Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/801177
O ne night about eight years ago, John Klus walked into his home on Lake Waubesa, Wisconsin (near Madison), and thought, Why is there a mouse running around in my living room? The next thing Klus knew, his wife, Sarah, was scooping up the mouse in her arms, a mouse that upon closer inspection turned out to be a dachshund puppy. Oscar, she'd named him, an inspired choice for a "wiener dog." (Does Oscar Mayer ring any bells?) Wanting a car companion on her frequent business trips, Sarah had gone into stealth mode—the long and short of it being that Oscar's appearance came as a complete surprise to her husband. "I gotta tell you," laughs Klus, "I was really ticked off. I'd grown up with Brittanies and Chesapeakes, and for a number of years now I've had pointing Labs. To me, a dachshund wasn't a real dog. It was a 'punt dog.'" Just so there's no confusion on this, the kind of punt being referred to here is not a small boat. Klus was still fuming when, a night or two later, one of his hunting buddies stopped by for a beer—and, upon seeing gundogs by tom davis This amazing liTTle dachshund has Tracked down and recovered dozens of wounded deer and bears. Oscar, lit up like Lambeau Field after an Aaron Rodgers touchdown pass. "That's exactly what we need!" he exclaimed. Klus wondered what the guy had been smoking, but his friend explained that when he was a kid, his dad had owned a dachshund that was the damnedest hunting dog he'd ever seen. The dog had been a genius at tracking and recovering wounded game, and when the friend subsequently dropped off an armful of literature on "recovery dogs," Klus began to view Oscar in a new light. This is where we need to back up and note that while Klus holds down a suit-and-tie job in the tech industry, he's also the proprietor of a highly successful hunting and fishing guide service (klusfishandhunt.com), leading one to wonder when he sleeps, if ever. Klus' reading persuaded him that Oscar deserved a chance to show what he was capable of, so that fall he put him on every deer and bear he could. As luck would have it, all the tracks early in the season were relatively short and straightforward, providing the kind of gradual, confidence- boosting learning curve that's ideal for a young hunting dog of any stripe. Oscar responded amazingly well, but it wasn't until later that fall, with the rut in full swing, that he truly came into his own. In the wee hours of the morning, Klus got a call from a man who'd arrowed a nice buck on a property north of Madison. They arranged to meet at first light, and after hiking to the spot where the man had lost the deer's trail, Klus put Oscar on the job. He tracked west, then north, then east, then south . . . and all of a sudden they were back at exactly the same place where they'd started. It's not uncommon for a wounded buck to move in a large circle, but when Oscar led them down the same trail they'd walked in on, Klus' doubts began to bubble to the surface. He needn't have worried. Within 100 yards Oscar had found a bed, then, in short succession, another and another. Fifty feet from the last one lay the buck, stone dead. "He worked through seven beds in all," Klus recalls. "That's really when the light went on. Since then he's been an absolute machine." Meaning that Klus has quite literally lost count of the number of animals Oscar's recovered. 136 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S Wisconsin sportsman John Klus and Oscar, his unrelenting little dachshund, recovered this 485-pound monster in Armstrong Creek, Wisconsin, during the 2016 bear season.