Book Preview 2: No Snow Tracks After Noon
The story of the coldest night of my life featured in Chapter 12 of my soon-to-be-publish book, Cat Dog Chronicles.
Continuing this series of snippets from my new book, Cat Dog Chronicles, please enjoy this story about one of the coldest, scariest nights of my life when I bit off a bit more than I could chew while out hunting the snow with my dogs this past season.
No Snow Tracks After Noon
This is a rule I created for myself after one particularly cold and scary night in the woods that spooked not only myself but my wife and my entire family. I resolved I would never do something so foolish again.
I had taken the day off work to catch another snow day and had hunted from 5:00 AM until about 3:00 PM without finding a runnable track.
This was early in the season during one of the first bouts of snow we got and my hunts from previous days were similar stories—very few runnable tracks. Frustration was mounting and I was beginning to feel desperate.
I had decided to head out of the woods to go home, but about a mile before I hit pavement, I crossed a small road network that led to an area I had never hunted before. The first road had no tire tracks on it and all that smooth, sparkling, virgin snow looked incredibly enticing.
I’ll just go take a quick look, I thought.
No more than three hundred yards up that road I found what looked like a fresh set of bobcat tracks. They were stunning. No snow had filled them in, and they weren’t iced over at all.
Having minimal experience aging tracks, I had no idea how old they truly were, but they were the freshest-looking cat tracks I had seen with my own eyes at that point.
I couldn’t believe they were real.
And that’s when any sense of discernment I had left my body dissolved into thin air. No way was I passing up this track. Checking to see how much daylight we had left never crossed my mind.
Full-send mode had been activated and there was no turning back.
Let’s give it a shot, I thought, then pulled Whiskey out of the box and put her on the ground.
To my surprise, she sniffed the first few tracks she came across, didn’t bark at all, then jumped straight back into the box. Well, that’s weird, I thought, are they too old? I should’ve trusted her.
Then, I pulled Coulee out and let her down. I had always thought Coulee’s nose was on the colder end of the spectrum, and this verified it. Sticking her nose deep into a track, Coulee let out a long, ringing bellow, then started following the track right away. Alright, we’re doing this!
I decided Roux and Finn should also come along, so I let them out and although neither of them barked, they both seemed interested in the track and started following Coulee’s lead. I pulled on my chest harness which I keep loaded with some essentials—first aid kit, emergency blanket, fire starter, etc.—grabbed my GPS then fell in behind the dogs.
We’ll just follow this a little ways and see what happens.
I was in utter bliss watching the dogs work this track. They were doing so good, following it to a T, and when they lost it, would circle around until they found it again. Being right there with them following such an obvious track gave me a lot of confidence in them and I felt like they really did have a chance at becoming cat dogs.
Track by track I followed along, and it went on and on and on. With all my attention focused on trying to keep up with the dogs, an hour went by without me even realizing it. I’m not exaggerating when I say I was having the most fun I had ever had in my life.
Eventually, the track emerged from a section of thick woods and hit a road. It was dark under the forest canopy, but it wasn’t until I stood on the more open road that I realized it was getting just plain dark in general.
I looked at my watch and saw that the sun was setting in ten minutes. The temperature was dropping fast. As I stood there, the dogs continued following the track. Coulee was barking here and there, but not continuously, and Roux and Finn were mostly silent aside from a few squeaks of excitement. Then suddenly, all three dogs erupted at once.
“Oh my God,” I said aloud to myself, watching their track lines on the GPS begin to accelerate. “I think they just jumped it.” The race was on.
As fast as they were moving, I knew there was no chance I was keeping up with them. They were approaching the 500-yard mark, then 600, then … 1000 yards. They kept going straight away from me, no zigging or zagging. If it weren’t for the cat tracks we were following, I would’ve thought they were chasing trash the way they were lining out.
Trying my best to stay calm, I started pouring over my maps to figure out if any roads would take me closer to them and the general direction in which they were heading. I was only about a mile from my truck, and there were roads, but access was cut off by at least one locked gate I knew about.
