About 1:50pm (cst) I received a call from Marlene Schmitt about a dog that went to ground about 9:30am (est) some place in Virginia near the North Carolina border and the owner was calling for help.  She received the call from Janon Joyner, a TRAPPED member, who was hunting in Georgia with Mal McEwen who received the call originally.  A women was hunting with her terrier while visiting her father in southwestern Virginia, she had been doing this for ten years.  The little terrier went to ground without a collar and a strong smell of skunk was coming from the hole and the women was trying to reach the dog.

About 2:06 pm (cst) we tried to contact the women by cell phone to get an exact location to send help with no luck, left a message on her cell phone.  Mike Bilbo and I tried to find someone that might know her and what area she might be hunting, no luck.  I called and left a message again for her at 3:37 pm (cst).  This dog had now been in the ground with a strong skunk smell for approximately six hours, this didn’t give us much hope of helping her.

Finally the women called and gave me her location at which time I was able to link her with Liz McKinney, a TRAPPED member.  They talked and the women decided to stop and come back tomorrow to recover her dog.  Some times all we can do is listen and learn.  Nothing can ever take away the pain of loosing a worker to ground. 

The women thanked us for trying to location her and send help and just being there to talk when all hope was gone.  If we had her location, Liz Mc Kinney was only 45 minutes away/

Char Smith