Good day

Tavo Cruz called us yesterday to meet him and other dog- in- laws and coursing friends for lunch at the Owl bar and a run down by White Sands missile range, where hares seem to thrive even in droughty years. I am gratified that old farts like me and Dutch Salmon are still walking, and that 8 year old Ataika found and ran the first hare of the day. Dan Gauss’s “Motley Crew” (that’s him on the right– click to embiggen) says it all. I am in the middle flanked by Tavo & Dutch.

Taik after a run– pretty good shape for a girl of a “certain age”…

One Good Hound

Not all New Mexico hounds are tazi types; more are longdogs (locally more often called “staghounds”), deliberate and intelligently- bred crosses of various sighthound breeds. I have been hoping, and still am, that Clint Chisler would elaborate on the voluntary partnership between Lucy and a free falcon, but meanwhile here is his celebration of a fine dog.

“In the fall of 2007 a good friend of mine and fellow sight hound hunting enthusiast, Bill Bates, and I took a trip to the Estancia Valley. I bought a pup for $45 that day. She was 7 weeks old and one of a dozen very similar looking siblings. I figured I’d get the smallest female since I’m more of a rabbit hunter than a coyote killer. The ranch hand I bought her from asked me, “do ya think that’s too much money?” I quickly replied, “No I’d say someday she’ll be prove to be worth it.” That statement was soon become an understatement. Lucy was a squirrelly little hazel-eyed light brindle staghound. To look at her you might think she was just another greyhound, but her ancestry traces back to indigenous staghound blood lines from the southwestern United States with a little Argentinean Dogo, Pit bull, and who knows what else mixed in.

“Over the years Lucy has been an outstanding hound. From about 6 months of age she could keep up with my older stag/saluki, and improved the older she got. Lucy has taken about a half dozen coyotes to date and I can’t count how many jacks. Ten of those jacks were taken as a team effort with a wild (previously inter-mewed) prairie falcon I had released on the mesa where I did most of my hunting in Los Lunas, NM. The prairie falcon is a story in itself that I hope to write soon. Not many dogs could match her perfect combination of speed and endurance.

“Lucy has endured many injuries that are all too common in the coursing world; broken toe, fence-torn tail that had to be amputated, a concussion from running full speed into a pickup, coyote bites, and too many sutures/staples to be listed. These strong yet delicate dogs age fast, but Lucy has stood the test of time and the rough miles of running across the New Mexico countryside. Her hardened feet have come to accept the sand, rocks, mud, and snow they have been exposed to and punished by. To this day Lucy is still an integral part of my pack.

“A couple of mornings ago I let the dogs out for the day and after I broke a thin layer of ice in the water tub I stood and soaked up a beautiful cream orange and blue sunrise. In the foreground a murder of crows were flying across the landscape. I’m guessing they were going from their nightly roost to a nearby dairy to eat for the day. I looked down and Lucy was right beside me watching the same grand display of nature, and then she looked up at me with those hazel eyes.”

Running Dogs

Herb Wells of Alpaugh CA takes the most amazing photos of coursing dogs I have ever seen- probably that anyone has.

A couple of sets here. The first three pics demonstrate the incredible and totally normal hyperextension and flexing of a running dog’s first joints (third is also one of out own breeding, Daniela’s Shunkar). This is also why you should not remove dewclaws.



Second batch: synchronized dogging. Is this common?!



Xigou


Sir Terence Clark has just returned from China. He writes:

“I was in Shaanxi Province of China in October 2010 with the Xigou (pronounced See-gow) hunters, one of whom had previously asked me whether I thought his hound was a Saluki. After examining a whole range of these hounds, I can only say that superficially they look very like desert bred Salukis of the kind that you find elsewhere in the northern range of Turkey and Iran.”

Terence thinks they came to Central Asia from the west, from Persia and Arabia. I rather think they went the other way; I’m not sure the evidence is in yet to prove either of our theories. What is for certain is that they have been in both places a long time! Tomb images and other art places them firmly in western China by AD 700– see “Prince Xangui’s Tomb” where the dog has the local roman nose, about which more in a moment. Terence continues:

“…the Chinese Xigou are quite varied in their appearance. Some have a distinctly banana-shaped nose, but this would seem to go back at least to the 7th century, if the tomb painting of Prince Zhanghuai is accurate. Others have a normal Saluki nose. Some have a roached back, but others a straight topline. Some are very broad across the chest so that the elbows seem to stick out, but most have a normal Saluki front. Most have quite thick ear fringes but only skimpy feathering on the tail, like the Tazys of Central Asia. A few have rather rounded front feet but most have a good long, well-arched Saluki foot. The colours are mainly solid black, white, red with black mask and fringes, grey and dark brindle. I did not see any particoloureds, grizzles or smooths, though I was told a smooth variety existed.”