Once I realized they were completely out of pocket, I started panicking, trying to decide if I should take off after them on foot or run back to the truck.
Foolishly, in my frantic rush to get on the track, I forgot to change from my hoodie to my rain jacket and now my hoodie was soaked. It was a thick, warm, fleece-lined hoodie but the majority of it was unfortunately made of cotton and had quadrupled its dry weight. Luckily, I had a new set of merino wool baselayers and insulated leather boots, which, if it weren’t for those items, I think this story would have ended quite differently.
I could see on the map that the road I was on would take me at least a little way further in the dog’s general direction. They were chasing a live animal now and I was becoming painfully aware that I had no control over where they would end up.
Trying to stay positive, I reasoned that they very well could make a turn and start running back this way. I had also heard of cats running their own tracks backward to fool the dogs and it soothed my nerves a bit thinking that was a possibility.
As I stood on the road trying to plan my next move, I watched the light fade. The air was clear enough that from my high vantage point, I could see twinkling lights below in the valley. It was officially nighttime. Then my phone rang.
It was my wife calling to check in on me. She knew that when I’m cat hunting, while I often hunt all day, I usually leave the woods at least an hour before dark to get home at a reasonable hour.
As I answered the phone and started talking, it occurred to me how cold my face had become. Forming words with my mouth was laborious.
I don’t recall our exact conversation well enough to write any dialogue here, but I remember finding it difficult to explain my current situation without causing alarm. I explained we had been walking down a snow track for a few hours and I was in the process of catching up to the dogs so I could gather them up and come home.
When she wanted a time estimate on when we might get back to the truck, I truly had no idea how long it was going to take me, but I knew I had to say something. When I told her, “Two hours,” I could tell that was far longer than she was expecting.
I tried my best not to escalate the phone call, but the longer I held my phone up to my ear, the colder my gloveless hand got—yes, I had forgotten my gloves—and the more pressure I felt as precious minutes and seconds were slipping away.
I told her I was OK but that I needed to make moves to get to the dogs and that I would call her later or send her a satellite message. I knew she was worried, but I had to go.
Luckily, during that phone call, the dogs had in fact made a turn and were heading back, not fully in my direction, but enough to where I’d be able to get close to them by hiking down the road I was on. The problem was the snow was far deeper on the road than it was in the woods and every step was a workout. But I slogged on until the dog distances on my GPS tipped back from being measured in miles to hundreds of yards. After a dozen minutes or so of marching through the snow, I stopped to check my GPS and to my utter delight, saw that the dogs had stopped running full-tilt and were loosely circled up in an area roughly 100 yards in diameter. Did they tree it?
Finally, dripping with sweat, strung out on the most intense adrenaline trip of my life, I caught up to where the dogs were and could hear them barking some fifty yards below the road in a bowl-like depression. I had witnessed all three of these dogs tree many a raccoon in the past, so I knew what they sounded like when treed, and in this instance, treed they were not. But I could tell they were searching for the animal and I couldn’t help but think it had in fact gone up a tree, they just hadn’t located it yet.
After catching my breath, I decided to head down to where they were. I wasn’t planning on sticking around for too long to try and locate the cat myself, but I did want to figure out what they were doing. I had no problem seeing on the road with the moonlight reflecting off the snow, but under the forest canopy, it was eerily dark. With the water droplets on my glasses, I could barely see in front of me.
And oh yeah, forgot to mention before, I didn’t have a flashlight with me—I must have taken it out of my chest harness and forgot to replace it.
I decided it would be best not to call to the dogs because I was worried about the sound bouncing around and the last thing I wanted was for them to run in the opposite direction. Coulee and Roux must have heard me bashing through the thick underbrush because they ended up coming and finding me. They ran up to me with their tails wagging like crazy, looking like they were having the time of their lives. I was so happy to see them that I literally cried a few tears of joy and relief.
But Finn was still a ways off, maybe thirty yards or so. I commanded Coulee and Roux to heel and while they didn’t hold it solid, they hovered around me nice and close as we walked toward Finn.
Then I messed things up.
