September 15, 2023 • 27 mins
Brent's back with a second installment of his journey as a coon hunter. From disappearing coons to what’s really going on out there when a dog is chasing one, Brent’s experiences and observations have helped him see the light on several different levels. There’s some good stuff in this one and all his stories happened this century. That’s a story all by itself. Sit back and take a listen to this week’s installment of MeatEater’s “This Country Life” podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves
from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
I want you to stay a while as I share
my stories and the country skills that will help you
beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as
part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best
(00:25):
outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends,
pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I
think I got a thing or two to teach you.
My journey is a Coon Hunter Part two. We're back
(00:46):
this week with more tales of coon hunting and coon dogs.
The Bandidos we Chase are curiously smart creatures and their
survival instincts of slipping away from hounds is about as
legendary as it gets. To continue one struggle of my exploits,
along with observations and lessons learned, are up next on
meat Eaters of This Country Life podcast. But first, I'm
(01:09):
going to tell you a story. About three years ago,
someone sent me a want add for lack of a
better term, that they'd seen on Facebook in some hunting group.
The post had had a number listed and it said
(01:31):
looking for someone to get coons off of Deer Lease
in central Arkansas. Well like Doc Holliday in the movie Tombstone,
when drunk Johnny Ringo challenged the earth Still Duel and
they ignored him, prompting him to shout, wretched slugs. Don't
any of you have the guts to play for blood?
Doc Holliday calmly said, and they y'all say it with me.
(01:55):
I'm a huckleberry. That's just my game. Well, that's just
that's how I felt what I saw that ad I
broke a nail tapping the numbers out on my phone
to talk to the man and offered the services of
me and my coonhound whaling. I talked to him, and
in short order he'd sent me a waypoint on on X,
And just like that, I had four hundred acres of
(02:18):
private timber ground to hunt in the middle of agfects.
It was too good to be true, all short growth
hardwood timber, surrounded on four sides by rice, corn and soybeans.
It had a drainage canals on one end and would
hold water on about sixty percent of it That was
(02:38):
about ankle deep, making it primo for crawfish, tadpoles, and frogs.
Three house favorites of Ricky Raccoon and his kin good
night Nurse. If I was going to draw on a
piece of paper the perfect place to train it up
and come in Coonhoun, that would have been the place.
(02:59):
The coons were thick in there. And when I dropped
Whaling in there the first time he treated a coon
before kackied lick is behind. He tread so quick I
thought he'd messed up. Now I can count on two
hands and still have fingers left over the number of
times that old Whaling has slick treed. He just doesn't
do it. And if y'all don't know what a slick
(03:20):
tree is, it's like striking out in softball. It is
no bueno and a bit embarrassing. A slick tree is
when a dog sets in tree in which is the
way of saying, hey, boss, I found him. He's up
here in this tree, and then you look and look
and finally decide, hm, no, he ain't. That tree is slick,
(03:42):
meaning there ain't no coon in it. Nobody likes a
lion coon dog, especially the fellow he belongs to. Now,
some dogs do it because they just can't figure out
which tree is in and they gamble or they're they're
just not good enough to decipher it and figure it out.
The prey driving and the want of praise gets the
gets the best of them. Old Whaling he ain't never
(04:03):
been bad about that. He ain't never been bad about
that at all. And I've heard Michael Roseman say he's
one of the most accurate dogs he's ever seen. And
Michael has seen a lot of dogs in his lifetime,
and coon hunting and making lights for coon hunters is
his business. So when he made that tree fifty yards
from where I cut him loose, instead of getting on
(04:25):
to him and making him go on, I checked the
tree and there he was, the mass bandido, looking right
back at me. Less than a minute in and I'm
already looking at a coon. It was that way for
quite a while. We were flat smashing the coons in there,
and Whalen was getting some good training and experience, and
(04:46):
so were the coons. Night hunt there three or four
nights a week, and never fail to tree coons. It
was more or less automatic. I'd parked my truck on
the north end of the property, walk into the edge
of the world woods, cut Whaling loose and he'd be
struck and barking in pretty short order a few times,
and y'all gonna think I'm crazy, But he'd strike a
(05:08):
coon in the same place, or at least on the
same couple of acres, And I believe in my heart
that it was the same coon every time, because that
joker would make a couple of dips and dodges in
the woods before making a big loop and then a
bee line right out of the timber into a flooded
rice field and soybean fields across the county road. Now,
(05:29):
let me tell you it's hard for a dog to
catch up to a coon in a flooded field. They'll
get in there and zig zagger around, and it's hard
for the majority of dogs to gain ground on them
because the rice is thick or the soybeans are thick,
and they the coons, they'll just get away. Meanwhile, back
in the woods, old tricky Ricky will pull some fast
(05:50):
ones too, And in this scope of woods I got
to witness seeing the coons that whaling was running on
more than one occasion. I just happened to be staying
in the right place at the right time to see
the coons come ambling by with a hound in hot pursuit.
Some folks think that when the hound is trailing and
barking at a coon, that's he's always looking at him
(06:13):
and running through the woods in front of him, And
that's nearly always not the case. Even when I cut
Wailing loose and he treed fifty yards in front of me,
I seriously doubt that he ever saw that coon until
he fell out of the tree and on the ground
after I poked a hole in his ear with my
twenty two. That coon was probably spooked up that tree
(06:35):
by us walking in before I had ever cut Waiting
off the chain. But Whaling could smell him because I
was casting him into the wind, which means I had
him facing into the wind when I cut him loose,
and he just went straight to where he that coon
had just climbed up in a tree and started treeing.
