Big Thicket Legacy

Floyd Warren

Introducing Aoyd Warren When we first met Aoyd Warren he had sixty-five dogs that would not hunt a thing on earth but bobcats. Aoyd trained them that way, for bobcats are his specialty. He has hunted over thousands of acres and is welcome to hunt anywhere because his dogs hunt nothing but cats, and man is their only enemy. A bobcat will lead the dogs through the roughest terrain in the Thicket, but Aoyd follows, cutting his way through the matted undergrowth, or crawling underneath. He is crippled in one leg but can outwalk anyone on a cat hunt His interest is shared by his wife, Fran. They met on a hunt when she came from Philadelphia to visit her sister near Beaumont, and they have been hunting together ever since. Few people know the nature of a bobcat like Aoyd, and he learned it on the ground. He comes by it naturally as his daddy and granddaddy were cat hunters, too. It requires training and diScipline for a dog to stay on a cat trail, but Aoyd knows how to train them; and, if he finds one occasionally that "trashes" on him, he gets rid of it. In the beginning it was with great difficulty that the Warrens literally cut their way into the Thicket and settled on a little ridge between Black Creek and Pine Island Bayou, but its appeal to each generation would make it even more difficult to leave. The grandchildren and great grandchildren still live in the shadow of the original homestead . FLOYD WARREN 'd rather hunt bobcat, wildcat, than anything else. It takes a better and smarter dog to be a cat dog. Acat is harder to trail because he don't have the scent a fox has, and a fox can't pull the tricks a bobcat can. Sometimes he'll double back on his same track, back and forth, and he'll go in a tree, and won't stay there. Lots of tree dogs will just hang up on that tree instead of circling and picking his trail up. And the cat will jump over to other trees and come down. He's more like a coon than a fox, but a coon don't dodge like a cat. Acoon won't run long on the ground before he'll tree. Nine out of ten times a cat will just run it out on the ground until a dog catches him. He goes in the roughest country he can find and makes it hard on the dogs. Used to when we had lots of hogs, a cat would go miles to go through a bunch of hogs and get the hogs to rallying, and they'd get the dogs off their trail, but now we don't have many hogs. Now they'll hunt up deer; they'll go through deer to try to switch the dogs off. The deer has a stronger scent than a cat. He'll do this to anything he can switch the dogs off on. They're smart. If a bobcat has kittens, and they're going to catch her and she knows it, she'll go through the kittens to try to pull the dogs off of her to save her life. I've run an old cat two or three hours and when the dogs are just about to catch her, well, as a last chance, she'd go through her bed, and lots of times the dogs are switched off on her bed. I'd go and get the kittens and then go back again and run the old cat again and catch her. We've brought the kittens home that she went through. Most dogs will smell around her bed a while where the scent is so strong before they get back on her trail. Ihad one old catthat went to her kittens and right there she stood till the dogs got there, and tried to fight them off. The dogs run in on her, and they had a awful fight. She run from them, and they caught her again and killed her. To hunt cat it takes a dog that will hit a trail and stick with it, won't switch on different game, even if a deer gets up beside him. They got to really like what they're runnin', and Ithink they get this quality by...