At the time of which I write we lived in Warren County, ten miles below Vicksburg, where our father owned an extensive plantation. He cultivated one thousand acres of cotton and six hundred acres of corn. He owned one hundred and fifty working mules and horses, twice as many young cattle, which ran loose in the swamp, and about twenty-five hundred hogs. It required from sixty to seventy-five cows to supply the plantation with milk and butter, and almost as many dogs to protect the stock from the wild beasts.
Just think of that! Think what music this pack must have made when in pursuit of a bear or deer, and imagine, if you can, the delightful concerts to which we listened on bright moonlight nights!
Perhaps you will wonder if we needed all these dogs. We should have been sorry to part with them, for they were as necessary to our existence as our horses, cows or mules.
Warren County at that time was almost a wilderness. Wolves, foxes and minks were numerous, and our henroosts would have been cleared in a single night, if the dogs had not been there to protect them. Wild-cats were abundant, and panthers were so often met with, that traveling after dark was seldom undertaken for pleasure. Bears, however, were the principal pests. They were, to quote from the settlers, “as plenty as blackberries,” and employed their leisure time during the night in roaming about the plantations, picking up every luckless hog and calf that happened to fall in their way.
I must not forget to say that our fellows had nothing to do with all these plantation dogs. The most of them belonged to father, a few to the overseer, and the rest to the servants.
Our pack numbered only five dogs. Mark was the happy possessor of Rock and Dash, two splendid deer-hounds, which, for size, speed, endurance and courage, were unequaled in all that country except by Sandy’s Sharp and Music. These four hounds were animals worth having. They could run all day, and when they once started on a trail, they never left it until the game, whatever it was, had been killed, or they were called away.
I laid claim to Zip. He was what we boys called a “bench-legged catch-dog”—that is, his fore legs stood wide apart and curved outward, like those of a bulldog, and he was used for catching and holding game.
He was yellow all over except his head, which was as black as jet. His nose and ears were as sharp as those of a wolf, and he was bobtailed.
Zip was unlike any other dog I ever saw. There were a good many queer things about him, and he had at least one peculiarity that every body noticed. He never wagged his tail sideways, as other dogs do, but up and down, and he never wagged it at all except when following a warm trail.
There were five of us boys—Duke Hampton, his cousin, Herbert Dickson, Sandy, Mark and myself. We were near neighbors—that is, we lived about a mile and a half apart—and we were together almost all the time. We always spoke of one another as “our fellows,” and we had finally come to be known by that name all over the country. Sandy merits a short description.