V. Cannon
UKC Forum Member
Registered: Sep 2006
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Posts: 903 |
I starting hunting when I was six years old following my daddy or brothers but we wasn’t sport hunters like you see today, daddy was a resident cowboy on a old time type cattle ranch where everything was done horseback, no electricity, no running water and no access other then by horse back during the winter but a pickup could make it in there during the summer.
It was like living in heaven to any kid that wanted to hunt and hunting or cowboying was all I wanted to do, it was dam hard to steer me away from doing what I liked doing.
I had six brothers and sisters and daddy made 75.00 a month so any hunting we did was for meat for the table or hides to be sold once a year. There wasn’t any dog food to be bought or money to buy dog food so if we fed a dog we had to cook their food which was usually ground corn with some kind of meat, usually it was whatever was killed with the dogs. We didn’t keep sorry dogs or pets, if a dog wasn’t earning his way he wasn’t around long.
The first dogs that was good enough to make a impression on me of being something special was a Black and Tan male named lead. Lead was a good solid dog but even as a kid I knew lead was slow on track but Lead was honest and a good treedog.
Spot was a different deal. Spot was a half running walker and half redbone. Spot was gave to us when he was about 2 months old, at the time we had a pet deer, the deer pawed him on the head and skinned his ear up enough that screw worms got in there but we couldn’t catch him to doctor him so the screw worms ate his ear off so needless to say spot was a red spotted one eared hound.
Spot treed his first possum when he was about 3.5 months old and by the time he was 10 months old he was already the best coondog at night that I had hunted with but during the day he would tree squirrels like a cur dog is supposed to but seldom do.
When spot was about 14 months old he started treeing gray fox during the day while he followed us horseback and a 15 minute fox race was unusual, daddy would usually time him and about 7 or 8 minutes was all a fox could handle before he would climb.
Spot followed us during the day while we was horseback spot was treeing squirrel and fox but during the night was where he really shined, it was treeing Coon, during winter when dogs would have to either run a coon or trail one for any distance spot would be treed for several minutes before the other dogs could trail into his tree.
Unfortunately spot was killed by a deer hunter by accident while he was a young dog. The deer hunter knew us and knew the dog, he came to our home and told us what he had accidentally done then went back to where he killed him to help bury him.
After seeing spot doing the things he did I took for granted that he was the norm for dogs so it didn’t seem like we could find a suitable replacement for Spot but a Bear hunter from Oregon moved in this country and brought his bear dogs with him and wanted to hunt with daddy some.
I should tell everyone that when daddy went hunting at night there wasn’t any part of the night left when he would make it back home, daddy would always hunt all night and then try the kill a mess of squirrels while walking back toward home. If you couldn’t handle that kind of hunt you wouldn’t make many trips following him.
After a few hunts the bear hunter gave daddy a pup, not only was she a pretty pup but she was a registered bluetick. We named her Bandit.
Bandit was around 8 months old going into the first winter and by the end of the winter she was showing us that she was going to be special, I still remember her tree style and her roaring bawl mouth.
Bandit wasn’t the kind of dog that Spot was, she couldn’t tree a fox, she quit treeing squirrels, all she wanted to do was tree Coon.
Sometimes the wind would get high while she was running and we would lose her, on those times we would usually be in the area horseback the next day and kill her Coon to her, if not we would walk back to kill it when it got dark then hunt from there.
After we hunted bandit for three years the loss of Spot wasn’t so hard to take then my Moma got sick. Daddy sold bandit for 100.00 which was more money then I had ever seen. The money was for Moma’s doctor bill.
I’ll still looking for another Bandit.
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