I grew up with hounds, as in dogs. We had a beagle named Tippi and a basset named Tyler. That beagle was sweet as hell, but the basset would rip your face off if given the chance.
Anyway, I can’t remember what time of year it was but it sticks in my mind that it was during spring/summer.
Our laundry room was in our basement. It wasn’t a finished basement so it was pretty cold; a cement floor, a pantry leading down the stairs where we kept our canned foods and boxed foods and of course the sublevel window. This was also the place where crap landed. Which is most likely why this happend.
My mom was going downstairs one day to do a load of laundry, and something leapt across her field of vision. She screamed, I heard it very clearly, dropped the laundry basket and came running back up the stairs screaming “There’s an elephant down there!” (There was also some very bad lighting) I laugh hysterically now, because what she was screaming was completely ridicilous. Seriously, wouldn’t a household of three people and two dogs notice if an elephant snuck down to the basement? I like to think that we would have noticed.
What we wouldn’t notice though, were squirrels. This was discovered after my very panicked mother called my father at work and demanded that he come home right now. He came home, went down to the basement and discovered that there were no elephants, but there were squirrels. After the discovery came the two hour long discussion about how to get the squirrels out of the basement. I was young enough to ask why we had to do that. Why couldn’t we just keep them? My parents assured me that we were not in fact running a squirrel motel and that if clean clothes and a steady supply of macaroni and cheese (to which I was and still am addicted to) were going to continue to happen, then we had to somehow remove the squirrels.
Enter the hounds. Who were not trained to be houndlike. They were taught to sit by the kid at the dinner table and she would definately drop stuff down to them when she encountered something she didn’t like to eat. In other words, hunting was not in their canine vocabulary. But my dad was convinced that we he could drag lure the dogs down to the basement and their natural instincts as hounds would kick in. Hah! You have to keep in mind that we lived in the suburbs. We had trees and a garden in our backyard. Squirrels and rabbits were run of the mill. I think that most of the time the squirrels and rabbits laughed at the dogs and their inability to do what they were bred to do. The dogs would bark at them, but most of the time I think our dogs thought the squirrels and rabbits were just very small quiet dogs. The biggest game our dogs knew of was the mailman. He was the enemy, not the outdoor animals.
My dad finally managed to get the dogs down to the basement (they were like me, they did not like the basement and would avoid it at all costs). Once down in the basement, the dogs ran around like nut cases. They had no idea what they were looking for, let alone try to find a scent. The beagle (Tippi) was the one to finally notice that the outdoor scents had somehow moved inside.
Our basement door was right across from our back door. My mom had set up the baby gate in between these two doors and the kitchen. This way when the scared squirrels were running up the stairs for their lives they wouldn’t get confused and dart into the kitchen and subsequently the rest of the house. We had the back door propped open, and two dogs in the basement.
Like I said, Tippi is the one who finally caught a scent and realized it. She started to bay. For anyone who hasn’t heard a hound bay, it sounds kind of like a wolf howl only not as mournful. Beagles and bassets have very distinctive bays. If you heard it, you would know it. And this is the first time that I ever heard these two dogs bay at something that they were bred to bay at. Usually this was a sound that alerted us to the arrival of our mailman (i.e. the dogs mortal enemy). Tyler must have either caught the scent too, or just started to bay because it was what Tippi was doing. For all I know, he thought the mailman was in the basement (these were not the smartest dogs).
All the barking and baying and encourgement from my dad finally alerted the squirrels that the jig was up and it was time to get out. The dogs chased these poor squirrels around the basement, baying the whole time, for about 5-10 minutes. They finally managed to get the squirrels up and out the doors while only a few steps behind the terrified squirrels. It was the quickest I had ever seen these dogs move on the steps.
From that point on, I don’t think the squirrels and rabbits ever felt safe again. I think they knew that the dogs were on to them. My dad found out how the squirrels had gotten into the house in the first place and fixed it so that we wouldn’t have any more unwelcome visitors. The dogs were fully rewarded with an extra cup of food at their dinner time and all the table scraps they could handle during ours.
