The Aromas of Hunting

By Keith “Catfish” Sutton

Keith Sutton
15601 Mountain Drive
Alexander, AR 72002
501-847-9643
catfishdude@sbcglobal.net

Headline: If we could smell the things our hunting dogs smell, what a magical thing that would be.

Limbgripper Ranger searches for a squirrel he’s treed.

His acute sense of smell enables him to find squirrels under seemingly impossible conditions.

I never fail to be amazed when observing a well-trained squirrel dog or rabbit dog trailing game.
Recently I watched as a world-champion treeing cur, Limbgripper Ranger, took up the chase. Ranger’s trainer, Jim Rhea, unleashed the dog, which promptly departed at top speed.

Ranger never gave any indication he was trying to pick up the scent of a squirrel. In an instant, he raced out of sight. But in seconds, the dog barked to indicate he had treed a bushytail. It was the first of dozens Ranger led us to that day.

“How does he do it?” I asked Jim. “He never even puts his nose to the ground.”

 

 

“His sense of smell is so keen,” Jim replied, “he can smell a squirrel even while running with his head up. He can smell one in a treetop that’s never been on the ground that day.”

On another hunt, a friend and I watched a pack of beagles running a swamp rabbit. At one point, the rabbit swam across a bayou to escape his tormentors. But this ploy failed. When the dogs reached the water’s edge, they were momentarily confused, but one quickly picked up the rabbit’s scent and bailed off in the bayou to continue the chase. The whole pack followed.

“I wonder what it’s like to have a sense of smell that keen,” my friend said. “What does a rabbit smell like when all you can smell is a trail of molecules left behind as he races ahead?”

I was wondering the same thing.

That question has run through the minds of many other hunters as well. Charles Fergus pondered it in his book, A Rough-Shooting Dog.

“I have often wondered what scent smells like to a dog,” he wrote. “Is a certain scent speckled? Is it blue? Does it chime like a bell or honk like a goose? Is it soft or ribbed or jagged or rubbery?”

The human sense of smell is feeble compared to that of many animals, but it is still very acute. We can recognize thousands of different smells and detect odors even in infinitesimal quantities.

Two small odor-detecting patches high in the nasal passages, each composed of 5-6 million cells, enable us to detect various smells. By comparison, a dog has 220 million of these olfactory receptors. Humans nonetheless can detect certain substances in dilutions of less than one part in several billion parts of air. We may not be able to match the olfactory feats of our hunting dogs, but our sense of smell is quite good.

Many things about our olfactory sense remain a mystery, such as why people with certain medical conditions or taking certain drugs have a heightened or reduced sense of smell.

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, neurologist Oliver Sacks related the incredible story of Stephen D., a 22-year-old medical student who, after taking mind-altering drugs, dreamed he had become a dog and was surrounded by extraordinarily rich, meaningful smells. The dream seemed to continue after he woke; his world suddenly was filled with pungent odors.

Walking into the hospital clinic, “I sniffed like a dog,” Stephen D. told Sacks. “And in that sniff I recognized, before seeing them, the 20 patients who were there.

“Each had his own smell-face,” he said, “far more vivid and evocative than any sight-face.” He also recognized local streets and shops by their smell. Some smells gave him pleasure and others disgusted him, but all were so compelling he could hardly think about anything else.

The strange symptoms disappeared after a few weeks. Stephen D. was greatly relieved to be normal again, but he felt “a tremendous loss, too,” Sacks reported. Years later, as a successful physician, Stephen D. still remembered “that smell-world—so vivid, so real! It was like a visit to another world, a world of pure perception, rich, alive, self-sufficient, and full … I see now what we give up in being civilized and human.”

Our sense of smell is something many of us take for granted because it doesn’t seem necessary for our survival the way our other senses are. However, odors affect our lives in many ways. Imagine what it would be like walking into a hunting camp or a cook shack and not being able to smell each of their distinct odors. What if you couldn’t smell the hickory smoke from a campfire or the aroma of coffee brewing in the morning or the fresh smell of the woods after a rain shower? The sense of smell adds richness to our lives that we aren’t always conscious of, but as soon as it’s taken away it dramatically changes our quality of life.

Smells also possesses an uncanny power to move us. A long-forgotten scent can instantly conjure up scenes from the past. Many writers have marveled at the quality of such memories.

In “Letter to a Grandson,” one of his Lower Forty columns published in Field & Stream, Corey Ford tells of a man writing a letter to his newborn grandson to be read when the boy is sixteen. The old man describes some of his guns and rods he wishes the boy to have when he reaches this age, but “More important,” he says, “I am leaving you some memories.” Among these memories are “The smells that men like to remember—pipe smoke and boot dubbing and Hoppe’s No. 9, and fly dope on a red bandanna handkerchief, and wet dog fur steaming by the fire, and the smell of leather that is more like a taste, and the before-breakfast smell of coffee boiling and bacon frying, and the smell of a cottonmouth—the smell of fear—and the fall smells of sweet fern and rotting apples and burnt powder in the frosty air.”

Read the words again, and focus on each item Ford describes. Pipe smoke. Boot dubbing. Hoppe’s. Fly dope. Wet dog fur. Leather. Coffee boiling. Bacon frying. Can you smell these things in your memory?

Now, what if you had to explain how these things smell to someone who had never smelled them? Could you? That is something we would all find next to impossible. Our culture places such low value on olfaction that we have never developed a proper vocabulary for it. There are no names for the tones and tints of a smell, and so it is difficult to share aromas with others who have not experienced them first-hand.

Sitting on a deer stand last fall, I shut my eyes and breathed in the aromas of the woods around me. I am getting old and I smoke too much, things researchers say can destroy one’s sense of smell. But when I focused on the balms of the forest without the distraction of sight, I became instantly aware of a whole new sensory world.

There were big smells like the redolence of rich bottomland earth, oak leaves and fields of grass. And I became aware of little smells apart from the big ones—the musty blood-smell of my hunting vest, the pungent odor of spent gunpowder permeating my shotgun, the languid fragrance of cypress needles.

As the day passed, I realized that morning smells different than noon, and noon does not smell like night. And I noticed the autumn air possessed a scent quite different from the hot bouquet of summer or the frigid sterility of winter.

I could smell persimmons and deer scrapes, hunters’ campfires and the loud smell of a skunk.

But as hard as I tried, I could not pick up the scent of a single squirrel or rabbit.

Till the end of my days, I will wonder what that must be like.

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