Top Gun Coon Hound

by Douglas Fodge



Have you heard the adage “Up a Creek without a Paddle”? That sums up nicely the situation I experienced. It was pitch black dark, and I was about half-way to the end of a branch near the top of a big oak tree and fury personified glared eye to eye at me.

Always be kind to animals
morning, noon and night.
For animals have feelings too
And furthermore, they bite.

- John Gardner

This particular event happened during mid winter after I had played a Junior High basketball game on a Friday night. I was already bone tired since I had guarded a roadrunner and human chimera in the ball game. I had barely gotten home and opened the front door when Daddy struck a match and fired up one of his roll-your-own Prince Albert Smoking Tobacco cigarettes. This wasn’t unusual since he smoked every hour on the hour through the night and more frequently during daylight hours. Daddy (the conversation is generally accurate), “Boy, you ready to go Coon Huntin’ (raccoon, Procyon lotor)? I traded for a new Coon Hound, a Plott Hound, today and I want to test him out.” “What the devil is a Plott Hound, Daddy?” I asked. Out of the dark, illuminated only by the glow of Daddy’s roll-your-own, Mama chipped in, “Why Douglas a Plott Hound is just about the best Coon Hound that man ever bred. This one was so good that the man only needed to tie a $5.00 bill to his collar to make sure Russie got a good deal!” Daddy, “Ah, don’t listen to the Madam, Boy, she’s just upset that Joe might eat us out of house and home.” “Amen, Russ Fodge, you needed this hound about like I needed another hole in my head.” At least Mama wasn’t mad, and since Daddy was pretty smart he didn’t prolong his misery by firing off any retort. He had learned that he wasted his breath arguing with Mama since her verbal skills could best those of the most ardent evangelical preacher.

“Daddy, where are we going to hunt?” You see, I was already suckered into going hunting! “Well, I was thinking about going over to Mr. Cowan’s woods ‘cause I saw a lot of tracks and other signs of coons there last weekend.” While I wasn’t eager to walk several miles to the backside of Mr. Cowan’s property the exchange between my parents had piqued my curiosity, and I was about to bust a gut to see the new Plott Hound, Joe, in action. Mind you, around the Fodge household we acquired and disposed of hounds about as often as some people shopped for groceries so there had to be something special to get my attention. Joe qualified since I sure didn’t know anything about Plott Hounds. “I better change into my hunting clothes.”

By the time I had changed clothes and got outside, Daddy had rounded up most of his hounds and put them into makeshift kennels or leashed them to fence posts and bushes. As we were leaving Mama yelled out the back door, “I sure hope the two of you will be able to pack home all the coons that Joe is going to catch.” Over at our house, Mama was either ready to debrain Daddy with a frying pan (not too often) or was laughing so hard with him at his antics that she was about to cry (often), so I didn’t pay much attention to the teasing. With Daddy there were no betwixt or between situations, but it sure wasn’t boring around him. At least he had a great sense of humor and laughed as much at himself and the predicaments that he got into as we did. Good-natured teasing was all that kept us sane in those days. We practiced the following philosophy; you may as well laugh about events that happen since it is a lot healthier than crying. It probably works just as well today as it did then.

Joe was as big as Mama had hinted at, and I could have sworn he was a miniature horse, but he was a Kentucky/Tennessee bear dog and somewhat taller and a bit heavier than our other hounds and mostly black with brindle-stripes. Joe’s former owner had trained him to be a Coon Dog since no bears were available to hunt in our area. As an adult I marveled at the Beagles the Division of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) used to find illegal drugs in airport baggage until one day it occurred to me that I knew of equally interesting feats with hounds. Daddy often trained hounds to hunt only a coon, squirrel, rabbit, fox, wolf or quail (much less frequently), but coon dogs rarely hunted squirrels or anything else and this was primarily due to the fact that they were in constant training. In contrast, other hounds were generalists, and they hunted whatever game presented itself. Whether we hunted with generalists, specialists, or both, the hounds roamed near and far, and when one barked (Daddy recognized the bark of every hound in his pack, and when he retold the exploits of the latest hunt he could and did mimic the bark of each hound) he would say, “That’s Queen, and it sounds like she’s hot on the trail of a fox”. A hot trail equaled one that the prey had just made as opposed to a cold trail that might be quite old. Meanwhile all other hounds would be actively searching for something to chase, and the only commands any of them received were Daddy yelling or blowing his cow horn to give them directions. The ATF Beagles had a trainer standing 3 feet away and guiding them through their paces, and I’m sure he helped insure both their safety and then nabbed any smugglers. Had Daddy trained the ATF Beagles and been in charge, he would probably have turned about a dozen lose in the airport baggage area and signaled commands to them on his cow horn from a central location until the search was completed. The guards could have stepped back and watched. Travelers might not have appreciated his approach, but I’m confident that the job would have been done quickly. The hounds would not have been distracted and would have located illegal contraband.

