Book Preview 3: Observe and Adapt, But Don't Imitate
Continuing on in this series of previews from my upcoming book, Cat Dog Chronicles, please enjoy this excerpt from Chapter 12 where I ponder the value of a good mentor and the challenges of implementing what is learned.
But before we get into today’s piece, if have any friends or family who you feel might enjoy Hound on the Run, feel free to share away!
Observe and Adapt, But Don’t Imitate
Just as there are many ways to skin a cat, as they say, so too are there many ways to catch a cat with dogs.
Overall, there is a general story arc to a bobcat race as I describe in Cat Dog Chronicles, but everyone approaches it slightly differently. It all comes down to the individual hunter and the dogs he chooses for his pack.
I can’t stress enough how crucial it has been for me to have a knowledgeable mentor to learn from, ask questions, and most importantly, witness success in the cat woods.
Without watching someone like him get it done consistently, I would have no idea what a bobcat race is supposed to look like.
Raccoon hunting is easy and the dogs pretty much just know what to do. That has been my experience anyway.
But catching bobcats requires an intense team effort between man and hound to find, jump, run, and tree the cat and if I didn’t have a good model for how it’s supposed to play out, I would be completely, utterly, lost.
It gets complicated, though, because I discovered that it’s impossible to replicate exactly what my mentor does in the woods.
I don’t have the same dogs or the same opportunities to hunt as frequently as he does. Even if I had both of those things, I wouldn’t necessarily know what to do with them because I don’t have the decades of experience he does.
So, I’ve learned that attempting to merely imitate him is a losing, infuriating proposition.
And he agrees.
One day early in the season, long before I caught my first cat, we were talking and I was explaining how my hunting efforts had been going.
It was one of those times when I was expressing my frustration and befuddlement about how I just didn’t know what was going on … something about how Whiskey was striking and running some tracks but we weren’t piecing it all together to where she could actually get the cat jumped.
Something about how I’d get to a point when trying to find the cat where I just didn’t know what moves I should be making and felt like I was driving around aimlessly.
I don’t remember exactly how he put it, but it boiled down to him telling me that I need to figure out how I hunt; figure out a way that works for me.
This brought me a great deal of relief and eased my mind a bit. I had been stuck on the idea that I needed to copy everything he was doing to consistently catch cats, but in that moment, I realized since it was impossible, my failure to imitate his “model” of bobcat hunting was making me feel discouraged, or like I was constantly doing something wrong.
It was a lightbulb moment—I needed to focus on catching bobcats in my own way, using what I had been learning from my mentor to inform my decisions.
The next day I went out, I was much more relaxed and had a lot more fun.
Instead of only rigging Whiskey all day, waiting for her to find us a track to run, I decided to keep her rigged but let Coulee and Roux run the road ahead of the truck. This brought a lot of enjoyment back into the pursuit as there’s nothing better to me than simply watching my dogs run. And since Coulee and Roux were still apprentice bobcat dogs, it allowed me to watch them “figure it out” while using Whiskey to keep them honest.
Although I didn’t catch a cat that day, two dogs on the road with Whiskey rigged proved to be a winning recipe—as I share in the book, that’s how we ended up catching our first cat on that fortunate day when my good-luck-charm wife came along.
I always keep my mentor’s hunting style in mind when I’m out there working the hills over trying to find a cat, but I don’t let it stress me out as much as I did before since now I know I can’t replicate his program. Figuring out what my personal hunting style is and how I run my program, while frustrating at times, has become one of my favorite aspects of this whole cat-chasing game.
I’ve always felt there’s a lot of creativity involved in hunting, and these days I feel more and more like the leader of a band … a band of floppy-eared, slobber-mouthed miscreants.
And yes, while we do play a lot of classic covers to learn the fundamentals, we’re starting to experiment with our own grooves, and pretty soon we’ll have our own album.
Thanks for reading and following along in my journey. My book, Cat Dog Chronicles, is almost available for purchase. If you haven’t subscribed, please do so you’ll be among the first to know when the book is live.
In the next dispatch, I’ll be sharing another excerpt from the book about one of the biggest challenges I’ve had to overcome while bobcat hunting which has roots planted deep between my ears … sometimes I just get too far ahead of myself which makes everything more difficult than it needs to be.
Stay tuned,
Niklas