Dog Days Publishing

                     The Sound of the Hounds

As the hunter continued to talk Judy and J.B. topped the ridge giving much more mouth than needed. The old-timer exclaimed, “Boys, here come those fox dogs now! Pushing that fox like they are doing it will either hole up or they’ll catch it, and right quick like.”

The hounds ran within a few hundred yards of where we stood and without a locate of any kind began to tree in their blow-down style. The hard treeing hounds quickly brought  smile to my face as I stated, “Well, there’s J. B. and Judy.”

The old-timer replied, “I thought they were fox dogs. I didn’t know a coon dog could run a track like that. Mind if I walk to the tree with you? I’d like to take a gaze at those hounds.”



              The Thrill of the Chase

The lone hunter reminisced of past hunts as a peaceful calm settled over the hills and hollows below the high mountain ridge where he sat waiting on a strike from his hounds. He had hunted “Chestnut Knob” many nights in the past and treed an untold amount of raccoon there, and hoped the tradition would continue well into the future. Back in his younger years, and with a different class of hound, he had on more nights than one listened to the hounds run a deer through the hollows and over the mountains out of hearing range. As the past hunts returned to his memory he thought, “That is all part of the game - some good hunts and some not so good.”

Recollections of great hounds and the not so great ones he had hunted on “The Knob” returned to his mind. He thought about “Rider” the powerful young Redbone that was one of the outstanding tree dogs of his time. Oh, what a tree dog he had been! Rider could, and would, earn the respect of any admirer of tree dogs. Rider had treed a truck load of coons on and around the surrounding mountains.