Off we went that particular night as if we were on our way to put out a raging fire. We kept Joe on a leash until we neared the hunt area, and then we unleashed him for a night of fun. Joe, unlike Daddy’s other hounds, didn’t bark until he could either hear or see a coon, or at least it appeared that way. Most of the time we wondered where he went as he hunted until he found a coon before making even a whimper. Fortunately coons usually zigged and zagged and circled about their hunting area so there wasn’t much danger that Joe would wander too far away. Then, suddenly in the distance Joe would let out a caterwauling bellow of his deep-based voice, and a few minutes later he would start to bay at something, a sure sign he had chased a coon up a tree or into a den. He sent us an urgent message, “Hey fellows, hurry up, I have found Mr. Coon.”

Joe’s message was clearly understood, and we made a mad dash through the underbrush and found him on guard at a big oak tree. Mr. Coon has ascended to the farthest branch, and Daddy focused the beam of his flashlight on the coon, presumably to blind him. Up the tree I went, mostly groping my way blindly along from branch to branch, and if this wasn’t near the top of occupationally hazardous and unsafe jobs then it should have been, but I climbed trees nonetheless. We could have shot Mr. Coon, but that would not have been sporty enough. The flashlight may have temporarily blinded the coon, but he quickly determined that I was on the way up to his hiding place and started snarling, chattering and gnashing his teeth together as only a coon can do. Down below, the instructions and encouragement from Daddy kept pace with Mr. Coon’s warnings. Not to be outdone (after all it was his game we were after) Joe bellowed occasionally and a few other hounds, ones who had escaped attention before we left home, seconded his motion.

My responsibility in all this was to encourage Mr. Coon to jump out of the tree, but gentle persuasion never worked very well since he had a PhD in negotiation skills. Therefore, I resorted to more intelligent modes of action: screaming at the top of my lungs, whacking him with a broken limb or shaking the limb he was clinging to for dear life. Naturally, he knew that there wasn’t any safety on the ground, but eventually he lost his balance and fell out of the tree. I marveled at the fact that I wasn’t close behind, but I managed to clutch the bole of the tree with one arm the entire time.

When Mr. Coon hit the ground below, some 60-80 feet of free fall, the real excitement started, especially for me since I was temporarily forgotten. I never got to see many fights, but I could hear what happened, and it wasn’t always pleasant, and wasn’t humane as measured by today’s standards. Daddy usually allowed only one hound to fight a coon, and if that happened to be Joe then all I heard was the crunching of bones, followed by silence. If a smaller hound tangled with a coon, then we had action galore. This was especially the case if any water was available and that was often the case as coons hunted for fish and crayfish in creeks. Coons were skilled swimmers and fighters in water, and if possible they climbed on a dog’s head and held it under the water until the dog drowned. However, the usual result in our hunts was that the adult coons, but not the younger ones, often escaped the initial clashes and found another tree to hide in. Stated another way, they made more work for me. The secondary trees were usually some distance from the initial tree, and this almost always meant that I clambered out of a tree with star or moonlight to guide me since the hounds and Daddy with the flashlight were already at my next work site. After Mr. Coon, and a few of his relatives, succumbed to the onslaughts we snatched each from the hounds and then marched off home where we tanned and sold the pelts.

Our biggest problem was getting rid of the ticks after a hunt. Texas was famous for its abundance of ticks and if man or beast walked where cattle grazed or rabbits ran, they were assured of having a few ticks clutching their clothing if not their skin. When we got back home, we immediately disrobed, removed ticks, and left the clothing hanging on the clothesline. Before the clothes could be worn again we had to scald them in hot water, but they needed to be washed after we slogged through the fields, woods, thickets, creeks and other terrain. Hounds were also monitored for ticks, and we dipped them weekly in a homemade mixture of kerosene, sulfur, asphalt tar, DDT and water that we kept in a 55-gallon drum. Even this miserable concoction didn’t always keep them tick-free, but it helped somewhat.

The morning after a hunt we skinned the coons and tacked their pelts inside out to the interior wall of the barn. An intact coonskin, properly dried and fat-free from scraping it each week, would bring a few dollars. The carcasses were field dressed, eviscerated, sectioned, and added the meat to a few bucketsful of wheat shorts, chunks of fat from the local butchery shop and water in a large cauldron and cooked the mixture over a log fire until the meat fell off the bones. If we supplemented this feed with a few vitamins and minerals, the hounds stayed in fine physical condition for up to 10-14 years.

Over the next couple of months that winter, and for several years afterwards, Joe lived up to his press releases, and on many a night we came home with all the coons that we could carry. In the process, we got plenty of exercise since we walked everywhere as we didn’t own an automobile. As testimony to her open-minded nature Mama became one of Joe’s biggest fans, and he was her favorite hound. Now that tells you something about both of them!