What's really going on when the hound is chasing the
(06:55):
coon is the dog is barking where the coon has been.
And here's a short less on how that works. We
all leave scent wherever we are, regardless if we had
the buried o bomb for dinner or not. We are
constantly shedding skin cells from our epidermis called skirf spelled
s k e rf. Well, guess what soda coons and
(07:19):
all the other little creatures running around and making a
living in the woods. It's kind of like dropping bread crumbs,
but instead of leaving a visual trail of gravity and
fluence sign for the hound to follow, these bread crumbs
of scurf are floating on the breeze in the microscopic
particles that are affected by wind, humidity, temperature, and age.
(07:41):
And by age, I don't mean the age of the animal,
I'm talking about how long it's been since the animal
passed through. There. The dog is following the scin with
his head up for ways and down for ways, and
while moving through the woods, and depending on how the
scin is flowing, he could be several feet away from
where the coon actually walk, just catching scent enough every
(08:02):
few feet to make sure that he's going in the
right direction and staying on course. This is called drifting
the track, and that's what whalan does as compared to
a ground and pound style of hunting, where the dog
has his nose literally on the ground smelling for every
bit of scent that as he moved through the woods
following the coon. My old Buddy Rex had a dog
(08:25):
named Shadow that was absolutely excellent at this and that
was his style, and that's the way he hunted. He
could sniff out some coons that had been traveled through
a long time before. But the drifting style dogs are
usually faster on the track than the ground and pound types.
But those dogs make fewer what we call loses on
the trail by staying as close to the scurf plume
(08:47):
as possible. Now, the first time this happened that I
saw coon that the dogs were chasing, I was hunting
with a new friend of mine named Michael Crosby. Michael
was looking to get his first coon hound, and I
took him along one night to give him a dose
of what it was all about. We cut Old Whalen
loose and he was making a big loop down through
(09:09):
that four hundred acre block of woods, and as he
started back towards where we were, he struck in barking.
I looked at my garment and he was over three
hundred yards away, but pointed back towards where we were.
Michael and I stopped and would cut her lights off
and listened. I was explaining what was going on as
it unfolded. I was talking soft and giving him the
(09:31):
play by play of what I assumed was going on
by how Whalen was barking while still listening to Whaling.
He was more or less coming straight to us, and
I told Michael, you know, if we're quiet and still,
he's liable to run that coon right over the top
of us. I was joking, but I was also thinking
how cool that would be if he did. All of
a sudden, the conversation kind of died out as Whaling's
(09:54):
barking picked up and got closer, and I could hear
something coming toward us from about thirty or forty yards away. Wait. Now,
I ain't scared of the dark, not in the least,
not in one little bit. But standing in the middle
of the pitch black woods at ankle deep water, hearing
something weighing towards you will heighten your situational awareness. I
switched on the red lens of my son's spot light,
(10:16):
and I looked toward where that racket was coming from,
and sure enough, here comes the coon. We didn't move
an inch. That joker looked like he was out for
a Sunday stroll, not even trotting to amount to munch.
Every now and then he'd we'd we'd see him break
into a short lope for a few yards and then
go back to actually just walking with a purpose. He
(10:38):
got to a little log that was laying in front
of us and hopped up on top of it and
walked the length from one end to the other before
jumping off the ground at a forty five degree angle
and heading due east. And we watched him go slap
out of sight like he wasn't late for work, but
if he wasn't careful, he might be cutting it close.
(10:58):
Two minutes later, here comes whaling, barking his brains out
about ten yards further away from where that coon had
just come through. He was down wind and drifting that
coon scent as it settled according to all the environmental
factors that affects it, like I just talked about, you know,
wind and humidity, all that Whaling stayed on that coon's
(11:19):
track until losing it one hundred yards or so from
where it came. By us no idea what happened. Sometimes
it's just like the world opens up and swallows them whole.
They just disappear, but we lost it. Other times it's
like when Rex Whiting and I were hunting in that
same spot one night, and Rex was training a tree
and walk up pup named June that he was running
(11:42):
with Whaling. Now, basically the same scenario played out, just
like it had when Michael Crosby and I were in
there a few nights before Whaling and June struck a
track and it looped back toward where we were standing.
The only difference is this time the barking was a
whole lot more excited, which usually indicates that the hounds
(12:02):
know they're close to the coon. They're either actually seeing
or hearing it running, or the scent it's so fresh
and hot that it's easy to follow, which actually can
sometimes work to the coon's advantage. But it appeared that
it was like the same song second verse from the
other night, and I'd already told Rex about it. I
remember saying, we fixed a look at this coon, and
(12:25):
he immediately turned on his red light and out it too,
And I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and
I started videoing. Sure, as I'm sitting here right now
telling you this, we saw that coon coming and could
hear not only the barking and Whaling and jumble with
their feet splashing coming close behind. They weren't far away
when that coon ran past a big tree, stopped right
(12:47):
in front of us less than ten yards away, ran
back a few feet and laid down as flat as
a flitter. He looked like wiley coyote after a steam
roller had run over him. And both of those dogs
ran within the feud of embarking and raising sand like
they was about to catch him, and they kept going.
