“Moon’s getting big,” Dud said over coffee
the other day.
“Sure is,”
said Herb Collins.
“Time to go after The Ghost
again.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“I’ll be there,” said Dud.
The Ghost, hereabouts, is a raccoon. He
lives along Lewis Creek and is a wily old rascal. We love going
coonhunting
here, but the way we do it is a bit different than they do it
other places. Since
we don’t have a lot of water around us, as they do in some
areas, we don’t have
a lot of ‘coons, either. So we conserve the ‘coons, but not the
fun. We throw
‘em back when we’re done.
So we take these
beautiful fall and winter nights, put on several layers of
longjohns, and turn
the hounds out along the creek. Sometimes the dogs strike a
‘coon track and put
the ‘coon up the tree quickly. Then we tell the dogs how
wonderful they are,
hook the dogs to leashes, and drag them back to the truck. It’s
hunting’s
answer to catch-and-release fishing. The coons stay in the tree
until we’re
gone and then go back to making the nights more interesting.
But not The Ghost. The Ghost is a big male,
or boar. We’ve treed him more than a dozen times now, and then
he discovered
this was kinda fun. So now he waits in a one-acre patch of
trees. Waits for the
dogs. And when they catch his scent, he takes those dogs through
farmyards,
across busy streets, even past the dog pound. He does everything
he can to
shake them off his trail, and it works. The dogs haven’t treed
him in three
years now. It the dogs get smart to his ways and put too much
pressure on him,
he swims the river.
So Dud and Herb will
try The Ghost again tomorrow. Will the dogs put him up a tree
this time? Don’t
bet on it.
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Brought to you by Packing
the Backyard Horse, by Slim Randles. Available on the
internet.