The Southern Experience--More coon hunting.
Coon dogs do have a use as their name implies. To some of the Texans and Okies around where I lived in Texas the fact you could hunt coons with them made them made them extremely valuable. Coon hunting however was the only thing I ever saw a coon dog do that could be construed as worthwhile.
Overall I think the owners of the dogs agreed with me since it was a mark of great shame for the dogs to do anything but run coons when released and they always knew if the dog did.
We used to sit in a circle with a half dozen or so coon hunters listening to the dogs. The hunters had names like Delfrey, JC, Joe Boy, and Jack T (the Waltons were like deja vu for me). Generally this was time of suffering as the weather was either icy cold or several thousand mosquitoes each would be milling around us while the low grade repellent available then failed to work. I gradually learned to sit next to Joe Boy as he smoked cigars that he bought for 25 cents a thousand and it repelled anything with wings.
I was in fourth or fifth grade at this time and therefore had more education than the combined total of any four of the hunters in that circle. I was of course regarded as utterly ignorant and they were correct. To this day I have never seen anything like those men sitting there listening to the dogs. They could at distances of over a mile identify each dog and know exactly what it was doing at anytime. At first I thought the things they were saying were jokes until the others would just sit there nodding their heads or the owner of an offending dog would hunker down and glower at the ground.
This sort of stuff is typical:
"Lady has got on one now, she is close."
"Listen to that, Blackie lying like that. I don't know what is worse, him doing it or Pumpkin and Petey believing it."
"Petey done wised up. Hey Sandy, you think Pumpkin is a gonna follow that lying Blackie clear to Oklahoma?"
"Joe Boy, old Buck has got hisself an armadillo. He must like the taste of shell."
"Treed By Gawd!"
Treed was the signal for us to go running through the dark. We always hunted near rivers, lakes, or streams so the area was a maze of briars, blown down timber, and water moccosins. I always tried to be third in line in these runs. The first one was at risk of running into the deadfalls and all and I had heard that it wasn't the first person to run over a moccosin that got bit but the second because the snake was ready then.
On arriving at the tree we would use flashlights to spot the coon and then call him down. [This is true, I am not making this up, I have seen it, it works, and I have yet to find a Yankee who believes me.] The coon was called down right into the jaws of those dogs. After spotting him one of he hunters would make a sound like a fighting coon. It sounds like a congested wild cat squawl. The coon would think another coon was fighting the dogs and jump down to escape. When the hunter made that squawl the dogs would be under that tree looking like a group of furry alligators. They would leap all over him when he hit ground. Raccoons are surprisingly good fighters and even a number of dogs would take a while to kill one.
In the water it got interesting. Coons swim like otters and are better at it than dogs. Coon dogs get drowned by coons on occasion. I saw one come close one time.
Sandy had called this coon out of the tree and he went straight into a pond nearby. Sandy's dog Jargo (who all of us hated including Sandy)went right in after it. The coon was a big boar and swam to a log and sat on the log put his paw on Jargo's head and started ducking him for all the world like a kid ducking another kid in a swimming pool.
Sandy took one look and yelled, "My dog!" kicked off his shoes and dove in. He swam to the log and grabbed the coon by the scruff of the neck and tossed him off. He didn't get bit which is an amazing feat considering grabbing a coon like that is like grabbing a chain saw blade. Sandy swan back to us, the coon swam back to the log, Jargo swam back to the coon, and it proceeded to resume drowning the dog again. This time Sandy threw it further off and the other dogs saw it and started fighting in the shallows. This time Sandy got bit. All in all it was a pretty good hunt.
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