That coon got up like he'd been taking a nap
(13:08):
on the couch and just loped away. Whaling and June
had gone twenty five or thirty yards past where that
coon had stopped, and then they came roaring back to
pick up the scent. Whaling opened up and took off
with June ride behind him. That coon turned east, just
like the one had done a few nights ago, and
after a hundred yards or so, the dogs lost him again.
(13:31):
Now I can't swear that it was the same coon
from the hunt before, but he ran that whole circuit
just like the other one did. They struck him and
trailed him almost identically, and he looped around and came
back to that same two acres where the one before
it does. Then that coon turned due east and disappeared
(13:52):
just like the other one. Now I can't swear it
was the same coon, but I saw him both and
it looked just like him, and that's just how that happened.
(14:13):
My journey is a coon Hunter, Part two. For a
fellow that's been a coon hunting for the better part
of forty two years, one would surmise he's had a
bunch of dogs during that time, and normally they'd be right,
but in this case, in my case, I've only had
three For the past thirty two years. My career has
(14:33):
limited the amount of time that I could dedicate to
training and being able to properly care for a dog
the way a hound should be cared for. They need space,
and they need hunting. Being on call and involved in
cases and such was a limiting factor over a large
portion of that thirty two years, and only in the
past five years or so have I been at a
(14:55):
stage in my job that I could dedicate the proper
amount of time to do it. So in twenty nineteen,
I decided it was time for me to start looking
for a hound to my own. I wasn't going to
be real particular about the bloodline or the breed for
that matter, although I've always leaned toward tree and walkers.
(15:15):
That was my first coon houn in my teens, and
even though my second one was a blue tick in
my late twenties, I never lost the preference for walkers.
My dad was a walkerman, but his dogs were used
for running codies. I remember taking my city mouse girlfriend
at the time, Alexis, down to dad's house to meet him,
(15:36):
and when we got there you could hear his hounds
over in the pen barking and raising cane. I introduced
her to my dad as we walked in the door,
and she asked him, what is all that barking. He said,
that's my cold dog's barking. She asked him, well, what
kind of dogs are they? He said, they're running walkers.
She scrunched up her nose and said, running walkers. They
(15:58):
need to make up their minds went they're doing. He
laughed and loved her from that very moment. I had
never even thought about the paradox of that name until
she said that. Anyway, I was looking for a walker dog,
and for six months I made phone calls, I sent
texts and emails, and I scoured over the internet looking
(16:19):
for a dog that would suit me and what I
was after. And what I was after was simple. I
wanted a dog that would mind and tree coons. I
wasn't after a particular style of hound like. I didn't
care if he was a dog that drifted a track
or if he was a ground pounder or a combination
of both. I wanted to be able to turn him loose,
have him treat me a coon and come to me
(16:41):
when I called. I had no interest in competition hunting.
I got nothing against it, and I loosely follow it
due to so many of my friends that I know
and hunt with that do enjoy it. Now, there's a
strategy and skill in competition hunting, and the handler that
knows the rules best will win a competition even when
his dog may not be the best dog in the cast.
(17:02):
And that's cool. It involves the human element and the
bond that's created between a handler and a hound. The
handler has to know the tendencies and habits of that
dog inside and out to be able to listen to
him and tell what's going on just by the different
barks or tones of different barks, and make his call
to the judge based on his observations. There's a lot
(17:24):
of skill in that. Me. I ain't that good at it.
And me went in a competition hunt with whaling rests
squarely on his shoulders, not my brain. Michael Roseman, Rex
Whiting and I would hunt together and we'd use all
the rules of a competition hunt, and they'd keep a
running tally in their head of the time left in
the hunt and what everyone's score was. Heck, I couldn't
(17:46):
even keep up with my own, much less everyone else's.
It was fun, but it just wasn't my thing. If
it's your thing, you should see what Alan Gingrich and
Trevor Wade and all those folks over at United kennlel
cl Over doing. You'll find them online at Wwwukcdogs dot com.
(18:07):
Then just search up to coonhout events. They've got a
lot going on and there's always room for more participation,
and these folks will bend over backwards to help you.
So to get back to my journey, After six months
of looking, I found a dog that interested me. I
was scrolling through Facebook Marketplace and there was a picture
of a six month old tree in Walker puppy for
(18:28):
sale with an address that was forty five minutes from
my house for two hundred and fifty dollars. Something struck
me about the picture. I can't tell you what it
is to this day, but there was something about that
dog that called to me. Up to this point, I
had looked at well over one hundred pictures of dogs
on the Internet, and talked to a multitude of people
(18:51):
on the phone or through texting about a jillion dogs
that I never laid eyes on. But I had never
been drawn to going and looking at one till now.
I called the number, I talked to the lady and
made an appointment to go see the dog. The next day,
she informed me that the address on the Facebook ad
was wrong and that they had moved nearly three hours
(19:13):
away from me instead of the forty five minutes I
originally thought. Okay, I was still going to look. I
couldn't shake the image of that hound out of my head.
When I pulled up and saw him, I knew he
was the one that I'd be taking home. When I
found out his name was Whaling, it solidified it for me.
(19:34):
For half a year, I had fretted and worried about
finding a dog and having one reason or another not
to even commit to going and look anyone. Now, after
learning at the last minute that I'd be driving two
hours further away, I hadn't been deterred. Pulling up to
the address and seeing the dog in the subpar of
living conditions he was being housed in. I didn't really
(19:56):
know if I was going to be buying him or
rescuing him, but I knew I was leaving with him.
