
Doggy, It's Cold Outside
In his opening monologue on the old Tonight Show, Johnny Carson often used a “how” joke. He would lead into some extreme, pause for his announcer and straight man Ed McMahon to ask, “How (blank) was it?” and then Carson would deliver the punchline.
But for anyone who lives north of the Mason-Dixon Line and who doesn’t do all their dog work in a temperature-controlled facility, there will be times when, if the question was “How cold was it?” the answer, for about four months of the year and in some years even longer, would be no joke.
If you have Sporting breeds or Hounds and actually hunt with them, or have breeds whose training needs to continue during the cold months, you most likely have, on more than one occasion, experienced the kind of cold that no matter what you do, you can’t warm up. When your teeth chatter like castanets, when even your hair seems to shiver, and you feel like your core consists of one giant icicle. Occasionally, this tooth-rattling cold arrives during hunting season and turns what should be sport and fun for both the dogs and the hunters into an ordeal.
I live in a northern border state known for rough weather, although autumn is usually pretty benign, with decent weather conditions for both dogs and hunters. But a few years ago, October was more than chilly, November was miserable, and December was downright brutal. It seemed as though all the talk about global warming had riled Boreas Rex, the bad-tempered king of the winds, to the degree that he was determined to show everybody that rumors he’d been deposed by Vulcanus Rex, the fire king, had been greatly exaggerated.
Upland game birds aren’t much bothered by frigid weather. Pheasants, grouse, quail and partridge, as long as they have food and some conifers for shelter, get along just fine. If they have the requisite number of calories and get some rest, the dogs also seem to thrive in the cold. But for several months during that frigid year, I couldn’t seem to find a spot on my body that wasn’t numb or quivering every time I set foot outside the 70-degree atmosphere of my house. Trying to work with the dogs was wretched, but hunting was pure torture.
The low point of the year, however, from the standpoint of sheer frigidity, occurred not in my home state, although that was bad enough, but in Nebraska, which on average is definitely the warmer of the two states.
The first pheasant rooster my Chesapeake flushed was burrowed in tightly and didn’t jump until the dog lunged in and nearly grabbed him.
Something was happening in Nebraska that year or in me or maybe in both the state and me. Knife-edged prairie winds sliced through every piece of clothing I could put on and still move. Being a waterfowl hunter, I have plenty of cold-weather gear, but for some reason, none of it seemed to stop the wind. I was cold when I entered the state and even colder when I left.
Although the cold and the wind were a constant during the week I spent hunting in Nebraska that year, one particular day remains frozen in memory.
The sun was up, but it was a strange sun indeed. In the early morning, it was a dull, crimson ball, but it was daylight without heat. It was as if the sun itself was freezing. Later it broke into light amber-colored rays that looked like chilled honey, and whatever thin warmth it provided was cancelled by the frigid wind. Even the birds were hunkered down in the cover, as the cold had them reluctant to move.
The first pheasant rooster my Chesapeake flushed was burrowed in tightly and didn’t jump until the dog lunged in and nearly grabbed him. He caught the wind and rode it back over my head barely 10 yards up, but I was so cold, I couldn’t feel the safety on my shotgun and thus never got off a shot.
The next bird, however, wasn’t quite so lucky, as I’d buried my “shooting hand” in the pocket with a hand warmer and just enough flexibility had returned when the dog found it so I could grip the stock and pull the trigger.
We had been hunting a swale that terminated in a creek bed, and when we reached it, I came around a bend to find my hunting partner huddled against the leeward bank of the creek with his Brittany on his lap as the two of them tried to take advantage of what little body heat each still possessed. Although Bill and his Brit were born and raised in Nebraska, the bone-chilling cold that day defeated both.
Fortunately, the creek bed led back to the truck. Although we were hustling along, Bill’s Brit found a large covey of quail, and thanks to handwarmers, we both had limber enough fingers to each scratch a pair of the birds on the covey rise. That was fortunate, because the odds that we’d survive long enough to find the remainder of the covey, on that day anyway, were long indeed.
Once we finally reached the truck, it took nearly a full hour with the truck heater blasting out maximum heat and the consumption of nearly all the scalding tea in my thermos before either of us could really move with anything approaching normal flexibility. The dogs were burrowed down so far in their crate blankets they were nearly invisible.
It seemed like after that hunt I stayed iced up until spring, even though we spent the remainder of the day in front of Bill’s fireplace stoked with Osage orange wood, the hottest burning wood available in the Midwest, sipping hard, hot cider pressed from apples on Bill’s trees.
It’s not just bird hunters who deal with extreme cold. A guy I know has Beagles that are absolute bunny-hunting demons. Winter is the best time for bunny hunting because it is easier to spot cottontails against the white snow. Of course, that also means the temperatures are frequently far from balmy for any hunt, so the beagler is accustomed to a chilly atmosphere when he and the dogs go afield.
