Learning on the job

With an ambition for a full-time stalking companion, Will Pocklington hopes his keen young teckel can rise to the challenge

She wove through the sparse stalks of bolting wheat on the field’s edge, nose pinned to the floor. The grass margin a few feet to our right had recently been cut, and on it, some way ahead, a young roebuck sauntered towards the big wood below the keeper’s house. I watched the pup carefully and wondered if she was on the deer’s trail or simply transfixed by the stew of other scents that surely filled her nostrils. I suppose it’s a different world down there when you’re vertically challenged and ruled by your snout.

‘She’ is a teckel, a wirehaired dachshund — my first, and not yet five months old. Her name is Scribble and this was our maiden outing. A milestone in her journey as a budding ‘deer dog’? Maybe, though I was keen not to make a fuss of it. It was just another short and steady potter, really, only I was carrying a rifle in case we came across the animals that, in time, would hopefully become her focus.

Early induction 

Even so, as the song of skylarks peppered the pollen-filled sky on that cool June morning, I couldn’t help but mull over the pros and cons of such an early induction. Had I been impatient? Should I have waited? On the one hand I’d been advised to take her out as soon as possible, and I liked the idea of her learning on the job; on the other, I was conscious that her nose is still far more developed than her brain.

In the end the whole affair was pretty relaxed — an extension of what we’d been doing during our brief, thrice daily sessions in the back garden, practising recall, patience and a bit of heelwork.