Hound Dogs: A photo essay

This is my second photo essay (I'm not certain how many of these I'll do, but my family has plenty pictures of the hounds) and dogs comprise a number of my childhood memories so here we go.

WARNING: Some of these photos have raccoon hides prominently displayed. These dogs are made for hunting what do you expect. Plus children with guns, we learned responsibility early on in our life.

This is me and my first dog Curly Tail. She isn't a coon hound, but I'll get into that at a later date.

Seems like most folk have read or heard of Where the Red Fern Grows. In a way my brothers and I grew up in that world, Jake and Abe gravitated to hunting a bit more than myself, I'm just not as outdoorsy as them I guess. We grew up with puppies and dogs and learned how to train them and work them and take care of them. Puppies and dogs are fun for little kids, but we learned quickly that the dogs we kept were there for a reason.

Here is a generic hound dog as it would appear outside my Grandparents house. There were usually at least four or five at any one time. Dad never really had coon hounds, we always had a lot of dogs at our place, but like Curly Tail those dogs will wait for another photo essay.

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This is me and Freckles, who looks like a Plot hound pup, sitting on grandma and grandpa's back porch.

There are a lot of different types of coonhounds we had over the years, Plots were probably the breed we had the least amount of. Mainly it was blueticks or black and tans (which were really leopard curs, but that's hard to explain, and irrelevant). And the only real hunting the dogs were used for was coon hunting.

Abe and a batch of pups, though I'm not certain which litter this is. They are of the line of Bob though.

Bob was one of our grandpa's best dogs and grandpa bred him a couple times. Bob was called Bob because he had a naturally nub tail. And I think my older brother has had pups that are three generations beyond him and the bob tail still shows up in a couple pups. And they're still really good dogs.

Here's another litter of pups with my brothers. Note the little guy in the foreground with the short tail, These are Bob's grand-kids.

I'll be generous and say Jake is fourteen (he looks younger) with the .22 here. And that looks like a possum the hound is sniffing at. Possums are vile little creatures, we did the forest a favor removing it from the ecosystem.

We hunted and killed things, that how it works, and if you don't like it tough. Granted the possum above didn't serve as anything other than target practice, which could have been accomplished in other ways. Did I mention possums are nasty little bags of mean though.

These walls are after two separate hunting seasons. Abe in front of the one and Jake and Dewey in front of the other. Dewey was our grandpa's close friend and hunting partner. Those are some blueticks they've got there.

The hides on the wall aren't trophies, they're money. Coon season takes place in the winter, after the momma coons have cut loose their young ones. They typically move at night so you hunt at night, it ain't an easy time trudging around the woods following your dogs on cold winter nights. It's done for a reason. Grandpa was a farmer. Not a lot of money comes in on a farm in late winter and so you find other ways to earn some cash. A typical coon season they'd wind up with a hundred hides or a few more. And when you'd sell them they'd average twelve bucks or so. That's over a thousand dollars that Grandpa and his pal Dewey relied on year after year.

Here is Jake and a few of his dogs taken over a decade after the previous picture. That black one on the right is Ace, he's got a long tail, but he's still got a lot of Bob in him.

My older brother still hunts and works his hounds. He hunts year round, but only shoots the coons out during the season. He enjoys training the dogs and seeing a hound progress. The money from the pelts is nice as well. I could claim it's a heritage thing and that he's keeping this old way of life going in these modern times and all that bullshit, but it's better to just say the truth. Hearing a dog you've trained catch coon's scent and bellow as he tracks it through the timber is rewarding and walking up on it as it barks up a tree is one of the purest forms of teamwork between you and the dog.

For me personally it's cold in the Missouri woods in January, which is why I never cared for it all that much.  But I'll defend the reasoning.  If you've never hunted you probably just don't get it, but trust me it's rewarding.

Line 'O the day - June 15, 2008

I’m reminded of something I myself said an age ago. But what is important now, what I said or the memory of it?

Abe can't let go. One of the funniest things ever.

For most folk this would be a horrific story about the time their little brother damn near broke his back. That is not how it played out in front of my twelve year old eyes. Every escalation that occurs in this story only made it funnier to me. For the briefest moment I was kinda scared for Abe's life, but only briefly. First a picture, taken a few minutes after the story. I show it first so that you can get a feel for the players involved, save Grandma, who took the photograph.

So we're all pulling stoic faces here like we're in a god damned tintype. The big fella in the cowboy hat is Dennis, my old man's friend. Then his son David, who is not dressed for hauling hay. Then Jake, me and Abe in descending order. And the old man, note his and Abe's faces.  Abe is frazzled, and I get a hint of relief in Dad's expression.

Look at the photo again, see the hay wagon and the layers of bales that rise out of frame. The top of that stack is where our story starts.

