The Curious Southern Custom of Coon Hunting

The Curious Southern Custom of Coon Hunting by Wayne Hogan There are lots of customs in the South that, to your average Yankee, virtually defy explaining. Eating grits is one. Another s coon hunting. I see my job here being to make a necessarily brief but hopefully successful effort to shed a little light on the latter-explaining grits I've found is for me, a southerner, impossible . For those who may not be all that familiar with the coon hunting cus18 torn, I'll start off by saying a few words about coons and then take up the coon hunter's part. Raccoons (procyon lotor) The coon is a medium-sized animal. Its pelage is long and thick, with a bushy ringed tail, slender smile on a white face with black mask, prominent and rather pointed ears, and has five toes on each foot. The coon's skull is broad and rounded, its molars broad and tuberculate , its palate extends back of the last molar for some 18mm, with a bullae that's slightly flattened and that extends laterally in a tubular auditory meatus. On average, coons weigh between 6.8 and 8.2kg and are about 812mm in length. The coon is a creature of the night. Coon Hunters (carnivor pickupus) Coon hunters come in four styles: tall or short; broad or narrow. All live for the midnight baying of coonhounds hot on the scent of a coon loping across an open field under a full November moon. But whoa-first let's talk a bit about how coon hunters come to be coon hunters, talk a bit about their growing-up years, their adult lives as, probably, members of somebody's families. It's been pretty well scientifically demonstrated by now that coon hunters are born, not made. That they come into the world compatible with up to as many as sixteen or seventeen varieties of Blue Tick Hound, can spot the booming moan of a "Sarge" versus a "Géraldine" more'n a mile away; can easily tell when a hound's glad just to be out romping through somebody else's property in the middle of the night or when it's seriously onto something; can tell when the lead hound's really taking charge or is just goofing off waiting for the curiously quiet ride back home to a late snack after a rousing outing. It's these sorts of things that separate the real coon hunters from chaff. Just about the time a coon hunter realizes he (yes, all coon hunters are males; not one female has ever been heard of) knows most of what's to know about coon dogs, he starts practicing how to drive a three-quarter-ton pickup truck through the dead of night without using headlights, how to park barely off a country road as near as possible to a peace-and-quiet loving, early-to-bed family's house so that when the hounds that ride in screened wooden boxes in the back of the pickup are set loose to sniff out the unsuspecting coon, they make all the noise it s possible for up to a dozen or more coon hounds to make when they pick up the trail they've been brought for. It's easy to underemphasize the coon hunter's affinity for pickup trucks. The plain fact is that the pickup is no less than an evolutionary appendage to the coon hunter himself. It goes with him everywhere-to town on Saturdays, to church on Sundays, to the county fair in September. And wherever the coon hunter goes in his pickup truck with its tailgate almost always open, he also goes with the screened boxes in the back. Born to drive the pickup his coon hounds were born to ride in. It's in the genes. Coon hunters usually go coon hunting in twos or threes. Some say they do this just to be efficient users of the space available in the cab of the pickup. Others say they do it for protection from renegade coons that might slip back past an inept pack of hounds, aiming to confront their opposite number head...