Week's Hunting Part III

[Mosby 355]

Part III

Today was the last day of coon season and it had to go out with a bang! Tanner gave his boss the what for and took the day off work. He showed up at my place around 7:30 a.m. and it was pissing rain outside. I was eating pancakes and ready to be lazy watching sitcoms with my blanky and lady friend. Hell no! I've got cabin fever and as much as I love my girl I was out of there. I threw on my dirty grubs, full of microscopic blackberry thorns that give me no peace, some wool socks not worth calling socks anymore and some Romeos that can't keep the elements out for the $75 dollars I paid for them. I was set and I would love to say the dogs were too. I got to the dogs spaces and they were all huddled in the hay faces covered in Nu-Stock. Magua looks like a Gremlin fed after midnight and breaths like a pug but that old b*****d will hunt till he dies. I grabbed him and left the young dogs to heal. I didn't like that they got so much action the other day for how young they are.

We had the box full of the Usefuls... Bob, Tipper and Magua. We commenced our journey and headed near to town. A produce market closed for the season which regularly holds nutria, occasionally coon and on epic worthy days fox; this was our destination.

We went straight about checking all the fox earths and found some new ones... nothing in. We explored around and pretty much wasted time collecting water from the rain like diapers collect pee, making everything involved miserable.

The dogs eventually winded and set to tracking. The race was on and hot. The dogs tracked for a few hundred yards pushing through the blackberries, willows and cow parsnip until the coon headed up into an old snag. Magua was treeing his little brains out and I love him for it, but the little weasel will shut up as soon as he knows you're coming to shoot the coon out. Sometimes this makes it very difficult to find the tree a coon has gone up. I think he does it so the coon will come down to his waiting jaws. We got to within ten yards of the raccoon and two of the dogs had left the tree. (I hate that!) Magua was silent and had me worried that he had left as well. The coon started moving down the tree fast. This coon had no tail due to fighting other raccoons. He looked a tough old fart with muscles a-rippling. I thought we’d have another race on our hands because the dogs had left it. Come to find out, a dog was right there waiting for it and the fight was on. They rolled over a bank toward the river. Tanner has lost two dogs to drowning in the past few years and he flipped. He bailed over the edge like a maniac. The tussle had made it to the river and Tanner readily jumped in to grab the ball of fun. The coon gave him a good scratching but in the end he dominated and brought the game to shore for dispatch.

We decided to move on and started putting the dogs in the box but Magua had other thoughts. We soon heard him treeing in the distance. A scan of the trees revealed a coon and we made our way around a water filled rock quarry, over a small slope to the stand of trees Magua was located. Meanwhile, Tipper and Bob decided to start another track. Magua got distracted and left his tree. Dang, Dang, Dang! I was getting super pissed about the dogs leaving trees. I called Tipper back and shot the coon over her hoping this would teach her something about coons going up trees.

I’d had enough of the place as coon were popping up everywhere and the dogs wouldn’t stay focused on one track so we loaded up the dogs and counted that we had seen a total of eight raccoons in the area. The dogs only truly located two so we left the rest.

We drove to one of my older hunting spots that I canoe hunted often as a kid. This was an action packed spot. Magua was on fire. He caught one coon after another on the ground. We were busting brush like a couple of pros. We might as well have been on a fire crew cutting lines. Old Bob felt left out in the action and started making some locates. He started several tracks and intercepted a coon that Tipper was pushing. My memory fails me but the gang snuffed out a possum’s candle. We walked a half mile of brush and the dogs all struck a track and moved it hard.

We were at the end of our permission and we worried the dogs would take it into a local park. But the track slowed down where someone had bulldozed cars and trucks from over the years. Tanner stood on top of an old buried truck and misplaced his foot. He, quick as greased lightning, slid off the truck into a drop off and landed badly between a couple of the buried cars. I offered him a hand but he wished only to sit and recuperate. During this time the dogs were trying but failing to locate. Tanner climbed out of his hole and we called the dogs.

We walked back toward the truck and noticed Magua was not following the leader. I joked that Magua was pulling out his secret pack of hunting tools to locate the game. I imagined him pulling welding goggles over his eyes and going at a crumpled car with a torch. He must have done something similar because we soon heard him sounding. It was very muffled but we went back to where we last saw him. We climbed down several layers of automobiles and saw what looked like a sette. It was a buried car with a dug entrance into its interior. Magua was meshed up inside some archaic piece of machinery, obviously having dominated his opponent. We sent Tipper in to draw. She had to tug for a good many minutes but loosed the quarry; a possum of all things. They sure are some stinky b*****ds.

On the way back Old Booby must have decided he was gonna steal the show with some more performances like the last. He located two more possums in holes at the bottom of trees. Our dogs smelled to high heaven. The stink literally took my breath away.

We were greedy and tried to get more out of the dogs but they had enough. I had enough. Tanner had enough. We were soaking wet, hungry and tired. So the season ends. Total for the day 6 coons caught by the dogs, many more left and 4 opossums.

[LolaPat 49]

Just read part 1 2 and 3 and they were all a very good read, sounded a great week and glad you and your dogs enjoyed yourselfs!

[alan626 305]

sounds a great day but were ur hunting sounds danger

[liamdelaney 2,585]

Good hunting Mosby. I see by one of your dogs names you have watched The Last Of The Mohicans.lol

[patterdale666 1,620]

Great Read

[Mosby 355]

Hell Yeah Liam