Here is a typical young black pup of the local type. Blacks are rare in the Arab countries but appear sporadically from Turkey east and are apparently common in China.

Some pretty saluki- type dogs:


The nose:

Which contrary to some saluki people has been around a long time. Remember the Prince’s tomb, and look at that profile:

Another:

A Xian figurine also ca 700:

Terence also got to go hunting. “Hunting was a free for all! I saw as many as six or eight run at the same time and the hare, smaller but similar to the European hare, does not have much chance to escape on the flat, sparsely covered cultivated fields.”

Hungry cultures are not as “sporting” as ones at play…

Weekend Hunt

We– Terence Wright, Karen Wetherill, their lurcher Loki (grandson of our Plummer and Lashyn), gyr- prairie tiercel Cog, Daniela and her smooth saluki pup Blaze, English master falconer and author of Game Hawk Ray Turner, Libby and Ataika and I– spent January 16- 17 hiking and hawking, first on high La Jencia Plain, on Lee’s ranch, then north of White Sands’ Stallion Gate on the other side of the river.

We ran only four hares and caught none but covered an amazing amount of ground and saw some great runs. We had fun. Among the following photos, the first ones at Lee’s are mine; the good, later ones Daniela’s.

Beginning of first day: Cog at Lee’s, on Karen’s Cootie car (click twice to enlarge enough to see “insects”). She is an entomologist, THE bee expert in NM, who has employed me to collect them in the Sevilleta Refuge. Fun fact: native bee species in NM are 1200+ and counting. I want to discover one…

Terence with Cog on “paint roller” pole. Cog may be the first “longwing” to pole- fly. He, like Arab sakers, will spot hares that are sitting in their forms, and has a real advantage there.

Karen and Blaze at White Sands. (Trinity atomic site, by the way, would be just behind her collar).

Ataika, a very youthful and energetic seven (her mother was twice that when she gave birth to her in Kazakhstan).

Searching, strategizing (Ray with binos)…

Loki lurcher…

Refreshments…

Finally the unseasonable though pleasant heat got to Cog and he baled out on a hare and landed on my head. Do notice please that I had been walking for two days at that point– and I am laughing. May have some seasons in me yet…

Cog apparently changed his mind after we loaded Blaze, but it was late afternoon and time to leave. A good time was had by all, and Ray got to see a kind of falconry that, outside of Asia, is still something of a New Mexico specialty.

And: I proved to myself that I can still walk.

Some “Country” Music Videos: Nostalgia and Chills…

Not all “country” music is unsophisticated or even American. Here I give you a bunch of stuff I have been working through and following. Let us start with Tom Russell’s classic “US Steel”— a straight- up traditional country lament complete with sweet pedal steel, but set in Pennsylvania rather than on the border or even Appalachia, full of sad images of decaying industry. I sent it to Marty Stupich, who worked in and documented that mill in the 80’s and now is photographing the abandoned smelter in El Paso, and to Retrieverman in West Virginia, who has been musing on such things. (I also suggested he look at a pre- doctrinaire Steve Earle in the stirring if slightly sinister “Copperhead Road” — a mini- movie with echoes of Thunder Road. Rednecks strike back…)

Which suggested in turn Show of Hands’ poignant “Country Life”. No jobs… no pubs… even in the American west, are we following England down?

The next jump almost leaves the tradition– Show of Hands provides the soundtrack to a traditional, rhyming poem turned strange, a very dark contemporary Christmas tale by Charles Causley, but the images in this version are adopted from Anime! I think it works. Causley changed Herod, the archetype of an arbitrary wicked king, into a more contemporary bogeyman, a sort of supernatural child molester, and put him in the English countryside. SOH gave him a soundtrack that stands at least MY hair on end. And the animator covered all this and added an apocalyptic edge– look at the sky and feel the wind over the line “…melt in a million suns”.

Enough doom! End your tour with “Longdog”, a merry tale of a merry poacher and his lurcher, also by Show of Hands; a hunter- gatherer, a “Municipal Paleolithic Man” in action. If dogs are outlawed only outlaws will have dogs…

Old Plummer

Our thirteen- year- old English lurcher from David Hancock, once one of the best single- hand hare hounds in the southwest, father and grandfather of other great dogs, mostly content to dream on the couch.

Unless he sees a hare…

Pakistan

Ali Hasnain hunts in a slightly grander and very traditional way– on a friend’s estate, with beaters! (His rookie of the year, Sonya, is listening alertly for them in the pic). This hunt took place in a watery oasis in desert country. We hope to get more reports from him including on falconry if he joins other friends in wide- open Baluchistan later in the season.