By Steven McGonigal
Oscar Young Oscar
I
thought Oscar had well and truly lost the plot. It Was 30th January this year, a Saturday morning with some snow on the ground and he was baying in the middle of some gorse bushes, not moving at all just baying – Being a true aficionado in the pursuit of foxes, Oscar never stayed in one place because the foxes never hung around long enough, he was always on the go, his familiar deep bay while running always made me smile. I got Oscar as a young pup from Paul Sullivan in Cork in 2015. He had a calmness about him from eight weeks old, never shy, never cocky, just calm, sometimes I thought he was too calm. I often regretted never training him better as a puppy, but the truth is had he been trained he never would have turned out how he did. He wasn’t a dog to be trained, as training would have only tempered his edge, it would have cooled
the fire in his belly that made him who he was. As a puppy he never showed much interest in hunting. We walked the lanes and fields in the spring following his arrival in in autumn and while he scented and sniffed here and there, he never showed much interest. I laid blood trails, let him see deer carcasses, rabbits, pheasants and all sorts of things puppies become familiar with, but they never interested him. I didn’t overly worry about it, but it did concern me just a little that he appeared to have a lack of interest in ‘things.’ One evening about a year after he arrived, I was walking in the very same area where we began the story when he became very keen on a scent. He began sniffing and snorting, really getting his nose into the grass and took off running while whining and barking and was gone for over 30 minutes, and appeared
to be in pursuit of something, although I couldn’t confirm this as I didn’t see anything and I assumed he was messing about. This happened another few times until one evening he was baying and howling in the gorse when I spotted a fox leaving the bottom of the gorse with Oscar coming behind a few seconds later. I realised then that he had begun to realise what his nose and his voice was for. As he matured from puppy to dog, he became ever more reliable and I really started to understand him and his voice and came to know what he was chasing.
He preferred to sneak about on a shoot and catch the odd easy pheasant Oscar never cared about rabbits one bit. I could walk him through a field of ten thousand rabbits and he wouldn’t
Irish Country Sports and Country Life Winter 2021
43
