A Sighthound Story

A Sighthound Story

Wally Atkinson


A friend of mine had a beautiful black stag bitch he called Sweetheart and he’d asked me to find a big running hound, as he described it, to put over her.

Well, as it happened a bloke out in the west Wimmera had a deerhound/wolfhound cross and so my friend brought Sweetheart down from Queensland and left her in the good hands of a hunting dog breeder at Neuarpur near the Sth. Australian border.

This breeder, Greg, had bull terrier/boxer/rottweiler/stag crosses for pigs and he had about 50 of them. Anyway, they put the deerhound/wolfhound cross over Sweetheart and she stayed at Greg’s until she had a litter of about six or eight pups. For Greg’s part in this he was to pick a dog for himself and I would get one too.

Greg chose the biggest dog pup and I chose the runt that was a bitch. I called my pup Silk and Greg called his Shatan. Greg and his wife Toni had two very young boys and Shatan became their special child minder he being such a gentle giant.

It soon became apparent that there was another side to this magnificent hound. He could hunt like no other. As with most giant hounds Shatan showed no aggression towards any of the pig dogs and having been raised with them they just simply ignored each other.

Greg came to respect Shatan’s ability to hunt and so decided to put him over a large pig dog bitch named Audie. Audie looked like a Staffordshire except she was about 24 inches at the shoulder and weighed about 35 kg. The pups were awesome looking animals and Greg used to keep 3 of the males together in their weld mesh yard at the back of the main camp.

To this stage Shatan had never crossed swords with any of the pig dogs so what followed was never expected.

One day when the “soul brothers” as Greg called Shatan’s sons, went out for a run following Greg through the forest they caught up with their old man who had stopped and squatted to evacuate and probably thinking at first that Shatan was a kangaroo silhouetted in the misty dawn light they set upon him in a frenzy of blood lust and poor old Shatan didn’t know what hit him.

Fortunately Shatan survived the attack and although near death was nursed back to health. However, he now had a totally new attitude to any of the dogs Greg owned and being such a complete change of character for Shatan, caught Greg a bit unprepared for what eventuated.

Shatan became aggressive and unfortunately was prepared to kill any dog that didn’t avoid him. And no dog stood a chance for he was not much under metre tall at the shoulder and weighed 70 kg.

Normally of course the dogs all had their own pens and weldmesh yards etc. but for hunting they could be taken out in compatible groups.

Greg was now living by the Castlereagh about halfway between Dubbo and Coonabarabran and I decided to go up and visit him with my 18 month old deerhound and of course Shatan’s sister Silk.

I had camped half an hour from Greg’s the night before and arrived in time for breakfast to be greeted by Greg who suggested I keep the dogs in the trailer until Shatan returned from his constitutional and then proceeded to tell me about his problems with the dog fighting and how he needed to avoid Shatan coming across unrestrained dogs.

However I felt there was no danger in Silk being out, so I opened the tailgate and out bounded Silk just as Shatan appeared and ran over to investigate.

Well, I never saw a dog so happy in my life. Silk did her usual grovel for big brother, something she never did for any other dog in her life and she galloped about in a spontaneous display of hound gymnastics and joy and so too did Shatan. The activity naturally set my deerhound Wattle off and his deep baritone brought Shatan to the trailer. Still he grinned and I was sure he had no animosity toward Wattle or the other young deerhound I had aboard, so I let them out and they had the time of their lives for the next half hour or so because after all, hounds are gregarious animals and Shatan recognised this hound compatibility and obviously appreciate the chance to let down his defenses.

We had a great few days roaming about together and although I don’t hunt my dogs apart from a bit of rabbit or hare chasing they enjoyed the freedom from fences and their normal diet of country lanes and back roads.

There was still one thing though that bothered me and I put it to Greg.

My question was prompted by memory of a discussion I’d had with Greg about 20 years earlier when we were neighbours in the Adelaide Hills and I bred deerhounds and he took a deerhound/greyhound cross but passed him on to someone else because the bullies kept inflicting leg injuries on him.

So I asked him how it was that Shatan had not succumbed to a leg hold favored by many of the pig dogs. “Mate”, he said, “He just hangs out his leg as bait!”.

Shatan’s passed on now but his little sister Silk’s still going strong at 13 years.

Wattle passed on last month after a series of illnesses associated with a pelvic injury the vet tells me may have occurred as early as the first day or two of his life. But I’ll never forget how up there on the Castlereah, sitting by the camp fire, he jumped up and measured himself alongside Shatan and a chill raced up my spine as they stood motionless and stifflegged for an instant, then tore off together for a swim in the river.