Gerald Basham’s coonhound, Kentucky Mr. Big Shot, rescued from 40-foot fall in Indiana

Gerald Basham of Hawesville was out with his cousin, Hawk Wilkerson, training Basham’s Treeing Walker coonhound, Kentucky Mr. Big Shot, when the dog plunged into a deep hole in the woods. The outing began Sunday, March 29, in the Rome-Derby area of Indiana, and the dog was not recovered until Tuesday.

Basham and Wilkerson of Derby, Indiana, searched but could not locate the coonhound and eventually had to leave without him. They continued the search in the next days and Basham heard him barking from deep underground; the dog had fallen to a depth estimated at about 40 feet total, and was trapped in a cavern.
Local authorities were called as the seriousness of the situation became clear. Among those responding were Perry County Sheriff Danny Peters and fire and rescue personnel. Several attempts to free the dog failed, and more specialized resources were requested.
With support from Indiana Department of Natural Resources staffer Jim Hash and coordination among everyone on scene, rescuers ultimately reached Mr. Big Shot and pulled him from the hole.

“It’s that time of season where you can train your dogs to run and tree,” Basham said. “We had made two drops. That was about midnight Sunday night, and into Monday morning. I went to where he was and he was treeing in a hole. I said, ‘Grab him before he goes in that hole.’ I went to grab him and when I did, he slid right down in the hole.”

A “drop” is an individualized release of a coonhound into the woods on a track.

“I couldn’t get him to bark,” he said. “I presumed that he had died in the fall. I went back on Monday. Sheriff Peters came out and so did Rome Fire Department. We couldn’t get any response and everyone presumed he was dead. He’s only 18 months old. Something inside of me told me he was still alive. I went up there on Tuesday. That’s when DNR was going to show up with Jim Hash. Another guy had a camera that goes down into things like that. I tried to get down in there myself and that might’ve been the wrong choice because then they would have had a human to recover as well.”

Authorities advised them to stay clear of the hole and said they would handle it, so that no one was harmed. Basham said Hash went down 20 feet and the dog started barking again.

“We knew he was alive then,” Basham said. “Mr. Hash said he went down about 20 feet and there was a rock wall between him and the dog. He said there was an entrance to that cavern and that Mr. Big Shot was down in that cavern. He crawled in between two rocks and had to dig him out. He got on the other side of that rock wall and looked down and said the dog was another 20 feet down in the ground.”

Hash then had to come back up, retrieve his equipment and go back down to the rock wall to dig and try to get to the dog. He got down where he could get hold of him, pulled him up by his collar and brought him up to the ledge.

“The problem was that the ledge came out over at the 20-foot mark, and the dog had already made several attempts to try to get up there but he couldn’t because the big ledge was preventing him,” Basham said. “He brought him out and the dog was so happy to be out. It took him 3 to 4 hours to get him out.”

Basham has been breeding, training and showing coonhounds since he was 14 and is now 67, and said he has never had anything like this happen before.

“To say the least, I was happy to hear that he was alive but at the same time I was concerned about Mr. Hash going down after him,” he said. “Mr. Hash said, ‘I do this all the time. I rescue people, dogs, cats.’ He is called a cave dweller, and it’s a unit that is a part of the DNR. I was so grateful when they pulled my dog out of that hole. I didn’t sleep for two days. I was thinking about the dog. My wife too, she was thinking about him. She helps me with all the dogs. She is always there to help me feed them, clean their pens. It’s a big job. I drive all over the place to show them. I do more showing than I do the hunting. I have five coonhounds right now. I have one female and I’m hoping to have a batch of pups out of this grand night champion, my 8-year-old coonhound, Hank. He has one of the best pedigrees you could have.”

Basham’s niece, Makayla Hulse, and her boyfriend, Trevor Sturgeon, helped all day Tuesday. Hulse is studying to be a veterinary tech and checked Mr. Big Shot when he was rescued; amazingly, he had no serious injuries. Sturgeon also went down in the hole to try to help get the dog out.

“I think it was nice that Mr. Hash did that. The Perry County Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff Peters, he went far and beyond his job description,” Basham said. “Sheriff Peters tried his best to go down the hole on Monday and see if he could get the dog. He found out when he got down there that it was going to need more than just him, so he had to come back up. Lucky enough, I had a 100-foot rope so he could get down there.”

He said the landowner where the hole is, Mr. Boling, is going to try to do something about that hole, to keep any other animals or pets getting down in there. He plans to cover it up or make a grid over it.

“He said that if we hadn’t continued to come back, the dog would have died down there because there was no way for him to get out himself,” Basham said.

Mr. Big Shot was scheduled for a thorough checkup at the veterinarian next. Basham’s dogs are all purebred UKC and PKC Treeing Walker coonhounds.

He said after the first 20 feet that Mr. Big Shot fell there was a cavern he dropped into, so there were two levels. The lower section was enclosed and that is the spot Hash had to dig to reach the coonhound.

Basham’s wife, Kristine, said, “It is scary that something like that was there. What if it had been a person?”

The dog fell into the hole on property off 9 Bear Creek Road in Indiana.

