Coon Hounds and Cottonmouths: A Southern Thrill
Good ole boy Myles Howard takes me on a wild adventure of a lifetime through the Mississippi backwoods, where coonhounds sing and cottonmouths crawl.
Fireflies and heat lightning illuminate the dark gravel road as the truck rolls to a stop beside one of the many sloughs that are scattered across this river bottom. We are not there long, when Joe Bones, a treeing Walker hound, lets out his lone bawl out across the slough. Myles Howard checks his Garmin GPS handheld to see just how far he is. Joe’s barking gets louder and more rhythmic as we sit there listening, trying to hear him through the bullfrogs and night bugs that have come to life in the dark.
“Have you always hunted with a GPS tracking system?” I ask him.
Myles’s fingers glide over the touch screen Garmin. “Naw,” he says. “When I first started coon hunting it was rough. We just listened to the dogs and tried to pick our way through the woods as best we could to get to ‘em. We just hoped and prayed we didn’t get lost or fall into the river.”
We take off through the thick woods that surround the slough, wild blackberry briars grabbing at my shirt as we make our way to Joe Bones. Two hundred yards deep and Myles shines his bright light up the tall cypress tree. His light is mounted on a hardhat with a battery pack on the back of it. The hardhat had seemed like an odd accessory when he’d jammed it on his head back at the truck, but he had explained that it protected him from running into limbs and the briars from getting stuck in his hair.
“There he is!” Myles says with a grin. I look up the tree and see two little eyes looking down on us. The raccoon’s signature ringtail is dangling off of the lowest limb. Joe hasn’t taken a breath yet, his howling echoes across the water, drowning out everything else around us.
Myles walks over to the hound, and Joe rears up and slings mud and murky water all over him, but he does not care, as he just pets ole Joe’s head.
I study Joe for a minute as Myles rubs behind his long ears. His paws are wide-set and webbed where he is braced against Myles’s thigh. He is muscular in his front shoulders and hindquarters with long legs to help him run quickly and expertly through the dark woods. When we had loaded Joe up into the dog box back at Myles’s house, I had asked him about his choice of hound.
He explained that he doesn’t really have a preferred breed of hound, but he does pay close attention for drive and heart and a hound that loves his job and will go the distance. He then stated proudly as he shut the dog box door, “Ole Joe here has it all, even at five years old.”
I realize as we start to make our way back to the truck, that we didn’t shoot the coon out of the tree. “Why didn’t you shoot the coon?” I ask him as we trudge through the soggy mud.
“Ole Joe here is coon crazy, that’s why I didn’t shoot the coon out to him.” He says as he checks his Garmin GPS handheld to be sure we are heading in the right direction of the truck.
I had to know what “coon crazy” meant. Myles claims it’s when a dog gets a lot of coons shot out to him, which is when the hunter kills the raccoon and the hound either fights the raccoon or bites at it after it falls from the tree, making the hound have a taste for blood. The hound will then start to tree on trees that he smells coon scent on, not really working the track and finding the right tree the coon went up.
Joe Bones pulls on the leash as if to tell Myles he is ready to go again. The love of the hunt radiates off both owner and hound as I walk behind them, taking in the midnight scene that has me wanting to know more about this sport called “Coon Hunting.”
We sit down on the tailgate, sipping another beer and trying to cool off from the southern heat suffocating us in these woods. “So, how old were you when you first started coon hunting?” I ask him.
“I was sixteen when I got my first coon hound. I had been with a friend of mine a few times before and my girlfriend, now wife, and her daddy. My buddy thought it was funny and gave me my first hound, an ugly Walker pup with a cherry in his eye. But jokes on him, cause Scout was one hell of a hound.”
Swatting a mosquito from my sweaty arm, I ask him about his wife and if she goes with him anymore. “Hell yeah. She would be here tonight but she’s eight months pregnant with our first boy and that don’t mix with this miserable heat.”
“Congratulations on the soon to be little coon hunter. Will you be passing the coon hunting tradition down to your little one? They say that coon hunting is a dying tradition, in what ways do you think this is true?” He gets up from the tailgate, grabbing some mosquito spray from the dog box and tossing it to me as he answers.
“Thanks. I plan on taking my son coon hunting as soon as he is able to go. I think that kids aren’t introduced to the outdoors as much as we were when we were kids. Cell phones and the internet has ‘em held up in their rooms. This factors in along with the timber that’s being cut every time you turn around. The amount of land with good timber we have to hunt is dwindling down at a high rate.”
We take a break from the questions and head up the road a little way to turn loose again. Joe takes off through the woods and it doesn’t take him long before he is on one as he lets out a short back to indicated he has “struck” a coon track. We ease back to the truck, but Myles stops me before I step on a turkey nest on the edge of the tall grass field that runs beside the slough. “Turkey eggs. This is why we hunt these bandits.”
We get back to the truck and I ask Myles about how coon hunting and conservation go together. He claims that the landowner of the place we are hunting has struggled for years with trying to build his turkey numbers back up. He approached Myles to bring his dogs and kill off some of the population where the raccoons were eating turkey eggs, chewing up his deer feeders, and they were even in his horse barn eating the horse feed and contaminating the hay.
As Joe Bones trails the coon deeper into the woods, I think of one last question for this seasoned coon hunter. “Alright, I have got to know, what are some dangers that lurk in the woods at night?” He laughs and then looks at me like “do you really want to know?”
“Well, if you had been paying attention back there at the first tree, you would have seen a cottonmouth that was coiled up at the bottom of the tree over from where Joe was treeing. That’s why I wear these thick snake chaps on my hip boots any time I am out here. Although rattlesnakes and copperheads are out here too, them damn cottonmouths are the meanest ones of all. There’s also stump holes, wasps, coyotes, and occasionally you’ll have people to worry about. But, if you don’t mess with them, they won’t mess with you.”
My head is still reeling from him saying I was just a few feet away from a cottonmouth snake. Joe’s howling is getting closer together, indicating he is almost treed again. He lets out a long bawl and Myles says, “You ready to see what he got?” I nod my head, but my heart is pounding a little more and my steps are a little higher as we inch our way through the tall grass and then across the slough.
When I shine my light up the tall oak tree, I see the coon looking back at me. I look at Joe and he is beautiful with his toenails dug into the bark of the tree and his head slung back with every bark. The scene that is all around me, helps me to understand the man that is standing beside his hound, looking for the coon they both know climbed in that tree.
I leave those deep woods in Mississippi with a better understanding of the coon hunter and the hunt itself as I saw how man and hound work together to practice conservation and have fun at the same time.
As I drive home, I roll my windows down and inhale the sweet southern air and think about the coon hunter as he rubs the old hound behind his ears, letting the ringtail go so they can all live to hunt again.