The Beagles were bunny-hunting demons who kept their hunter out in the frigid temperatures much longer than planned.
Chilly is one thing, he says, but on this particular day, it would have needed to warm up a lot to be “damned cold.” Still, the dogs were driving him nuts in the house, and he thought a short hunt in an area close by that was always a good place for the dogs to jump rabbits would burn off some of their energy.
To say that things did not work out as planned, especially the “short” part about the hunt, would be a vast understatement. The dogs hunted for almost an hour not striking any scent at all, while their owner tried to avoid becoming a frozen human statue in a tangle of prickly ash patches, plum thickets and brush piles. It was great habitat for rabbits, but not so much for a freezing hunter.
Finally, just about one nanosecond before he was going to call the dogs in and head for home, they started yelling their “Hey, Boss, we think we found one” cry.
The last thing a rabbit hunter wants to do is try and call dogs off a hot scent. So, he was resigned to at least a few more minutes of the bone-cracking cold. But he hadn’t reckoned on close to 60 minutes of it, which is what it took for his yodeling Beagles and the rabbit to make their way around to him.
By the time the hounds pushed the rabbit into range for their owner’s firearm, he was so numb from the cold that he was unable to mount the gun properly and totally missed the shot. The rabbit, having dodged a bullet, disappeared deep into a massive brush pile and wasn’t coming out again, no matter how much or how loudly the dogs yelled at it.
Their owner contended it took two days inside a house with the thermostat at astronomical heights before his lips thawed enough so anyone could understand anything he was trying to say.
The cold creates havoc (and numbness) for dog people other than hunters. A lady I know still talks about the time she and her Australian Cattle Dog had to bring her sheep flock back to the sheep barn from their distant pasture during a nasty, frigid snowstorm. Herding white things in a snowy winter storm definitely has to be classified as a tough day at the office.
The shepherd and her young Australian Cattle Dog found herding white sheep in a snowstorm to be a tough day at the office indeed.
“The sheep were uneasy with the snow, plus the wind was making them goofy,” the ACD’s owner says. “Whenever the dog and I would get them headed in the direction of the barn, one or two would break away from the flock and run back toward the pasture. It’s not easy to find white critters in a whiteout, believe me. If it hadn’t been for the dog’s nose, I’m sure we would have lost several in the storm.”
Making matters even worse for the shepherd, her experienced ACD had been hurt earlier that week and was too lame to work.
“So, all the help I had was my young dog, who had just completed his pre-trial tested title, so he wasn’t exactly a veteran when it came to moving any stock, let alone a bunch of nervous sheep. As a result, a job that would have taken about 20 minutes in nice weather with my older dog took more than two hours with the young dog and crazy sheep in the snowstorm.
“By the time all the sheep were in the fold yard and then into the fold and their pens, despite being bundled up in Thinsulate® and wool and wearing shearling-lined boots, I couldn’t feel my toes and I was shaking so hard I’m sure it must have registered on the Richter Scale,” she continued. “While it may have been a hallucination brought about by the snow and cold, I’m pretty sure I saw brass monkeys asking directions to the nearest welder’s shop.”
Malamute owners expect to work their dogs in snow and cold weather. But they don’t expect to be dumped into freezing water.
When deep snow hid a kink in the river, the musher and two of her Malamutes wound up in frigid water.
A Malamute owner told me that she and her dogs had been traveling along a small river that runs through her property. They were on land, not on the ice because, she says, because she never trusts ice with moving water beneath it.
But the deep snow had hidden a tiny kink in the river, and when the dogs cut across it, the sled and its rider wound up in waist-deep, frigid water.
Although the “musher” was able to extricate herself and the sled from the river without a great deal of difficulty, that was really the least of her problems.
“I was a mile and a half from home,” she says, “and the temperature was barely above zero. Being wet, you lose your insulation, and hypothermia is a real danger, so I needed to get back to my house really quickly. Two of the dogs were pretty wet also, which meant it wasn’t just me who was very uncomfortable.”
She says she was screaming like a banshee to get the last ounce of speed from her team. “I was shivering really hard, and I knew the two wet dogs had to be just about as miserable. By the time we reached my yard, I was frozen and to this day, I don’t recall putting the dogs away in the kennel. Fortunately for the two wet dogs, the kennel building is heated.
“When I finally stumbled into the house, my husband said I was talking gibberish. He got my now wet and partially frozen clothing off, lit the fireplace, plopped me in front of it wrapped in two quilts and poured hot coffee into me. An hour or so of this treatment brought me back to the living, but I confess that was a scary experience. After that, I made sure I gave the river a much wider berth during the winter months.”
While the cold is part of living in the northern tier states and the dogs don’t seem to mind it at all, as I’ve grown older and the pain of old injuries has increased, on cold days, I find myself more often than not, paraphrasing Frank Loesser’s great hit — “Doggy, it’s cold outside” — and opting instead for the warmth inside.