"There!" he heard himself saying. "Let that teach you that girls ought never horn in on coon hunts!"
Harky breathed a doleful sigh. Delightful as this mental image was, in no way did it erase the fact that a girl had horned in on a coon hunt. Harky sought solace by tearing his thoughts away from Melinda and fastening them on something pleasant. He considered the four hounds.
Queenie was a slow and methodical worker who'd never been known to lose a trail she started. Of course they did not get every coon Queenie started; some went to earth in rock-bound burrows and some escaped by devious means. Queenie, who tongued on a trail, was one of the few hounds who'd followed Old Joe to his magic sycamore.
Glory, as yet untried, might and might not adopt her mother's hunting style. Duckfoot—neither Harky nor anyone else had any reason to believe that he'd already tracked Old Joe to his sycamore—was another unknown quantity insofar as his own special way of hunting was concerned. But Harky had no doubt that, after adequate training, Duckfoot would shine, and Glory would do well enough.
Thunder, next to Precious Sue the best coon hound ever to run the Creeping Hills, couldn't be doubted. Big, long-legged, and powerful, Thunder was another hound who'd distinguished himself by tracking Old Joe to the big sycamore. A silent trailer but a tree barker who did credit to his name, Thunder was so fast that he often caught coons on the ground. With six years of hunting experience behind him, he was probably the best of the four hounds on this current hunt.
They were, Harky thought, a pack fit to run in any company. With Thunder to run ahead and jump the coon, Queenie to work out the trail at her own pace and at regular intervals to announce the direction Thunder had gone, and quality pups like Duckfoot and Glory, any coon they struck tonight, with the probable exception of Old Joe, would find his stretched pelt on the barn door tomorrow. Maybe even Old Joe would have a hard time with this pack.
Thinking of coons, Harky was pleasantly diverted for a few minutes more.
Creatures of the season, coons availed themselves of the most of the best of whatever was handy. When they emerged from their dens at winter's end, they liked to fill empty stomachs with buds and tender grass and flower shoots. As the season advanced, coons conformed. They never spurned vegetation if it was to their liking, but as soon as the spring freshet subsided, they did a great deal of fishing and frog, crawfish, and mussel hunting. When gardens started to bear, the coons varied their diet with green vegetables. As they ripened, both wild and domestic fruits received the attention of properly brought up coons. They were always ready to raid poultry.
At this time of year, with frogs already gone into hibernation, fish inclined to linger in deep pools where even Old Joe couldn't catch them, the crawfish and mussel crop well picked over, and vegetation withered, coons concentrated on fields of shocked corn, such fruit as might cling to branches, and beech and oak groves, where they foraged for fallen beechnuts and acorns.
It was to a beech grove that Raw Stanfield led them.