Ice Fishing & Plott Hounds

Ellie is a Plott Hound, a southern hunting breed developed for tracking, trailing, and treeing game. The pack she was born out of are black bear hunting specialists. Like them, she’s not been spayed — most hunting dogs are kept intact for breeding — but unlike them, she’s mostly a house dog. No kennel dweller, she’s got a soft, warm bed at home. Though her mother, father, brothers, and sisters all pursue bears at an elite level, she spends her days with Avani and I as our companion animal. That’s what she’s doing here, tucked into a sled on the ice, fishing with us.

Being a hound means she has long, soft, floppy ears that give a lot of heat back to the environment in sub-freezing temperatures. Consider the line of elephants. Those living in Africa have large, thin, capillary-rich ears designed to doff heat in the effort to keep them cool. The mammoths and mastodons — also elephants, now extinct — had much smaller ears, as they needed to retain their heat in the ice-age cold. Ellie isn’t good at retaining heat from her ears — hence the neck gator she’s wearing. She loves ice fishing for about an hour,

running about on the perfectly level expanse of the lake, chasing leaves blown about by the wind or just eddies in the breeze made visible by their entrainment of snow. Then, all her heat spent, she curls up in the sled and waits for us to finish.

But today’s a bit harder for her. She may be physically cold but she’s reproductively in heat. Unusually emotive, she’s seeking a bit more attention than normal and staring longingly off into the distance for long stretches of time. We have no immediate intention to breed her, so this longing is something she’ll just have to endure. In another week it’ll be over and we’ll all go back to normal. It’s all just a part of the ancient human-dog relationship.

So, until then we’ll just care for her and contemplate the incredible, unlikely story of two species — a wolf and an ape — that united in domestication to become, ultimately, housemates. Now, bound to each other in mutual love and appreciation, we navigate the Anthropocene together. Our ancient past just a genetic memory. Woof.