Come to find out, he was rescuing me. It was
Thursday in March twelfth of twenty twenty. I had made
(20:21):
it back to the outskirts a little rock when I
got a call from Alexis saying through her job, she'd
learned of a possible exposure to the COVID virus earlier
in the week. This was when all that started. They
were instructing her to go home and we had to
report our family's possible exposure to my employer in Bailey School.
(20:43):
Now Bailey was in the first grade. Alexis had called
the school and they said that we'd have to come
get Bailey and do that whole quarantine thing that was
just starting to get so popular. Then it was all
the rage and everyone was doing it. I would have
never thought that Bailey wouldn't get back to her class
that year. I also would never have thought a dog
(21:04):
could have meant so much to us in such a
short amount of time. Bailey was doing her classes online now,
so she was free to roam around with me and
our new hunting hound. So while elementary school was basically
out for Bailey, coon hunting school was in for her
and Whalen. The rest of that spring and summer was
(21:26):
spent taking that dog to the woods and turning him
loose and just seeing what he'd do. Bailey went with
me on a bunch of those trips. She like riding
the four wheeler and watching and learning what Whalen was
doing and asking a million questions. And I are while
unknowingly tried to burn the retinas out of my eyeballs
by shining her coon light in my face every time
she looked at me. I bought a metal diamond played
(21:50):
a dog crate for my truck that attracted the attention
of a guy that happened to be driving by one
time who stopped and introduced himself, And that was Rex,
who is now like a member of our family. He
introduced me to Michael Roseman, who is now like family
and who I'm going hunting with tonight, all because of
a dog. I've been to the ears of those boys
(22:13):
and several others in the training of old Whalen, and
they helped me beyond measure in the development of this
dog from coonhound to coon dog. And there's a difference,
a big difference. He was born a registered purebred coonhoun,
but he earned the title of coon dog by being one.
I took him religiously every opportunity that I had that
(22:35):
didn't interfere with anything related to my family. Alexis leaves
for work early, so she goes to bed early, and
I worked from home and I set my own hours.
Bailey goes to bed early, so when they hit the hay,
I usually hit the woods with this dog. The best
(22:58):
advice I ever got was from my dad, who passed
away twelve years ago, and I mentioned it earlier in
part one of my journey as a coon hunter, when
he said he could always tell which dog out of
a litter that was going to make the best because
it was the one that got hunted and messed with
the most. You can't take that literally, because some have
(23:19):
more natural abilities than others. He meant when all things
are equal. The pup that gets hunted will be better
than the ones that are still sitting in the pen.
And that's simple and straightforward. But his message was more hidden.
In order for that dog to get better, I had
to take him out and give him the opportunity. In
(23:40):
doing so, I was outside, and I was getting better.
My dad taught me a million things about trees and animals, hunting, fishing,
taking care of dogs, and the whole time he was
really teaching me how to take care of myself. I
just didn't know it. It worked the same way with
old whaling. All I really did was give that dog
(24:02):
the opportunity to make choices, both good and bad. When
I cut him loose, the good choices were praised and
the bad ones were corrected. The maturation of a hound
is very comparable to that of a person when you
think about it. A dog lives a week of their
life for every day of hours. Imagine if it was
(24:23):
the other way around, we wouldn't live long enough to
see how good a dog could be, or have the
opportunity to learn just as much or more from them
as they do from us. The core of my law
enforcement career was during my hiatus from owning a coup.
Now I saw more tragedy and ugliness during that time
(24:44):
of my life that I'd ever imagined one person could
I live with that? And dealing with those memories or
not dealing with them, has led me to where I
am now. I used to hunt alone a lot when
I first started out training Whaling. I'd go five nights
out of seven, slowly implementing what I desired for him
to do and corrected the things that I wanted him
(25:07):
to stop. I had a lot of sitting on a
log in the woods in the dark time, and while
I was watching Whalen's Tracker, I was thinking about stuff.
It allowed me moments to talk out loud with my
dad and talk to the Good Lord too. And my
journey as a coon hunter is still going on, just
(25:27):
like my journey and my faith as a husband and
a father, a brother, and a friend. That old dog
that a Lexus follows around the house with a vacuum
like she's hot on his trail has been an important
factor in helping me do all those things by making
me slow down and pay attention to what was going
on around him, so I could get a clear picture
(25:49):
in my head of what he was doing, and in
doing so, I started to pay attention and see what
was going on around me. That, as Barney Fife would say,
was very therapeutic. The rest of us would say therapeutic.
So that's your challenge this week. Find your whaling and
(26:11):
give yourself the opportunity to have that sitting on a
log in the woods in the dark time, whether you're
literally doing that or on your dinner break at the office.
If you're on your dinner break at the office, you're
probably gonna want to leave that coon dog at home.
I'm just saying, Hey, I hope y'all have enjoyed these
episodes about coon hunting and it ventures me and whaling
(26:32):
to wonder how and have had. I got a lot
more stories about him and chasing those river bottom bandidos
that I'll share later, but like I always say, that's
another story. Thank you so much for listening and sharing
our show with others. You folks are simply amazing, and
(26:53):
I appreciate you allowing me some time during your life
to talk about mine. It don't matter where you're from
or where you are, We're all alike. We can sit
down and have the noon meal and I can call
it dinner and you can call it lunch, but it's
still gonna taste the same. This is Brent Reeves signing off.
