[The Wolf Chase.]
WE BELIEVE it was in the year 1841, the wolves were killing my Father’s pigs more than usual, and he went to the men who kept hounds and got them to come early in the morning, and they brought about twenty-five dogs and they soon started a wolf, and it circled a little, then started north, and about fifteen men and twenty-five dogs after it, and it went north nearly to the knobs timber, then turned northwest to near where Assumption now stands, and then turned south to near to where Rosemond now stands, and they caught it just south of Rosemond, and about half of the men and all the dogs but eight had dropped out when they caught it at sun-down; and they said they run it about thirty-five miles, then they had to go about twenty miles to home, in the night; but two men went south to hunt up the Sarver’s and Fraley’s to come with fresh hounds and try for the other one, and they were there at daylight, and my Mother had got breakfast for them, and I remember hearing Uncle John Sarver say: “Boys, I can get on old Nance and take my two oldest dogs “Sam Houston” and “Davy Crockett” and I can catch any wolf on the earth, but I want from sun-up till sun-down to do it, for it takes a hard run for thirty or thirty-five miles, but we’ll get him.” My Father had found where their den was in a mound on the prairie about a mile east of our house; and they soon jumped the other wolf and took nearly the same route as the one did the day before, but when it got around the head of Beck’s creek timber it turned south and they caught it just at night in a lake just west of where Oconee now stands. They had tied all the dogs that had run the day before but John Hall’s “old Rule”, a long-legged spotted dog, that led the chase all day the day before, broke his rope and went in the lead all that day. Now the young wolves was a little larger than a rabbit. The next morning all the men and all the dogs in the settlement, and a number of women was there, and during the day they caught seven young wolves; they didn’t run very far; and John Hall and John Sarver said they could take “old Rule” and “Sam Houston” and they could catch the Devil.
[The Coon.]
WE sometimes hear men joke about the proverbial “coon skin” of early days, but it was no joke in our boyhood, we had to have the Raccoon in our business. If the coon crop had failed we would have had a coon skin panic, which would have swept all over the country. But the coon had one bad habit, he liked roasting-ears a little too well; but his diet in the spring and summer was frogs and crawfish and bugs, and in the fall and winter it was acorns and hackberries and corn. And if a dog was not a coon dog he was no dog at all; and an old experienced coon dog could tell better when it was a good night for coons to travel than a boy could; he would come to the door and whine and howl, then the boys would gather their ax and away into the woods, and soon “old Pomp” was gone, then they would sit down on a log and listen and after awhile away up the branch “y-o-w”, “y-o-w”; and when the boys would get there, whether the tree was big or little it had to come down, or one of the boys would climb up and scare his coonship out. The coon was a bad fighter, and could whip a dog very quickly, unless the dog understood how to kill them; but when we saw a dog take a “running shoot” at a coon and strike it with his breast and knock it down, then grab it through the ribs, and hold it to the ground very tightly, we knew that dog was “onto his job”, for he would kill it pretty quickly.