For those of you that follow Pappy's "Life is Good" string, you've undoubtedly seen his little hound Sadie pictured from time to time. Sadie must have realised I could use a little extra exercise, because she helped me get some one afternoon last week while hunting at Pappy's.
Pappy had decided not to hunt that afternoon (freezer probably already full
), and had put Sadie and Hanna in the pen while Anthony and I went to hunt a couple of stands. Well, after I had been sitting in the stand for 10 minutes or so, I heard an animal running and saw Sadie tracking me to my stand. After just a couple of minutes she came right to the ladder and looked up at me! I waited for a while hoping she would leave, but other then running around the stand and generally just sniffing around, she seemed to be there for the duration. I decided to get down and walk her back to the cabin. She followed for a while and soon was no longer in sight in the woods. I dropped down off the ridge into the creek bottom and saw Pappy riding up in his truck looking for Sadie. He had let the dogs out a while after we had left and couldn't stop Sadie when she took off along our trail.
I decided to try another stand, hoping Pappy and Sadie would reunite...wrong! After a climbing back up the ridge to a second stand site, Sadie again came running up to say hello.
I got down the second time and walked back down to the creek bottom leading to the cabin. I saw Sadie at least a couple of hundred yards away running full out for the cabin....I thought. So I decided to go to a third stand site closer to the creek bottom. I don't even think I got to pull my bow up before...here comes Sadie...for the third time!
This time I decided I wasn't climbing into another stand until I knew Sadie was in the pen. I went back to the cabin, and Sadie had made it there ahead of me...Pappy had her pinned up. Pappy gave me directions to another stand I didn't know about near the cabin. Didn't have a lot of daylight left at this point. I found the fourth stand and had climbed up and settled down. Looked around and saw a dead dog near the stand. Don't know who's dog he belonged too, but I didn't feel very confident of seeing deer with a bloated dog carcuss within 20 yards of my stand, so I got down out of this fourth stand I had climbed and headed for a fifth stand I knew of on the other side of the farm. I actually hunted out of the fifth stand maybe forty-five minutes prior to dark...didn't see any deer. But I got a lot of exercise that afternoon for which I'm extremely grateful to Sadie for allowing me the opportunity!