“Finn!” I called out as I toned his GPS collar—I use the tone as a recall command. To my horror, exactly what I didn’t want to happen, well, happened.
He started running in the exact opposite direction from me. That’s when my sense of panic doubled. Just moments before, I thought all we had to do was hike back to the truck, warm up and drive home. But now, I had a hound getting even further out of pocket, in the middle of the night, on one of the coldest nights of the year.
Looking back, I have no idea why I hit the tone instead of just calling by voice. For some reason, it must have seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but clearly was not.
I started trying everything I could think of to get him to turn and come back to me. I called with my voice a few times as I toned him, but that wasn’t changing anything. He just kept … running.
Then I remembered that I had an extremely loud whistle in my chest harness. The whistle also made no difference. Did he bump a deer? I thought.
Finn has always been a good coon hunter but had proven to be my trashiest dog when hunting bobcats. I simply don’t trust him not to run a deer or coyote unless he’s directly in eyesight.
I realized it was time to put an end to this and electricity was the answer. I hammered down on the continuous stimulation button until he stopped moving. I didn’t want to, but I had to.
I tried calling him again, but again, he started moving further away. More stimulation stopped him again and I decided the only way he was coming home with us was to hike in there and get him.
So that’s what I did. Then, another call from my wife.
Much of that night is a complete blur, and to be honest, I didn’t think I would end up writing about it out of sheer embarrassment. It spooked me pretty good. I don’t know how much time had passed between my wife’s first call and second call, but she was completely shocked that I still wasn’t back at my truck.
On this second call, I was not calm and the seriousness of the situation was obvious to her now. I told her about Finn going in the opposite direction. Thankfully, she was able to talk me down and help me calm down. I told her that my phone was dying but Finn wasn’t moving anymore so I would be able to get him, then it was probably at least an hour hike back to the truck. I told her I would call her if I could, but if not, to keep an eye out for a satellite message.
It was another four hundred yards to get to Finn through a patch of thick, snow-draped reprod. Every other step had me plowing between pine boughs that would shower me with snow. Absolute misery.
I felt like I was hiking through the iciest layer of Hell, punishment for heeding my hasty, desperate, selfish, impulses. Thank God for merino wool.
Coulee and Roux stayed glued to me, and I was thankful for all the obedience training I had done with them when they were younger—teaching them to heel off-leash was so incredibly handy, it’s something every dog I’ll ever own will learn.
I was furious at Finn, but when I finally caught up and put eyes on him, the anger dissipated. I was just happy to see that big half-blue dork. With all dogs accounted for, I set my course back up to the road and then back to the truck.
When I got to the road, I called my wife again. With only fifteen percent of battery life left on my phone, I kept the call brief but filled her in on my plan.
The road took us all the way back save for the last half mile or so. Since I had started walking down the track through the woods, there was no choice but to go back through that same patch of woods to get to the truck. I looked at three or four different maps to see if by any chance there was another road we could walk to get there, but the only one would add at least another four miles to the trip. Had I not been soaked to the bone and desperately cold, I would’ve done it to avoid the snowy death march through the brush, but time was of the essence.
I took a deep breath and dove in. And that’s when the true cold started setting in.
And it wasn’t just that I was cold—I was also dehydrated. So dehydrated and fatigued that my legs started cramping up. Cramping so bad that the muscles on the back of my legs were balling up causing me to fall down face-first into the snow.
I had already eaten all my Hi Chews and a granola bar by that point, but I dug through my chest harness and found some TUMS that I chewed up. Those seemed to help a little bit with the leg cramps. But after a while, the pain and cold and constant falling became too overwhelming, and I knew I needed to take at least a short break to regain some composure. But any time I stopped moving for a few seconds, the cold crushed me.
I need to build a fire, I thought. I need to get warm.
I kept marching until I found trees that had small, twig-like branches near their base. I snapped off as many as I could, then found a small clump of grass that was sheltered by a fallen tree and somewhat dry.
My phone rang again.
“Are you back to your truck yet?” my wife asked. “Do you need me to come meet you out there?”
“No, I’m not back yet but getting close,” I said.
