So I haven’t given many updates or posted much about my new pup. It’s been a long sad summer for us after losing Shelby back in April. I’ve been training my new pup Ruby from day one but I just haven’t had the same fire lit in under me until here lately. With the season getting closer and closer I’m starting to get the itch though and ready to get her in the woods on some real tracks. She’s just now getting big enough to wear the Garmin Alpha collar so we can start training on it.

You hear the older trackers talk a lot about having good dogs over the years but there only being one or two that are truly outstanding and what you call “once in a lifetime” type trackers. I hate to call it too early and jinx her but I think little Ruby has the potential to be just that. She’s a natural at it and a natural hunter. She doesn’t care anything at all about playing fetch with a ball…..she wants to go to the field and hunt and sniff for stuff. At 5 months old she’s already running mock tracks with the patience and meticulous nose work of a seasoned tracker. She stops and takes time to sniff individual leaves and twigs, etc….She’s way farther along right now than either Otis or Shelby were at this age. I won’t be surprised at all if she’s finding deer for folks by the end of this first season. We’ll find out here pretty soon………

Coming soon…….”The Tales of Otis and Ruby Roo”

Good looking dog

Thanks man.....I purposely went with a yellow lab this time so that she would be easier to see in the woods and hopefully she'll stay cooler during the early season than a black dog

Oh, one other thing I meant to add about Ruby……she’s gritty as all hell. I think she may make a good bay dog. I’m just hoping she’s not overly aggressive. About the third or fourth day we had her....as an 8 week old puppy she had Otis bayed up in the corner of the back porch. She gives him tee total hell every day….She’ll bite at his front legs and force him to wrestle with her. She’s got a crazy sounding little growl too. When she’s getting after Otis wrestling with him…..she sounds just like a big coon that someone has knocked out of the tree onto a couple of hounds. You’d think she’s eating him.

That’s funny - we only hav one dog now - before we lost our boxer our Chesapeake use to make the boxer wrestle by biting his front legs

Awesome!! Look forward to the tracking tales this hunting season, as always..

I think I remember you saying she was related to William Crawford’s tank dog, if so be careful with her cause tank will flat out catch one.

I think she is gonna be that way.....she's really aggressive.....

Some things are just hard wired in a dog and people too….I struggled making a high energy lab into tracking dog. Some labs have a lot harder time throttling back and she only had two gears.... All that energy combine with some idle time led her astray. I was just focusing on trying to fix my house and I neglected her need for something to occupy her brain……. I suppose I can relate…..…..She tried hard to be a good tracking dog though. She was just too high strung for it naturally but she didn’t know the meaning of quit….…She would have made a world champion fetch player though…..if there was such a sport…..When she got a new ball she wouldn’t put it down and even slept with it in her mouth….If you didn’t throw it for her she started dropping at your feet again until you finally did…..

She’d even take on walks and drop it in front of you over and over as you walked… until you finally gave in…..When you threw it she would go after it with such intensity that I worried that she was gonna hurt herself….she’d be jittering. What I miss the most though is that she was nothing but pure joy and happiness and she exuded it so much that it would spill over onto you as well ….She didn’t just shake her tail….she jumped off all fours and wagged her whole body…… It took me some time to adjust but I know it happened for a reason and I’m at peace with that….I also have a lot more perspective on life in general now too. People may say its “just a dog” but the chit still hurts though to have that kind of priceless joy taken from you in an instant and in such an ugly way..... I reckon that’s all I got to say about that……

Let’s go track some deer!!!!!