(27:14):
Y'all be careful.
Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves
from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
I want you to stay a while as I share
my stories and the country skills that will help you
beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as
part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best
(00:25):
outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends,
pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I
think I got a thing or two to teach you.
My journey is a Coon Hunter Part two. We're back
(00:46):
this week with more tales of coon hunting and coon dogs.
The Bandidos we Chase are curiously smart creatures and their
survival instincts of slipping away from hounds is about as
legendary as it gets. To continue one struggle of my exploits,
along with observations and lessons learned, are up next on
meat Eaters of This Country Life podcast. But first, I'm
(01:09):
going to tell you a story. About three years ago,
someone sent me a want add for lack of a
better term, that they'd seen on Facebook in some hunting group.
The post had had a number listed and it said
(01:31):
looking for someone to get coons off of Deer Lease
in central Arkansas. Well like Doc Holliday in the movie Tombstone,
when drunk Johnny Ringo challenged the earth Still Duel and
they ignored him, prompting him to shout, wretched slugs. Don't
any of you have the guts to play for blood?
Doc Holliday calmly said, and they y'all say it with me.
(01:55):
I'm a huckleberry. That's just my game. Well, that's just
that's how I felt what I saw that ad I
broke a nail tapping the numbers out on my phone
to talk to the man and offered the services of
me and my coonhound whaling. I talked to him, and
in short order he'd sent me a waypoint on on X,
And just like that, I had four hundred acres of
(02:18):
private timber ground to hunt in the middle of agfects.
It was too good to be true, all short growth
hardwood timber, surrounded on four sides by rice, corn and soybeans.
It had a drainage canals on one end and would
hold water on about sixty percent of it That was
(02:38):
about ankle deep, making it primo for crawfish, tadpoles, and frogs.
Three house favorites of Ricky Raccoon and his kin good
night Nurse. If I was going to draw on a
piece of paper the perfect place to train it up
and come in Coonhoun, that would have been the place.
(02:59):
The coons were thick in there. And when I dropped
Whaling in there the first time he treated a coon
before kackied lick is behind. He tread so quick I
thought he'd messed up. Now I can count on two
hands and still have fingers left over the number of
times that old Whaling has slick treed. He just doesn't
do it. And if y'all don't know what a slick
(03:20):
tree is, it's like striking out in softball. It is
no bueno and a bit embarrassing. A slick tree is
when a dog sets in tree in which is the
way of saying, hey, boss, I found him. He's up
here in this tree, and then you look and look
and finally decide, hm, no, he ain't. That tree is slick,
(03:42):
meaning there ain't no coon in it. Nobody likes a
lion coon dog, especially the fellow he belongs to. Now,
some dogs do it because they just can't figure out
which tree is in and they gamble or they're they're
just not good enough to decipher it and figure it out.
The prey driving and the want of praise gets the
gets the best of them. Old Whaling he ain't never
(04:03):
been bad about that. He ain't never been bad about
that at all. And I've heard Michael Roseman say he's
one of the most accurate dogs he's ever seen. And
Michael has seen a lot of dogs in his lifetime,
and coon hunting and making lights for coon hunters is
his business. So when he made that tree fifty yards
from where I cut him loose, instead of getting on
(04:25):
to him and making him go on, I checked the
tree and there he was, the mass bandido, looking right
back at me. Less than a minute in and I'm
already looking at a coon. It was that way for
quite a while. We were flat smashing the coons in there,
and Whalen was getting some good training and experience, and
(04:46):
so were the coons. Night hunt there three or four
nights a week, and never fail to tree coons. It
was more or less automatic. I'd parked my truck on
the north end of the property, walk into the edge
of the world woods, cut Whaling loose and he'd be
struck and barking in pretty short order a few times,
and y'all gonna think I'm crazy, But he'd strike a
(05:08):
coon in the same place, or at least on the
same couple of acres, And I believe in my heart
that it was the same coon every time, because that
joker would make a couple of dips and dodges in
the woods before making a big loop and then a
bee line right out of the timber into a flooded
rice field and soybean fields across the county road. Now,
(05:29):
let me tell you it's hard for a dog to
catch up to a coon in a flooded field. They'll
get in there and zig zagger around, and it's hard
for the majority of dogs to gain ground on them
because the rice is thick or the soybeans are thick,
and they the coons, they'll just get away. Meanwhile, back
in the woods, old tricky Ricky will pull some fast
(05:50):
ones too, And in this scope of woods I got
to witness seeing the coons that whaling was running on
more than one occasion. I just happened to be staying
in the right place at the right time to see
the coons come ambling by with a hound in hot pursuit.
Some folks think that when the hound is trailing and
barking at a coon, that's he's always looking at him
(06:13):
and running through the woods in front of him, And
that's nearly always not the case. Even when I cut
Wailing loose and he treed fifty yards in front of me,
I seriously doubt that he ever saw that coon until
he fell out of the tree and on the ground
after I poked a hole in his ear with my
twenty two. That coon was probably spooked up that tree
(06:35):
by us walking in before I had ever cut Waiting
off the chain. But Whaling could smell him because I
was casting him into the wind, which means I had
him facing into the wind when I cut him loose,
and he just went straight to where he that coon
had just climbed up in a tree and started treeing.