So we loaded the wagon, this was later in the afternoon and I think it was the last load of the day. Now to get to where we unloaded the hay we had to drive between these two sheds which had a low hanging electric cable strung between them. We had taken the tractor and wagon through here a number of times and it required someone on the stack to lift the power line up and over and guide it back until the wagon was passed (it didn't have juice running through it or the rubber on the tires kept us from grounding, I don't know). I had previously done this without fail, and on this last time also handled the task. This time though Abe had ridden in from the field with me on top of the stack. And as we approached the wire everything seemed fine.

The tractor was inching along as the wire reached the stack and I reach down and pulled it up above the first row. Now then the tricky part here (I say this for Abe's sake) is to step over the wire as it skids along the top row of bales. I do this easily, as I've already done it before, Abe on the other hand latches onto the thick cable. Again the tractor is moving very slowly so he's got time, with about ten or twelve feet to go before he gets swept off the back of the stack, but he won't let go of the wire. I'm yelling at him, from the ground Dad is yelling at him to just let go, but he couldn't. He did attempt to step over once or twice, but the movement of the wagon and the wire and everything must have been too much for Abe. Look at the picture again, look how old he was; he's a little kid and for whatever reason he got scared in that moment. I can't fault him for freezing up and just hanging on.

But hanging on meant he was about to get yanked off the back of that wagon. Perhaps I froze too, as I didn't reach him before we completely passed under the wire and he slid off. What happened in the next thirty seconds comprise one of the most vivid memories in my little pea brain. He slid off, but he didn't come free of the wire instantly, he bobbed twice. He was about right in the middle of the span and it had some spring to it. He sank then sprang up and sank again. When the cable tried to pull him up a third time he lost his grip and fell. We'll say it was ten, at best twelve feet to the ground, but again he is tiny. That's a helluva fall for a seven year old.

We're in an old barn lot and the ground is pretty much just dirt, there are rocks here and there, but luckily where he lands is just solid earth. Abe fell for what seemed like minutes to me as I watched from the hay stack. And he landed flat on his back, sorta spread eagle in the dirt. This is bad, right? It was all kinda funny to me up until he hit the dirt. It was odd that he wouldn't let go of the wire, he looked funny getting drug along the top of the stack, and then it was funnier watching him flail as he bobbed up and down in the air. When he hit the ground though it was hard, and it looked bad, and for an instant I was scared shitless he was really hurt. Then he moved.

He raised his head, which is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. He's flat out spread eagle and completely motionless and then his head tilted up, just his neck his shoulders still firmly on the ground, and seemingly expels every ounce of air in his little lungs in one long exhalation. In that moment he was a Loony Tunes character, he was the coyote falling off the cliff. Just the look on his face and that forced exaggerated breath puts a smile on my face every time I think of it (I'm a dick of a brother I know this). All he needed to complete the scene would have been for his feeble little hand to raise one of those wooden signs with OUCH! painted on it.

But he didn't raise a sign, he just lay there in the dirt, motionless. Dad stood him up, which Abe managed rather well, and proceeded to check him over. Abe could stand, he was fully aware of everything, and besides his eyes being the size of saucers seemed to be in working order. Something wasn't right though as a long moment stretched with the old man kneeling in front of his littlest. Abe seemed incapable of drawing a breath. His little feet began to shuffle in place as he tried to gasp for air, but his lungs wouldn't work. Simply put he couldn't breathe. As a parent in this situation you want your kid to start breathing again, so Dad shook him a little and gives him a couple good swats to the back. Sorta knock the wind back into him.

Now this is where Grandma comes into it. I'll be honest I was climbing down off the hay stack when she reached the situation, but as I came around the side of the wagon she had slid in front of Abe and was coaxing him to restart his lungs by grabbing him by the shoulders and yelling 'BREATHE' into his face.  It's her youngest grandchild she was rather concerned, but it was funny to see.

Finally he sucked in a huge gulp of air and began to breathe regularly after a second. The fact that he couldn't breathe does seem alarming in hindsight, but the scene was funny. The adults yelling at him, his failed attempts to do something so basic, and the whole while he looked in perfect working order. I was twelve, he didn't look in pain so I figured he was fine, obviously there are innumerable things that could have been wrong, but I didn't know those things at the time. In the end he was fine, and as soon as we got home we relayed the story to Mom, my version considerably lighter than Abe's and Dad's.

Line 'O the day - June 4, 2008 #2

Can’t decide if my thoughts on Regina Spektor are day dreams or pipe dreams; what’s it matter either way.

Line 'O the day - June 4, 2008 #1

I’m a little sad, but it’s a welcome feeling. It’d be hard for you to understand.

Line 'O the day - May 30, 2008

It all might be false hope and pipe dreams, but ain’t nothing else going so what the hell.

Line 'O the day - May 28, 2008

The sun may shine and the stars may twinkle, but you’ll never notice unless you keep your head up.

Line 'O the day - May 15, 2008

I’m not a fan of the current trend, and here’s why. By the time it’s current it’s far too old to be interesting.


Present day note:
I am most definitely not some cutting edge hipster. I sorta like to cherry pick what I like from the past. That includes my vocabulary, since most people think I talk line I'm from the fifties.