Home Country

By Slim Randles

October 15, 2004

When the moon grows large in autumn, and that crispness makes a jacket a nice thing to have, we take the dogs and go to the woods.

Coon hounds, of course. While we laugh with each other and compare our high-powered lights, our hounds are off through the woods and wild grape vines and the berries down near the river, bawling that plaintive, frantic music to the night sky, chasing the raccoon through his scent, and doing what they were born to do.

The coons seem to enjoy this too. They’ve been trailed by hounds and treed any number of times, you see. Most view the dogs as a nuisance, but a few … well, just take the Ghost Coon.

He’s been treed maybe two dozen times and likes it so much he waits in one certain area of the river, hoping we’ll turn the dogs loose in his backyard again. And when we do, off he goes, taking the dogs through farm yards, back and forth across irrigation ditches, even running along pavement for a while, trying to outwit the hounds.

If the dogs are clever enough to stay with him, he’ll swim the river. We haven’t treed him in two years now.

You see, we don’t kill the coons here. We tree them, tell the dogs they did a great job, and then go to another stretch of the river. Our fun is in watching the dogs run the trail, not in any three dollars worth of fur we might take home.

And like Dud Campbell was saying the other night, "If you shoot him, you can’t hunt him again."

Slim Randles

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