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

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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.