“I’m getting worried,” she said. “I think I’m going to call your mom and stepdad and we’re going to come get you.”
“No! Do not come and get me! I don’t want you driving, the roads are icy!” I felt my anger rising but I also understood she was genuinely worried about me.
“Listen,” I said, “my phone is going to die any second now but I’m less than half a mile from my truck. But I’m really cold so I just stopped to build a fire—”
Then my phone died.
I pulled out my satellite communicator and sent her a message explaining that I stopped to build a fire to warm up for a few minutes, then would hike back to the truck. Unfortunately, due to the thick forest canopy, my device couldn’t get a satellite connection, so the message was never sent.
I pulled out my plastic bag full of fire starters—cotton balls covered in petroleum jelly—then mounded up my kindling around a few and set it ablaze with my lighter. The grass took off, then the twigs, and I used the small flames to warm my hands.
Within a few minutes of sitting down to get the fire started, all three dogs had dug out small snow nests tapping into their deep survival instincts and snuggled themselves together to stay warm. I stuck my hands in between them to warm them up even more and it felt so good. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that trick sooner.
Worst case, I figured, I would snuggle up to my dogs and we’d make it through the night.
The rest of my body was still ice cold, so I dug out my emergency blanket and wrapped it around my torso then shoved the rest down my pants to try and keep my legs warm. The merino wool was doing its job to insulate me despite being waterlogged, and right away I could feel my body heat reflecting off the emergency blanket. In that moment, I distinctly remember wishing I would have stopped sooner to insulate myself in this manner.
Throughout the whole adventure, I never felt like a was a goner, but once I started warming up, I knew I was going to make it. The fire had worked through all the twigs and I scrambled to collect more. After ten minutes the cramps in my legs eased and I was feeling a lot better.
I looked at my map one more time to confirm the direction of my truck, warmed my hands with the last few embers of the fire, then climbed to my feet and called my dogs up and into a heel.
Off we went.
It was all downhill to my truck and we arrived within thirty minutes. Whiskey and Plum were snuggled together in the dog box looking content, and Coulee, Roux, and Finn all piled in to get warm. I jumped in the driver’s seat, started the engine, and cranked the heater. I left my merino wool on but peeled off the rest of my clothes and pulled on a big down puffy jacket I keep in the truck specifically to warm up quickly when needed.
As the air from the vents turned warm and the feeling came back to my fingers and toes, I let out a huge sigh of relief and then burst into tears. To date, that was the most physically and emotionally exhausting thing that has ever happened to me.
I plugged in my phone and it turned on right away, the screen reading 10 missed calls from: Wife.
I called her back right away. It was an emotional call, and she was so happy to hear that I made it back to my truck. She told me she had driven to the gate, and she was waiting for me, and that she enlisted the help of my mom and stepdad and that they were on their way, too.
At first, I was angry because I didn’t want anyone risking their lives on the icy winter roads. But after she explained everything to me and how scary it was that I had to stop and build a fire, she wanted to make sure that when I got out, I would have medical care if I needed it—my mom is a nurse, after all—I understood and was incredibly grateful I have people in my life that care about me. I ended the call with her and then called my mom to let her know I was OK, and that she could head back home.
I drove out and met my incredible wife at the gate. After we hugged, kissed, and cried, she handed me a big candy-cane-shaped tube of Skittles left over from Christmas and they were the best-tasting Skittles I’ve ever had.
In the days after this event, I spent every waking moment analyzing where I went wrong. Although I made many mistakes that day that led to me becoming the coldest I’d ever been in my life, I realized my main failure was starting the track far too late in the day.
Now, if I’m hunting the snow, if I don’t find a track to run before noon, I pack up and drive home. Period.
In my next dispatch, I’ll be diving into some of the lessons I learned about how invaluable a good mentor can be. If it weren’t for him, I would’ve been relying on pure dumb luck to catch one of the craftiest tree-climbing animals there is. Stay tuned, and if you haven’t subscribed yet, please take a moment to enter your email address so you’ll be among the first to know when Cat Dog Chronicles is live.
Thanks for reading,
Niklas