Coon Hunting With Dogs
It was late at night when we began to prepare to go Coon Hunting With Dogs. I had gone on many a coon hunts with my dad. I didn’t enjoy the hunt as much as my dad but there was many reasons to go with my dad. It was a chance to spend time with him and to see the world from a different view. He was not very close with my two brothers and me. I guess this was because his first family basically disowned him when he divorced their mom and married the woman that later was my mom.
My dad always made sure I put on at least three pairs of socks and wore thermal
long johns beneath my clothes to keep warm. I usually did not want too but
later that night I was always glad that I had when it got really cold. We always
carried a strong beam flash light for shining up the tree when looking for the
coon. My dad usually took a shotgun and a rifle with him on the hunt. Then
there were the coffee and sausage biscuits. After we packed everything we
needed for ourselves we would go out and load the dogs into the back of my
dad’s old pickup truck. He had this big old handmade wooden and wire cage that
he put them in. Then we would always go and meet one of my dad’s coon hunting
friends. It would be decided whether we would either take their truck or ours
to some remote place to enter the forest.
Coon Hunting With Dogs – More often than not the location included going down some bumpy old dirt road that passed by a graveyard or some old haunted home. The night being so dark I would imagine I saw ghosts. There was always a tall tale associated with these locations. Once we pulled to a stop my dad would turn off the engine and the lights to the truck. It was so dark I could not even see my hands in front of my face. The quietness would come rushing at us like a monster of its own accord, stifling the little whispers of my dad to his friend and the frenzied yelping of the impatient dogs in the back of the truck. We would set the dogs free and they always ran around like mad for a few minutes, sometimes jumping up on me and almost knocking me to the ground. This was because most of the time they were leashed with a long chain and it was their one night of freedom after maybe weeks of waiting. My dad would start off into the woods calling to the dogs with names like, spike, old blue, preacher, and so many I cannot recall them all to follow him. Sometimes we had as many as ten dogs from my dad and his friend to go on the hunt. After a few minutes my eyes would adjust to the night and I could see the world take on a completely new shape. You could see the glow on the sky from some distant town’s lights and the stars thrown across the heavens like so many diamonds on black carpet. We had to always hunt one the darkest night possible. My dad said that if you went hunting when the moon was out the dogs could never get the coon to climb a tree and he would always end up in a hole that was unreachable by the dogs or us.
After a short time in the woods the dogs would start barking off in the forest somewhere. They had that sound almost like a train, but special in its own way when they caught the scent of their quarry. We would continue on into the forest until we would find a clearing somewhere. This was one of the other things I liked about the hunt. We would sit there with the lights out and just listen to the dogs as they raced after their prey as fast as they could through the night. I would sit back and just stare at the stars and marvel at the creation of God. I would picture in my mind how big the universe was and think just how small I was. How could I, a small little clump of water and minerals of the earth amount to anything to a God that could make such a creation as the universe? I would silently talk with God in my heart and thank him for being so gracious that he saw fit to let me live even if I was not worthy of his majestic glory. Sometimes I would get lucky and see a shooting star go across the sky.
Then the dogs would change their note from the long drawling howl to one of short choppy barks. My dad would turn on his light and we would start hiking to the place they had ran the coon up a tree somewhere deep in the forest. Sometimes it would be difficult going through briars and swamps. Almost always we ended up in some water. This made my feet so cold. When we got to where the dogs were we would find them jumping as high as they could up the side of a huge old tree. My dad had a special light with a really strong beam that he would use then. He would shine the light up into the tree and start making a growling coughing sound like someone clearing out his throat. This would cause the coon to look into the light and its eyes would glow in the dark of the tree branches.
My dad would have me hold the light at the coon and he would position himself in a way that he could hold the rifle in its beam and aim at the coon. My dad was a good shot and it usually only took one or two tries for him to bring the coon tumbling from its perch high in the darkness of the tree. I always felt sorry for the coon as it fell from the tree to a loud thump on the ground. Quite often it would not be dead but just wounded. It would fight all the dogs for its survival, but always in the end it would lose. My dad would wrestle the coon away from the dogs and put it in a big plastic feed sack. I would have to tote the coon over my shoulder which weighed anywhere from 5 to 10 pounds. Its blood soiling my clothes and sometimes I could hear it still rasping to breathe in its last throws of life. My dad would call the dogs away from the tree and get them started looking for another scent trail. It would not take long and the dogs were off again on the trail of another coon. Again the dogs barking would be like a train on a track that raced through the forest. If I was lucky my dad would have a difficult time locating the coon or the coon would be in a hole. This gave me time to start a little small campfire and to open up the biscuits. Coffee and biscuits never tasted any better than they would when you had walked so many miles through the freezing night and your shoes are steaming by the campfire from some swamp you crossed. This Coon Hunting With Dogs would continue through the night leading from one tree to another. The hunt would sometimes last from 10 o’clock at night until we saw the sunrise in the morning, especially if we got lost. We would always get three to five coons in one night.
We did not eat the coons, my day sold them to some people he knew did like to eat them. Later on when I was a little older I found out we could sell the fur to a company up in North Carolina. This turned to be a profitable business split for me and my dad’s friend for a while. I would register with the game management service for special tags and sell the fur. My dad and his friends kept me a nice stock pile that I had to make a trip to North Carolina at least once a month.