Shedding light on opening night
1/24/2006 11:03:07 AM
"Shedding light on an opening night coon hunt"
By TYLER ARCHIE
WINDSOR, NC — Non-stop dog barking raises suspicion in city-types, and over an extended period, will grate on even the most relaxed country-types. But Brandon White wants his dogs to bark all night. You could say he enjoys the sound, his three coonhounds, Crank, Peanut and Timber howling in the distance.
Striding through anonymous moonlit woods towards the racket, White is calm, yet purposed, like a rock skipping over water.
Therein – in these woods on opening night of raccoon season, Oct. 17 – lies the mysterious appeal of hunting coon, a pastime enjoyed by many, but wholly embraced by just a few.
“Deer hunt in the day and coon hunt at night,” is the mantra of coon hunters in eastern North Carolina says Brandon Bryson, a wildlife officer with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. He adds, however, that the pursuit of big game inherently trumps the other: “People in eastern North Carolina deer hunt so much that it consumes all their time.
“But a lot of people want to do something in the evenings. It’s your only alternative for hunting at night,” he said.
Bryson calls Williamston home, but he used to hunt raccoon with a high school pal in the mountains of North Carolina where the sport enjoys greater popularity, in spite of the choppy terrain.
Since the price of pelts began to drop, though, the number of coon hunters across the whole state has dwindled. The demand for coon skin caps and faux fur coats is not, apparently, what it used to be. And as always the entry price to hunt raccoon, the cost of buying dogs and the time it takes to properly train a coon hound, can be prohibitive.
Ironically, open season on raccoons means little to White for that very reason. He has been running his dogs year round, he says, to keep them in shape and disciplined. The only difference is that tonight he has his .22 rifle in tow.
Less devoted coon hunters go through “spells,” he says, when the sport loses their attention for months that stretch into years. He has crisscrossed the countryside in his old Toyota pickup with hunting buddies since he could drive and before – a new copilot every few months.
Though he almost never tells funny stories or outright laughs, he says “all jokes aside” ever so often when making a point. For instance, his girlfriend had a spell where she would join him hunting, but not anymore. “All jokes aside, I’d hunt seven nights a week if it weren’t for my girlfriend,” he says in between cell phone calls to her and Gabe, a Chowan College student trailing behind in his truck. He has buddied up with White more and more often in the past few weeks, and leading up the season, Gabe is thinking about getting his own dog soon, he says.
Riding from a first failed effort to bag a coon to a second site, White directs Gabe to a parcel of land far off the grid. He just references old trees, ditches and no-name dirt roads to get there.
A GPS tracking device, the most accurate of which have a 10-yard margin of error, would serve White little purpose with his encyclopedic knowledge of the area. Having hunted these woods all his life, he never worries about losing his bearings. But if knowing the land means saving face – not having to wait out the night by a tree, lost – knowing who owns the land could save a night in jail.
Bryson, the game warden, says coon hunters should always know who owns the woods they walk. White goes to lengths to avoid trespassing.
Now on a tree farm, his three hounds bolt the truck box immediately, heading into the woods, already on a scent. Despite the full moon, which tends to make nocturnal animals more hesitant, White says the raccoons are out moving around tonight as he listens to Timber – his almost two year-old hound in training – bark in the distance. Timber’s barking is random, but Crank and Peanut vary their yips and yaps based on the hunt’s progress. White filters the second language, and at the same time he carries on with Gabe, who thinks he may have found a hunting hound in the classifieds.
“A year-old, already broken for $1,200,” he reports. “There ain’t no such thing as a broken one year-old,” says White.
White paid $2,000 for Crank, a Treeing Walker and the paterfamilias of his run, and he says finding a broken, or read-trained, one year-old hound is a fools hope. And comparing Gabe’s quoted price to the amount of schooling it would take to train a hound before its first birthday, he says there has to be a catch:
“I’d look into that,” he says. Other breeds, Red Bones and Blue Ticks will hunt, sure, but the Treeing Walker is preferred. It is a “throaty” looking dog with a fold of skin that can hang from its neck. But for its terrier-like eyes, the Treeing Walker looks like any other hound with its long muzzle and prominent nostrils.
The breed, which gets its name from an 18th century strain of Virginia hound imported by Thomas Walker to Virginia, has been forever influenced by cross-breeding that took place with a stolen hunting dog from Tennessee. According to the United Kennel Club (UKC) the dog, named Tennessee Lead “didn’t look like the Virginia strain of English Foxhounds of that day. But he had an exceptional amount of game sense, plenty of drive and speed and a clear, short mouth.” (AKC Note: The name of the Walker hound is credited to the family by the same name that developed the forerunner of today's "Treeing" Walker from domestic and imported foxhound stock in their native state of Kentucky.)
Each of White’s dogs has a distinct voice that changes to a clear chop at the base of a raccoon’s tree. Crank is easiest to distinguish for his deeper bark, which has just now increased in frequency where Crank sounds to have stopped moving.
That dog in particular will have to be forcibly removed from the base of the raccoon’s tree. White says Crank has spent five hours at one tree, never stopping or slowing his bark. The dogs wear tracking collars just in case they get out of earshot.
“That’s too much money to have running around in the woods not to,” says White, as he pushes through underbrush, the barking getting louder – now only half a mile away.
White suspects the raccoon will have treed on the edge of a field bordering these woods, and we find his hounds where he approximated. There is movement in the top of the tree.
(Continued. See “Part Two” in the Raccoon Tales section.)
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