What's really going on when the hound is chasing the
(06:55):
coon is the dog is barking where the coon has been.
And here's a short less on how that works. We
all leave scent wherever we are, regardless if we had
the buried o bomb for dinner or not. We are
constantly shedding skin cells from our epidermis called skirf spelled
s k e rf. Well, guess what soda coons and
(07:19):
all the other little creatures running around and making a
living in the woods. It's kind of like dropping bread crumbs,
but instead of leaving a visual trail of gravity and
fluence sign for the hound to follow, these bread crumbs
of scurf are floating on the breeze in the microscopic
particles that are affected by wind, humidity, temperature, and age.
(07:41):
And by age, I don't mean the age of the animal,
I'm talking about how long it's been since the animal
passed through. There. The dog is following the scin with
his head up for ways and down for ways, and
while moving through the woods, and depending on how the
scin is flowing, he could be several feet away from
where the coon actually walk, just catching scent enough every
(08:02):
few feet to make sure that he's going in the
right direction and staying on course. This is called drifting
the track, and that's what whalan does as compared to
a ground and pound style of hunting, where the dog
has his nose literally on the ground smelling for every
bit of scent that as he moved through the woods
following the coon. My old Buddy Rex had a dog
(08:25):
named Shadow that was absolutely excellent at this and that
was his style, and that's the way he hunted. He
could sniff out some coons that had been traveled through
a long time before. But the drifting style dogs are
usually faster on the track than the ground and pound types.
But those dogs make fewer what we call loses on
the trail by staying as close to the scurf plume
(08:47):
as possible. Now, the first time this happened that I
saw coon that the dogs were chasing, I was hunting
with a new friend of mine named Michael Crosby. Michael
was looking to get his first coon hound, and I
took him along one night to give him a dose
of what it was all about. We cut Old Whalen
loose and he was making a big loop down through
(09:09):
that four hundred acre block of woods, and as he
started back towards where we were, he struck in barking.
I looked at my garment and he was over three
hundred yards away, but pointed back towards where we were.
Michael and I stopped and would cut her lights off
and listened. I was explaining what was going on as
it unfolded. I was talking soft and giving him the
(09:31):
play by play of what I assumed was going on
by how Whalen was barking while still listening to Whaling.
He was more or less coming straight to us, and
I told Michael, you know, if we're quiet and still,
he's liable to run that coon right over the top
of us. I was joking, but I was also thinking
how cool that would be if he did. All of
a sudden, the conversation kind of died out as Whaling's
(09:54):
barking picked up and got closer, and I could hear
something coming toward us from about thirty or forty yards away. Wait. Now,
I ain't scared of the dark, not in the least,
not in one little bit. But standing in the middle
of the pitch black woods at ankle deep water, hearing
something weighing towards you will heighten your situational awareness. I
switched on the red lens of my son's spot light,
(10:16):
and I looked toward where that racket was coming from,
and sure enough, here comes the coon. We didn't move
an inch. That joker looked like he was out for
a Sunday stroll, not even trotting to amount to munch.
Every now and then he'd we'd we'd see him break
into a short lope for a few yards and then
go back to actually just walking with a purpose. He
(10:38):
got to a little log that was laying in front
of us and hopped up on top of it and
walked the length from one end to the other before
jumping off the ground at a forty five degree angle
and heading due east. And we watched him go slap
out of sight like he wasn't late for work, but
if he wasn't careful, he might be cutting it close.
(10:58):
Two minutes later, here comes whaling, barking his brains out
about ten yards further away from where that coon had
just come through. He was down wind and drifting that
coon scent as it settled according to all the environmental
factors that affects it, like I just talked about, you know,
wind and humidity, all that Whaling stayed on that coon's
(11:19):
track until losing it one hundred yards or so from
where it came. By us no idea what happened. Sometimes
it's just like the world opens up and swallows them whole.
They just disappear, but we lost it. Other times it's
like when Rex Whiting and I were hunting in that
same spot one night, and Rex was training a tree
and walk up pup named June that he was running
(11:42):
with Whaling. Now, basically the same scenario played out, just
like it had when Michael Crosby and I were in
there a few nights before Whaling and June struck a
track and it looped back toward where we were standing.
The only difference is this time the barking was a
whole lot more excited, which usually indicates that the hounds
(12:02):
know they're close to the coon. They're either actually seeing
or hearing it running, or the scent it's so fresh
and hot that it's easy to follow, which actually can
sometimes work to the coon's advantage. But it appeared that
it was like the same song second verse from the
other night, and I'd already told Rex about it. I
remember saying, we fixed a look at this coon, and
(12:25):
he immediately turned on his red light and out it too,
And I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and
I started videoing. Sure, as I'm sitting here right now
telling you this, we saw that coon coming and could
hear not only the barking and Whaling and jumble with
their feet splashing coming close behind. They weren't far away
when that coon ran past a big tree, stopped right
(12:47):
in front of us less than ten yards away, ran
back a few feet and laid down as flat as
a flitter. He looked like wiley coyote after a steam
roller had run over him. And both of those dogs
ran within the feud of embarking and raising sand like
they was about to catch him, and they kept going.
That coon got up like he'd been taking a nap
(13:08):
on the couch and just loped away. Whaling and June
had gone twenty five or thirty yards past where that
coon had stopped, and then they came roaring back to
pick up the scent. Whaling opened up and took off
with June ride behind him. That coon turned east, just
like the one had done a few nights ago, and
after a hundred yards or so, the dogs lost him again.
