AUGUST, 1917 
FOREST AND STREAM 
359 
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'5 
association with the family of their mas¬ 
ter, they acquire intelligence, resourceful¬ 
ness and mdependence, and at the same 
time an interest in human beings, which 
qualities are not necessary to the city ani¬ 
mal. It was in this way, I presume, that 
many of the traits we so much admire in 
dogs were originally developed; modern 
methods certainly would never have de¬ 
veloped them. 
I was shooting on a snipe marsh one 
day, some miles from the nearest cattle¬ 
man’s shack, when a cow dog came walk¬ 
ing very deliberately out on the marsh and 
sat on his haunches. I was greatly amused 
at the dignified and quiet interest he 
seemed to take in my proceedings, for I 
had never seen a dog do anything like it 
before. He had probably wandered some 
distance from home, as such dogs will do, 
and was curious to know what all the 
shooting was about. Very likely he dis¬ 
approved of it, as not assisting in the cat¬ 
tle business; and after awhile he delicately 
and discreetly picked his way off the wet 
marsh and trotted back into the woods. 
Another catch dog with whose acquain¬ 
tance I am honored, accompanies his mas¬ 
ter’s children every day about three miles 
to school. He pays no attention to them 
and will obey no orders they give him; he 
treats them thoroughly as children.—But 
he stays all day at the school house, and 
goes home with them in the evening. 
This same dog and an older one once 
came with the family to a celebration at 
the school. But when they returned the 
dogs did not accompany them. I asked 
someone why they remained, and was told 
that they would stay there until all the 
people had gone. So I stayed to watch the 
phenomenon, moving off to a little dis¬ 
tance. Some five minutes after every soul 
had gone and all about the little weather¬ 
beaten hut had sunk into primeval stillness, 
the younger catch dog got up and trotted 
slowly home, testing various scents on the 
way. A few moments later, the old dog 
started after him. I watched them disap¬ 
pear, trotting along about two hundred 
yards apart, in their independent contented 
dogged way. They evidently enjoyed the 
celebration as a study in human beings and 
their peculiar ways, and stayed to see the 
last of them safely departed. 
I once went to church in Virginia 
(where by the way I heard an excellent 
sermon) and noticed that four or five dogs 
that had accompanied their masters came 
into the church and lay by the fire all 
through the service. No one seemed to 
think anything of it; and I liked it. It 
humanized the religion;—but that is pos¬ 
sibly an heretical notion on my part. 
A S to the cow dog’s appearance, pretty 
much all of them I have seen re¬ 
semble one another in a general way. 
This led me to think that a more or less 
distinct breed might be in process of form¬ 
ing. But there are some exceptions. I 
was once shown a pointer dog that could 
hold a cow; but I think it is a rare trait 
among bird dogs. I have heard sometimes 
of a cross of bull dog with hound, that 
produced a good catch dog; but I have 
seen only one instance of it, and do not 
like it. The usual mixture seems to have 
been hound with cur; and the result of 
mating good ones, who will do the work 
required, seems to be an animal about the 
size of a pointer, short haired, rather sharp 
nosed, and very flexible in the back and 
spine;—as a Dutchman said, “Mein Gott, 
they have to be!” They bound and spring 
with great ease and force; and in watch¬ 
ing them one cannot help but be reminded 
a little of the panther, although in other 
respects there is of course no resemblance. 
Their color is interesting. They are al¬ 
most invariably tan, reddish tan, and yel¬ 
low, with black nose and trimmed with 
black round the jaws and eyes. Some are 
reddish tan on the back, fading to tan or 
yellow or buckskin on the sides and under¬ 
neath. Others are red tan all over. Some 
tend to black on their backs and some 
have white on their necks and shoulders. 
But tan is their marked characteristic. One 
is reminded of that persistent tan color 
which appears so strongly in the blood¬ 
hound, and is undoubtedly a prepotent 
color in hounds, going back for thou¬ 
sands of years to the hot sands of north¬ 
ern Africa and Persia, where our hounds 
and good dogs are supposed to have orig¬ 
inated. Tan is a color characteristic of 
the desert—as of the lion and other ani¬ 
mals of the East. 
I like that tan color and believe in it. 
I like the black-and-tan fox hound; and 
do not sympathize with the fashion of try¬ 
ing to breed it out of beagles and fox 
hounds. American hounds in wild places 
readily revert to the black and tan types; 
and grand dogs they are, ready to hunt 
anything for you, fox, deer, wild cat, pan¬ 
ther or turkey. Those dogs I saw some 
years ago in the Yellowstone Park, used 
for hunting mountain lions, were a cross 
between a foxhound and bloodhound. The 
tan came out strongly in them and they 
were terrible looking fellows, of splendid 
power and’courage. 
The strangest mystery in all the history 
of dogs, is the persistence of type; of a 
color or a quality of mind or body that 
will remain intact through the centuries, in 
spite of careless breeding and altered sur¬ 
roundings. The greyhound is sometimes 
said to be the oldest, purest and truest 
breeding type of dogs we have, going back 
for hundreds if not thousands of years to 
Persia and the East. But in that case 
great care in breeding has been used. With 
our other hounds it is different, and I have 
often wondered about them, because I have 
seen so many of them in wild places, care¬ 
lessly bred without pedigree or register, 
and yet retaining the remarkable qualities 
they have always been noted for so far as 
we can trace them back in history. 
Our beagle is simply a small harrier, 
and the harrier a small foxhound, and the 
foxhound was once simply a hound that 
hunted anything by scent. But here the 
history of them becomes vague, and in the 
Middle Ages, just as we lose all definite¬ 
ness in it, there seem to have appeared two 
kinds of hounds, the bloodhound and the 
St. Hubert hound, sometimes called the 
black St. Hubert. I have always supposed 
that the black St. Hubert still persists with 
us, in our black-and-tan foxhound. The 
bloodhound and the black St. Hubert were 
two distinct types as far as w r e can trace 
them back, and the two types seem to per¬ 
sist to the present day. But whether still 
farther back in the past the two types de¬ 
scended from one common type or whether 
they were always distinct, is an apparently 
unsolvable problem. 
O N the outskirts of old Fort Bassinger 
last winter, I suddenly met two 
splendid black-and-tan hounds that 
stopped for a moment to talk with my 
Saxon. In form and feature they re¬ 
minded me of old French pictures of 
European hounds. So here were dogs, 
bred in the American wilderness for hunt¬ 
ing wild cats and deer, far from all influ¬ 
ences of kennels, bench shows and regis¬ 
tered pedigrees, yet harking back to an old 
type of hundreds of years ago. Delighted 
with the opportunity I began to get out 
my pocket camera; but meantime their 
master was disappearing on horseback into 
(continued on page 382) 
Ben, a promising young catch dog. He has already held several cattle 
