Coon Hunting

The only times I remember my Dad carrying the .22 caliber rifle were a couple times that he took me coon hunting; he used it for shooting the raccoon out of the tree after the dogs had treed the coon.  I think I remember him shooting at a coon one time I was with him, but I don’t think he got it.  I was much older and off to college when he got Franklin, a coon hound, so I never got to do much coon hunting with him.  My Dad used to hunt coons with his friend Bill Edwards.  When coon hunting, you should have a coon hound; and you walk around the woods at night until the coon hounds get the sniff of a coon. Then, the coon hounds trail the coon with their noses until the coon runs up a tree to get away from the dogs.  Here again, it is a pleasant time standing in the woods at night listening to the dogs bark while they are trailing the coon and when they have it treed.  The dogs have a different bark or howl for each of these two phases of the pursuit.  Once the dogs have the coon treed, you follow sound of the dogs barking through the darkness of the woods at night until you get to the tree.  Then, you use a spotlight to try to find the coon in the tree, and shoot it.  It is sometimes not easy to see the coon in the tree.

Years later, in our five acre country lot, we put out a bird feeder in the Crab Apple tree behind the deck on the back of the house; we could watch birds from either the kitchen window or while sitting on the deck.  This bird feeder attracted a lot of raccoon as well as the birds.  Our Chow dog Leo, who for a while we kept on a long chain outside the garage attached to our house, once treed two young coons in the Honey Locust tree near the garage.  I guess the coons by chance came too close to Leo, and he chased them up the tree.  They sat up in the tree for about three days with Leo sitting at the base of the tree.  Leo must have fallen asleep one time because one day the coons disappeared – maybe they left out of desperation.

I suspended the bird feeder on a three foot long, thin nylon rope from a tree limb to keep out the raccoon; the bird feeder was about five feet above the ground.  My idea was that the coons would not be able to reach the bird feeder from the limb along this long, thin rope.  One night, I heard a large racket outside.  I got up from bed and turned on the light over the deck, and saw a very large raccoon eating from the bird feeder.  This large coon was holding onto the limb with his back paws; its body and front and back legs were fully stretched downward; and it was eating from the bird feeder using its front paws.  When I turned on the light, the coon very deliberately began to pull himself back up onto the limb.  He moved as if he was not really concerned about me, but I think he may have been moving as fast as he could from his stretched out position.  If I had a gun and the inclination, I could have shot at him five times while he was thus retreating.

Another time on the summer night, we had a banana sitting on the counter in the kitchen with the kitchen window open.  There was a screen on the window, but the screen was not fastened tightly against the window frame.  The next morning the banana was gone.  Apparently, a coon had squeezed in between the screen and the window frame and taken the banana.  We knew that the coon had been there because there were short black hairs on the counter.

So, I decided to try my hand at trapping coons.  I bought a medium-sized varmint cage trap at the local Farm & Fleet store.  The trap is a steel-wire cage with a loaded door so that when the varmint steps on the trigger plate on the floor of the cage the door drops shut trapping the varmint inside.  I bated the cage with an apple and set it out in the yard between the garage and the crab apple tree.   On five consecutive nights, I caught a raccoon.  When it is trapped in the cage, the coon uses its paws to make a soft bed for itself dragging in the nearby grass from around into the cage.  Each morning, I took the captured coon out to the other side of Salt Fork Lake and released it near the primitive camping grounds.  The coon was bewildered when I first released it, but it soon recovered its senses and hustled off into the nearby brush.  I took it to the other side of the lake so hopefully it would not find its way back home.