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"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 coon hunting 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 long johns, 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. The coons stay in the tree until we're gone and
then go back to making the nights more interesting.
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column]
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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 an 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. If 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.
[Slim Randles]
Brought to you by "Raven's Prey," a thriller
of the far North. Available at
www.slimrandles.com.
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