(13:31):
Now I can't swear that it was the same coon
from the hunt before, but he ran that whole circuit
just like the other one did. They struck him and
trailed him almost identically, and he looped around and came
back to that same two acres where the one before
it does. Then that coon turned due east and disappeared
(13:52):
just like the other one. Now I can't swear it
was the same coon, but I saw him both and
it looked just like him, and that's just how that happened.
(14:13):
My journey is a coon Hunter, Part two. For a
fellow that's been a coon hunting for the better part
of forty two years, one would surmise he's had a
bunch of dogs during that time, and normally they'd be right,
but in this case, in my case, I've only had
three For the past thirty two years. My career has
(14:33):
limited the amount of time that I could dedicate to
training and being able to properly care for a dog
the way a hound should be cared for. They need space,
and they need hunting. Being on call and involved in
cases and such was a limiting factor over a large
portion of that thirty two years, and only in the
past five years or so have I been at a
(14:55):
stage in my job that I could dedicate the proper
amount of time to do it. So in twenty nineteen,
I decided it was time for me to start looking
for a hound to my own. I wasn't going to
be real particular about the bloodline or the breed for
that matter, although I've always leaned toward tree and walkers.
(15:15):
That was my first coon houn in my teens, and
even though my second one was a blue tick in
my late twenties, I never lost the preference for walkers.
My dad was a walkerman, but his dogs were used
for running codies. I remember taking my city mouse girlfriend
at the time, Alexis, down to dad's house to meet him,
(15:36):
and when we got there you could hear his hounds
over in the pen barking and raising cane. I introduced
her to my dad as we walked in the door,
and she asked him, what is all that barking. He said,
that's my cold dog's barking. She asked him, well, what
kind of dogs are they? He said, they're running walkers.
She scrunched up her nose and said, running walkers. They
(15:58):
need to make up their minds went they're doing. He
laughed and loved her from that very moment. I had
never even thought about the paradox of that name until
she said that. Anyway, I was looking for a walker dog,
and for six months I made phone calls, I sent
texts and emails, and I scoured over the internet looking
(16:19):
for a dog that would suit me and what I
was after. And what I was after was simple. I
wanted a dog that would mind and tree coons. I
wasn't after a particular style of hound like. I didn't
care if he was a dog that drifted a track
or if he was a ground pounder or a combination
of both. I wanted to be able to turn him loose,
have him treat me a coon and come to me
(16:41):
when I called. I had no interest in competition hunting.
I got nothing against it, and I loosely follow it
due to so many of my friends that I know
and hunt with that do enjoy it. Now, there's a
strategy and skill in competition hunting, and the handler that
knows the rules best will win a competition even when
his dog may not be the best dog in the cast.
(17:02):
And that's cool. It involves the human element and the
bond that's created between a handler and a hound. The
handler has to know the tendencies and habits of that
dog inside and out to be able to listen to
him and tell what's going on just by the different
barks or tones of different barks, and make his call
to the judge based on his observations. There's a lot
(17:24):
of skill in that. Me. I ain't that good at it.
And me went in a competition hunt with whaling rests
squarely on his shoulders, not my brain. Michael Roseman, Rex
Whiting and I would hunt together and we'd use all
the rules of a competition hunt, and they'd keep a
running tally in their head of the time left in
the hunt and what everyone's score was. Heck, I couldn't
(17:46):
even keep up with my own, much less everyone else's.
It was fun, but it just wasn't my thing. If
it's your thing, you should see what Alan Gingrich and
Trevor Wade and all those folks over at United kennlel
cl Over doing. You'll find them online at Wwwukcdogs dot com.
(18:07):
Then just search up to coonhout events. They've got a
lot going on and there's always room for more participation,
and these folks will bend over backwards to help you.
So to get back to my journey, After six months
of looking, I found a dog that interested me. I
was scrolling through Facebook Marketplace and there was a picture
of a six month old tree in Walker puppy for
(18:28):
sale with an address that was forty five minutes from
my house for two hundred and fifty dollars. Something struck
me about the picture. I can't tell you what it
is to this day, but there was something about that
dog that called to me. Up to this point, I
had looked at well over one hundred pictures of dogs
on the Internet, and talked to a multitude of people
(18:51):
on the phone or through texting about a jillion dogs
that I never laid eyes on. But I had never
been drawn to going and looking at one till now.
I called the number, I talked to the lady and
made an appointment to go see the dog. The next day,
she informed me that the address on the Facebook ad
was wrong and that they had moved nearly three hours
(19:13):
away from me instead of the forty five minutes I
originally thought. Okay, I was still going to look. I
couldn't shake the image of that hound out of my head.
When I pulled up and saw him, I knew he
was the one that I'd be taking home. When I
found out his name was Whaling, it solidified it for me.
(19:34):
For half a year, I had fretted and worried about
finding a dog and having one reason or another not
to even commit to going and look anyone. Now, after
learning at the last minute that I'd be driving two
hours further away, I hadn't been deterred. Pulling up to
the address and seeing the dog in the subpar of
living conditions he was being housed in. I didn't really
(19:56):
know if I was going to be buying him or
rescuing him, but I knew I was leaving with him.
