like. It’s the process you go through to be sure your shot will hit where you think it will when you use your scope to zero in on a target. Oskar’s drilling hadn’t been fired in a long time, so on those evenings and mornings when I sat in the raised blind waiting for a boar to show up I was a bit concerned that I might make a bad shot because of the sight adjustment. I had also never fired the rifle barrel, which is a much larger caliber than any rifle I had fired previously, so I didn’t really know what to expect if I pulled the trigger. Altogether not a good position to be in if you want to hunt responsibly.

So after I finished off the translations for the day and things in the office quieted down, I headed off to Schloss & Gut Liebenberg to learn some practical lessons about the gun I acquired recently. I spent a very useful hour and a half on the 100 meter target range testing the rifle at 100 meters and 35 meters (the latter distance being about the distance from the raised blind I’ve sat in most of the time and a salt lick in the clearing in front of it) and the shotgun barrels (left and right) with slugs at 35 meters.

My concerns were valid. I had never shot with sights having the particular type of reticle (Absehen) that the old Zeiss 6×42 scope on the drilling has. I received competent instruction that got me oriented quickly, and I discovered that the rifle shots were consistently about 10 centimeters high. So I learned to lower the target point by loosening the set screw and turning the adjustment wheel a bit to the left. After an initial overcompensation, I soon had the rifle barrel shooting centered groups at 100 meters that I could cover with a silver dollar (or an old 5 DM coin). I discovered that the shotgun barrels shoot the slugs a bit low, with the left barrel shooting about 25 cm to the right at 35 meters and the right barrel shooting about 10 cm to the left at the same distance.

Overall, it was a very successful excursion. I now know exactly hat I can expect from the drilling, and I have a high degree of confidence in the accuracy of the rifle barrel. I neglected to test systematically the “climbing” of rifle shots in quick succession, but I have the impression that it is not extreme. However, since most of the time I allowed the gun to cool for at least 3 or 4 minutes, I don’t really have enough data to be sure of the climbing behavior. I’ll have to test that on another day.

I'll get that hare and take all his eggs!

This morning Ajax and I greeted the dawn at the double-wide raised blind with the dachshund’s peephole. Things were fairly quiet; nothing had come by to take the remains from the carcass bait spot (Luderplatz) where I had left bits of our pigeon dinner. No noises of boar in the woods. Just the singing of birds, which grew louder as the light increased. Finally, there was enough light that I could see to the fence of the golf course about 150 meters away, where the hares I saw two days ago were still going at it. Mr. & Mrs. Easter Bunny. Since it didn’t look like there would be much of interest to come at the spot I was watching, I decided to stalk the road below the golf course and look for the fox which Barack, my youngest Vizsla, had pointed last week. I unloaded the drilling, climbed down and got Ajax from the car. Then I remembered my mentor’s insistence that despite the utter stupidity of putting dogs on the trail of healthy hares (a practice abandoned by a number of breed clubs for many good reasons), I should let Ajax work a few more fresh trails.

When we got to the spot where the hares had been doing their duty, I released Ajax and told him “Such’ den Hasen!” (“Find the hare!”). He started running in circles like a crazy dog. I was puzzled for a second until I realized we should have gone farther down the trail on which the hares had disappeared into the forest. Ajax was following all the tracks where the hares had run around in circles mating. I was dizzying. Eventually he unraveled the lover’s knot and found the right path on which they had departed. He disappeared into the trees like a steamroller on amphetamines. Several minutes later I heard his sighting bark (Sichtlaut), which indicated to me that he had found a hare (or something at least). This time I simply waited and didn’t whistle him back. He worked the trail altogether about 15 minutes before returning.

We stalked on, the drilling with 32 gram hunting loads of 3.5 mm shot in case we found the fox. No bullet in the rifle barrel; ground level shots with a rifle are simply too dangerous in that reserve, since a miss or ricochet can travel for miles and most paths are full of joggers, cyclists, dog walkers et alia. No fox, but two beautiful geese flew overhead skimming the trees so close I could have hit them with a stick. Wonderful birds. Not sure which variety of geese they were, but I was pleased that they are not in season today. Even if they were, I prefer to enjoy the view in cases like that. I’ve heard the rule about which geese to shoot in a V-formation, but nobody every said anything about pairs. The gray geese I see in the cornfields are probably safe in season too; they remind me of the “three sisters” – the geese I was forced to take off the estate of a deceased garlic farmer in Oregon as a condition for buying a piano for $50. They kept the snails and slugs under control and kept me entertained on my farm for years.

In the clearing past the Biberburg blind I noticed that the goshawk wasn’t in his usual tree waiting for pheasants or hares to investigate the Kirrung. Perhaps he had decided that Easter is a good day to let hares live.

This is the third day I’ve had my hunting license and the papers to allow me access to the hunting reserve in Stolpe. In that time I’ve been out to work with the dogs a few times, particularly on field searches with tests of their steadiness with shotgun blasts and following fresh hare tracks (both required for the spring natural abilities test [Verbandsjugendprüfung] later this month). Tonight I went out to the reserve with a friend; we stalked a bit, saw three fallow deer and a hare. I set Ajax on the hares track after it had disappeared (he never saw it), and he followed the track for about 10 minutes, apparently discovering the hare at one point. After about ten minutes I whistled him back, which I’m not supposed to do, but nightfall wasn’t far away and Jens and I wanted to sit in a raised blind for a few hours to see what would come.

I put Ajax back in his crate in the car and went up into the double-wide raised blind near the edge of our area. This is the third time I’ve sat there; I spent the evening of April first there and went back to greet the dawn the following morning.

A very comfortable hunting blind for two

We didn’t see much while we were up there tonight, though it was likely that a fox was rustling around underneath us for a while. Yesterday at dawn I saw a few hares about 50 meters away mating at the edge of a field, and on the first night I saw a roe deer come and nibble a bit, use the salt lick and wander around for about 5 minutes. I also heard the cries of the raccoon dogs (Marderhunde), a predator that wandered in from Asia years ago. It’s great to sit up there in silence and just listen to the sounds of the field and the forest.

It’s a very well designed, comfortable blind with carpets padding the seat and the widow ledge that also serves as a gub rest. There are extra little shelves on the right side as I look out where I can organize things like an emergency light, a mug of coffee and extra ammunition or use the shelves as an elbow rest for better shot stability. The fixed bench, window ledge and upper right shelf are arranged perfectly to rest my drilling up high, so I can raise it quickly and quietly to take aim. And it’s well sheltered with a big roof overhang to protect me from the weather. It’s also in one of the quietest parts of the reserve.

I’m looking forward to my next observation session in about 5 hours on Easter morning.