"There she is," Melinda said.
A second hound, almost exactly like the first but with subtle differences that were apparent when both tongued at the same time, began to sing. Raw Stanfield promptly swallowed his chew. Butt Johnson and Mun were momentarily too shocked to move.
Harky gasped. There was witchery present that had nothing to do with Duckfoot. Raw didn't know his own hound when he heard it, but Melinda did. Then Harky put the entire affair in its proper perspective. What else could you expect when you brought a girl on a coon hunt? Raw was just so shook up that he might be pardoned for failing to recognize Queenie even if he saw her.
"Le's git huntin'," Raw muttered.
Guiding himself by the blended voices of Queenie and Glory rising into the night air, and seeming to hover at treetop level for a moment before they faded, Harky began to run. The cold air whipped his face. The night whispered of all the marvels that have been since the beginning of time and will be until the end. For a moment, he even forgot Melinda.
This, he thought, was what coon hunting really meant. Listening to the hounds and trying to keep pace; knowing that somewhere far ahead, swift and silent-running Thunder was also on the coon's trail; drawing mental pictures of the coon and his scurry to be away; Thunder bursting upon and surprising the coon, who'd be listening to the tonguing hounds; the chorus as all hounds gathered at the tree. Harky laughed out loud.
Now he knew what a running deer knew, he told himself, and almost instantly the swiftest deer seemed unbearably slow. He was the wind itself, and he exulted in the notion that the other plodding humans, who would surely be running, would just as surely be far behind. They hadn't had his experience in running away from Mun.
Glory and Queenie, who seemed to run at the same pace even as they tongued in almost the same pitch, drew farther ahead but remained well within hearing. Harky frowned thoughtfully as he sped through the night. The way that coon was running, and the way the dogs became quiet at intervals, as though they'd been thrown off the scent, he had a feeling that they were on Old Joe himself.