Of Woods and Waters: A Kentucky Outdoors Reader

An Excerpt from Hunter's Horn (1949)

H A R R I E T T E ARNOW An Excerpt from Hunter's Horn (1949) LATE NOVEMBER'S gentle misty rains made a fog across the hills and brought a grayness and a stillness to the bright noisy leaves. The good hunting weather, the dog food, eggs, fresh milk, and scraps of meat from a just killed pig all gave new life to Zing. This fall, as on other falls, he was the pride and the wonder of Little Smokey Creek country. Stretched on boards in the middle room upstairs were one red and two gray fox skins; and no man, not even Blare Tiller who was forever claiming an injustice done him or somebody else, disputed Zing's right to them. Always the first to give tongue and be off among a dozen hounds clamoring in anger and bewilderment over a puzzle of crosses and backtracks in a half-cold scent, he was likewise the first to hole the fox or bring it down. On nights when there was no fox hunting, he would sometimes slip away, and hours later Milly would awaken to his soft whine. She would get out of bed and go to the chopping block where Nunn skinned all the game Zing caught. Once in two weeks' time there was a fat possum, and twice a big coon, dead but never much mangled, with the skin good enough to save and the meat good enough to eat. Lee Roy would come too, and no matter how wet or cold it might be, the two of them would skin the animal by lantern light and praise Zing for his smart ways and thank him for the meat. Both Milly and Lee Roy liked better the nights when Zing was a tree dog than when he was a foxhound. On fox-hunting 209 nights Nunn would come home, cursing Zing and every other hound in the country with ugly bitter oaths that made Milly pull the covers over her head and hope that Aunt Marthie Jane wasn't listening. Night after night and never a scent of King Devil. He was still in the country. One of the Townsends on the other side of Bear Creek had seen him walking down the road past his barn, walking along and taking his time like somebody going to church, the Townsend had said; and big as a full-grown sheep he had looked to be. And every day for almost a month something had taken one of Nancy Ballew's big fat White Rock hens. They'd hear one short, smothered-down squawk, sometimes not even any cackling from the others; he slipped up so slyly nothing saw him, not even the hen he killed. Nancy and John and the two boys and the white feist dog would go running but never find a thing, often not so much as a feather. Sometimes the hen squawked in the woods above the house and sometimes down by the barn, and once right in the yard, not fifty feet from where the feist dog was sleeping; and sometimes she never squawked at all. Nancy would count her hens, and there'd be another missing—even the guineas were going. It was enough to make a body believe that red fox was kin of the witches, John said one day while he and his neighbors squatted by the road in front of Samuel's store and waited for the mail. "He'd never come that close to Zing," Nunn said with pride. John watched a long shaving curl up from the piece of yellow poplar he was whittling and shook his head. "But Zing'ull never git him, though. He's like me; he's gitten old. It'll take a young hound to git King Devil—if he's ever got." Jaw Buster Anderson eased his back against an apple tree. "But take a young hound now; why, he'd be old fore he could begin to learn all King Devil's tricks, an Zing, he knows em." Willie Cooksey, who disliked Nunn—mostly people said be2IO OF WOODS & WATERS cause Preacher Jim had never thought much of the Cooksey generation —nodded and grinned. "But looks like it's taken perfessor fox hunter here a right smart spell to live up to his brags. It's goen on five year now, ain't it, Nunn, since you...