Come to find out, he was rescuing me. It was
Thursday in March twelfth of twenty twenty. I had made
(20:21):
it back to the outskirts a little rock when I
got a call from Alexis saying through her job, she'd
learned of a possible exposure to the COVID virus earlier
in the week. This was when all that started. They
were instructing her to go home and we had to
report our family's possible exposure to my employer in Bailey School.
(20:43):
Now Bailey was in the first grade. Alexis had called
the school and they said that we'd have to come
get Bailey and do that whole quarantine thing that was
just starting to get so popular. Then it was all
the rage and everyone was doing it. I would have
never thought that Bailey wouldn't get back to her class
that year. I also would never have thought a dog
(21:04):
could have meant so much to us in such a
short amount of time. Bailey was doing her classes online now,
so she was free to roam around with me and
our new hunting hound. So while elementary school was basically
out for Bailey, coon hunting school was in for her
and Whalen. The rest of that spring and summer was
(21:26):
spent taking that dog to the woods and turning him
loose and just seeing what he'd do. Bailey went with
me on a bunch of those trips. She like riding
the four wheeler and watching and learning what Whalen was
doing and asking a million questions. And I are while
unknowingly tried to burn the retinas out of my eyeballs
by shining her coon light in my face every time
she looked at me. I bought a metal diamond played
(21:50):
a dog crate for my truck that attracted the attention
of a guy that happened to be driving by one
time who stopped and introduced himself, And that was Rex,
who is now like a member of our family. He
introduced me to Michael Roseman, who is now like family
and who I'm going hunting with tonight, all because of
a dog. I've been to the ears of those boys
(22:13):
and several others in the training of old Whalen, and
they helped me beyond measure in the development of this
dog from coonhound to coon dog. And there's a difference,
a big difference. He was born a registered purebred coonhoun,
but he earned the title of coon dog by being one.
I took him religiously every opportunity that I had that
(22:35):
didn't interfere with anything related to my family. Alexis leaves
for work early, so she goes to bed early, and
I worked from home and I set my own hours.
Bailey goes to bed early, so when they hit the hay,
I usually hit the woods with this dog. The best
(22:58):
advice I ever got was from my dad, who passed
away twelve years ago, and I mentioned it earlier in
part one of my journey as a coon hunter, when
he said he could always tell which dog out of
a litter that was going to make the best because
it was the one that got hunted and messed with
the most. You can't take that literally, because some have
(23:19):
more natural abilities than others. He meant when all things
are equal. The pup that gets hunted will be better
than the ones that are still sitting in the pen.
And that's simple and straightforward. But his message was more hidden.
In order for that dog to get better, I had
to take him out and give him the opportunity. In
(23:40):
doing so, I was outside, and I was getting better.
My dad taught me a million things about trees and animals, hunting, fishing,
taking care of dogs, and the whole time he was
really teaching me how to take care of myself. I
just didn't know it. It worked the same way with
old whaling. All I really did was give that dog
(24:02):
the opportunity to make choices, both good and bad. When
I cut him loose, the good choices were praised and
the bad ones were corrected. The maturation of a hound
is very comparable to that of a person when you
think about it. A dog lives a week of their
life for every day of hours. Imagine if it was
(24:23):
the other way around, we wouldn't live long enough to
see how good a dog could be, or have the
opportunity to learn just as much or more from them
as they do from us. The core of my law
enforcement career was during my hiatus from owning a coup.
Now I saw more tragedy and ugliness during that time
(24:44):
of my life that I'd ever imagined one person could
I live with that? And dealing with those memories or
not dealing with them, has led me to where I
am now. I used to hunt alone a lot when
I first started out training Whaling. I'd go five nights
out of seven, slowly implementing what I desired for him
to do and corrected the things that I wanted him
(25:07):
to stop. I had a lot of sitting on a
log in the woods in the dark time, and while
I was watching Whalen's Tracker, I was thinking about stuff.
It allowed me moments to talk out loud with my
dad and talk to the Good Lord too. And my
journey as a coon hunter is still going on, just
(25:27):
like my journey and my faith as a husband and
a father, a brother, and a friend. That old dog
that a Lexus follows around the house with a vacuum
like she's hot on his trail has been an important
factor in helping me do all those things by making
me slow down and pay attention to what was going
on around him, so I could get a clear picture
(25:49):
in my head of what he was doing, and in
doing so, I started to pay attention and see what
was going on around me. That, as Barney Fife would say,
was very therapeutic. The rest of us would say therapeutic.
So that's your challenge this week. Find your whaling and
(26:11):
give yourself the opportunity to have that sitting on a
log in the woods in the dark time, whether you're
literally doing that or on your dinner break at the office.
If you're on your dinner break at the office, you're
probably gonna want to leave that coon dog at home.
I'm just saying, Hey, I hope y'all have enjoyed these
episodes about coon hunting and it ventures me and whaling
(26:32):
to wonder how and have had. I got a lot
more stories about him and chasing those river bottom bandidos
that I'll share later, but like I always say, that's
another story. Thank you so much for listening and sharing
our show with others. You folks are simply amazing, and
(26:53):
I appreciate you allowing me some time during your life
to talk about mine. It don't matter where you're from
or where you are, We're all alike. We can sit
down and have the noon meal and I can call
it dinner and you can call it lunch, but it's
still gonna taste the same. This is Brent Reeves signing off.
(27:14):
Y'all be careful.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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