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.