“That hole was big enough that I could fit myself down there, but the problem was the other cavern where the dog was at only had a crack in the stone and Mr. Hash had to dig his way through to get to the other side,” Basham said. “He said when he got to the other side, he was on a ledge. It prevented the dog from being able to get up to the top because it came out over the cavern. It is like a room but there wasn’t any way out of that cavern. He believes it was a cave. Mr. Boling didn’t know it was there. The DNR said about two or three weeks ago a dog fell into another one like that and they had to take an excavator to rescue it.”

They told Basham that there was no way to rescue his dog with an excavator because the roof would have caved in and the dog would have been killed.

“That’s why they had to use the cave dweller. He said they’ve rescued people from places like this before,” Basham said. “They put their lives in danger to rescue. He had all kinds of hookups and equipment as if he was going to rappel off Mount Everest. He needed someone on the first level to help him get the dog up when he got down there at the other 20-foot spot and was able to bring him up.”

Once Hash retrieved the dog, another DNR responder reached in, grabbed him, pulled him through and sent him up out of the 20-foot hole to Wilkerson, who stood at the top and brought Mr. Big Shot to stable ground.

The Bashams said Mr. Big Shot has become a new favorite since the ordeal.

“Hank is also a favorite because his dad was a world champion,” he said. “Cutter and Hank, and now Mr. Big Shot. They are all famous dogs. Cutter’s dad was a world champion. Mr. Boon Doctor is Hank’s dad. I went to Winter Classic in Mississippi this past February and there were guys wanting to buy Hank. I said, ‘Boys, if I didn’t take that dog back home with me, I’d be sleeping out in the doghouse for over a year.’ My wife likes them just as well as I do. Dogs are resilient. I’m lucky he came out of there without any injuries at all.”

He said he has enjoyed this lifelong hobby and has had many good dogs over the years.

“I had one that was in the top 100 in the world. She’s gone now,” he said. “Donn Wimmer published many pictures of them over the years. I had Hank at the Hancock County Fair and friends entered him and he won it. He is a beautiful dog. But Mr. Big Shot now kind of holds the stage. It’s almost like he vanished. I didn’t hear anything out of the hole. I went there Monday and stayed all day almost until dark and nothing, not even a peep. When I went back there Tuesday, I was hollering and heard him barking from beneath and it was a relief. I called Hawk and said, ‘Get them up here. He’s alive!’ And Hawk came and DNR came.”

He said it was a blessing and that prayers were answered. From 40 feet down where Mr. Big Shot was, and they still could hear him; it’s a miracle.

“God took care of it,” Basham said. “He kept barking and I kept him barking and told him, ‘I’m coming.’ There had to be another opening but we looked and looked. It was windy that day and air was flowing out of that hole. The dog was behind rock, nothing but rock all the way around. I had a GPS on him. I knew the collar was dying because it had been going on almost three days. When we cut loose from that spot, and by the time we got up there, it was 220 yards from the gravel road. He hadn’t moved. That was the most concerning thing. He didn’t move from the spot where he was when we first saw him go into the hole.”

He described the training he and Wilkerson were doing with Mr. Big Shot in March.

“Right after the regular hunting season comes the training season and you can run a coon but you can’t take it, shoot, nothing; all you can do is tree it up in a tree and you train your dogs to run them,” Basham said. “In Kentucky, the season runs from Oct. 1 to Feb. 28. It’s just regular coon hunting. You turn the dog loose and teach him to run a track. Usually, you take him with an older dog and the older dog trains the young dog. Kentucky Mr. Big Shot is starting pretty well.”

“They have hunts throughout the year at multiple clubs that night hunt. They go out and take a piece of paper. The first dog that strikes gets 100 points. If he trees first, he gets 125 points. Whichever has the most points at the end of the night gets first-place win. After so many wins, you become a night champion and then a grand night champion. It’s the same way with the show. The picture in the Perry County News is of Hank, and they thought it was Mr. Big Shot. Hank won the nationals last year at Tennessee in the show event. He won in the veterans class because of his age. He also won second place in confirmation in AKC. He won fourth overall as the best dog there out of 124 breeds that were present that day.”

He explained how the cup events work with Perry County Coon Club.

“They’ll get in touch with DNR, the game warden, and let them know when we were having an event and then they get a permit to be able to have people out there,” Basham said. “The score cards are permits showing they’re in this class that they have. Last year, Perry County had an event and everyone comes from all over the country for these days and they have a show, water race, contests and hunting contests. The hunting contests are all done on paper and number; it doesn’t injure the coon. The raccoon just gets a little bit of exercise running to the nearest tree and climbing the tree and the dog is sitting down there treeing, and they score at the tree, and walk off and leave the raccoon and take the dogs with them and go to the next spot. It’s a sport in itself. I would like to see more participation by the youth. There are people who do it professionally. My son did the hunt side of it, professionally, and got paid quite well for doing it.”

Gerald and Kristine Basham live in Hawesville and married in 1986. They have fostered and adopted many children over the years and received an award for their dedication as a foster family. Their children are Tonya, Steven, Anthony, Amanda, Kenneth, Samantha, Alex, Damion, John and Mercedes. The couple is also blessed with many grandchildren.