My hope was for him to see Gimme's new tendency to do a walkabout when she can't find the track. I don't know why she does it and thought he'd be likely to see something I was missing. She also does it if she can find the track and I obtusely refuse to believe her. Envision her getting in a huff and saying, "Well fine! I'll do it your stupid way, but there's no track over here."
The parameters were TD-ish length (it ended up being 595 yards) and one-hour-ish age, no food on the track, but an article on every leg. It was also supposed to be a blind track, but the cover was so deep, I could see the track part of the time. Of course Gimme was going so fast I didn't have a lot of time to look for a path in the grass. It was warm, low 70's with a light breeze.
My first mistake involved the start. Sil pointed me to go to the start flag at a 45-degree angle. I let Gimme use much of her line to investigate and pee before the start, so she arced out and our approach to the start was more of a 90-degree angle. Gimme had no difficulty with this, but Sil said I should be sure we approach the flag as directed by the judge.Gimme quickly found the first article (and all articles for that matter). She then proceeded to overrun the first corner quite a bit. We worked a search pattern in both directions. At one point Gimme started to go off at an angle and I queried her, "Is that the good track?" and she curled off it. Yay for her... We worked our way back toward where she'd been solid on the track and she found the next leg. She was quickly rewarded by another article.
She also overran the second corner, but not as much this time. We again had to employ a search pattern to get her back to the track. And again right after she found the next leg she was rewarded with another article. This leg took Gimme right into a little patch of woods. She spent a bit of time snooping off to one side and I let her use most of the line, keeping myself out of the woods. Then she pulled harder and took me down the dirt path through the woods and out the other side.
She made the next turn pretty quickly and had a moment where she sniffed to the left, but then continued down the leg. Later Sil told me, when he laid the track there was a mom and baby deer bedded down to the right of where the track went through. When they saw him, they moved off, crossing our track (red line). Gimme got past this so well and was rewarded with another article.
When Gimme got to the fourth corner, she made it so fast, I really didn't believe her. Her head was up a bit, as it tends to be when she is off on a walkabout. In this case her head was probably up because the cover was so tall it didn't need to be down to follow the track. I queried her and she wasn't as decisive in her response - possibly because she sensed my Doubting Thomasina. In fact she dithered around a bit to the left. I came perilously close to bringing her back to search for the corner. Thank God I didn't. Gimme was right and soon showed me the final glove.
This is kind of a milestone for us. It was pretty clear that I doubted her last corner, but she didn't let me throw her off. I came really close to bringing her back, but at some level she must've been giving me enough so could follow her. I hope it's enough so she feels more confident to be more insistent in the future. Sil said we did a solid job and could be ready for a TDX test before long.
My plan is to get up there later this summer and do a TDU lesson with him. I'd like him to evaluate where we are in our skills. Sometimes I feel really confident and other times not so much. There are fall/winter TDU tests coming up, so I want to see whether he thinks we should enter. If not, we wait until next year, since I want to get our tests done away from pollen season.
This was very exciting...
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