by Jay Cassell
Excerpted from Cogan’s Woods; reprinted with permission of the author.
New Wilderness
DAVID FOSTER
Dad called. “Let’s go up to the home place. Bag some squirrels.”
The home place is only that. A place. A weedy knoll on a hillock, about a mile down two overgrown ruts from State Highway 85. Dad was raised here while his father sharecropped for old man Minter. The family lived in a rickety, worn wood house that slouched heavily on its field-stone foundation beneath two spreading oaks. The oaks are still there. The house seems to have dissolved. Piece by piece stolen away by neighbors in search of fix-it wood or nature in search of rot. Even the field stones are gone, stickery weeds and stunted young oaks starved for sunlight taking their place.
We parked under the oaks and followed a deer trail down through the pines toward a stand of old, tall hardwoods dad called the “woodlot.” It was Dad’s favorite place to hunt squirrels. Had been for almost 70 years, wars and school and stints in distant cities notwithstanding.
“We hunted squirrel a lot when I was a boy,” he said as we walked. “Papa didn’t like it though. Preferred we shot rabbit. More meat on a rabbit. We’d find’em in the bed and try to shoot their noses off. Squirrels were more fun. Smarter. Harder to hit. Harder to kill. You had to shoot straight. You only got three cartridges for a yard egg. You waste ’em and you could get a whipping. Meat hunting and Papa’s belt led you to shoot straight. Real straight.”
Sharecropping meant that old man Minter got two-thirds of whatever cotton Dad’s dad grew. Some years they shared some corn as well. The other third was given over to various other holders of debt who would then extend just enough new debt to get the family through the winter so they could start all over again.
My dad remembers those years as good ones. I couldn’t imagine it any other way myself. Life out here, in this game rich wilderness, had to have been good, farming aside, of course. Maybe better than good. I said so.
Dad smiled. “Wasn’t a wilderness then. This was a community. This pine thicket was the close-in field. The far field was on the other side of Sweetwater Creek. The woodlot was the only real forest for miles. Back then this was all cotton fields and houses in every direction. Twenty or thirty families.
“The Minters lived down on what’s now 85. Big three-story house. Handsome place. Over across the highway, which in those days was the farm road we drove in on, lived the Dukes. I took a shine early on to Eunice Dukes and her daddy never trusted me much after that. Some folks whose name I forget lived down in the hollow there and Lisbon Baptist Church was up on the other side of the hill. I remember when it burned.
“Over where the road crosses the creek, Sam Nations—your grandma got him confused with damn nations—had a white-washed two-story house. Heard my first radio program there. Jack Dempsey fight. Battery operated radio. Delcos, they were. I helped string the antenna.
“Lots of folks here then. You stand up here in the field and you heard kids playing, mules bellowing, folks shouting across the field.”
It was hard to believe. From the homeplace back to Fayetteville there is hardly a house. Only rolling woodlands punctuated by a few pastures. Now the land is subdivided by deer hunting clubs instead of cotton fields.
“We lived here until ‘24. That’s when the boll weevil moved in and we moved out. Mother nature, she just took the whole place back over. Gave it up to the critters. More game here now than we ever saw.”
“Lots of squirrels,” I said.
“That ain’t the start of it. Deer. And turkey. Folks had long since killed them all when I was a kid. Deer are pests now. Back then, a deer would have been a godsend. Lord what your grandma would have given for a deer. Or a turkey. Best of all a turkey.” Dad laughed. “Of course, we’d never seen a turkey, so if one came up it woulda probably scared us to death. No, squirrel and rabbit were pretty much the menu.”
We shot four squirrels that day. Enough for dumplings. Dad got three with his old Stevens, as he sat at the base of a tall sweetgum. He mumbled once about what a pretty girl Eunice Dukes was. I couldn’t help but think it must have been the best of both worlds, being my dad there under that tree, dead in the middle of his two favorite places: the old community and the new wilderness.
The Rabbit Runners
T. EDWARD NICKENS
“I don’t like to hunt with a hungry man,” Dungee Taylor says. He’s a bull-sized fellow, bald, with one foot in the briers and a grin on his face, but I can read between the lines. His comment is both a statement of fact and an admonition: don’t shoot too soon. Let the dogs have their fun. After all, that’s the point of turning out 14 finely tuned beagles with a single thing on their minds—finding every rabbit on this patch of the planet.
“We’re not out here to shoot everything we see,” Taylor sings out. “We just want to teach these dogs how smart a rabbit really is.” And with that, both feet go into the briers, and 240 pounds of denimclad rabbit hunter disappear into the tangled brambles along North Carolina’s Neuse River.
As I fight through curtains of thorny smilax and blackberry, the beagles worm through briar so thick a breeze couldn’t sneak through—an entire dog pack reduced to white-tipped tails senmaphoring in the brush. Good rabbit dogs rely on their eyes as much as their noses. At times I can see them looking for game; they burrow their snouts into every nook and cranny, then suddenly their heads are up, eyes dissecting the thicket for any sign of a rabbit. I can hear their heavy snorting as they siphon the air for scent.
They’re hot onto something, but it seems to me that they’ve covered every inch of ground to no avail. Then Cassie, Taylor’s “A-number-one jump dog,” suddenly pushes a bunny from its bed not 10 feet from my bootlaces. Cassie opens up with a bawling cry. In seconds the rest of the pack honors the find, rushing to the hot scent. Rip booms out a guttural bass line of affirmation. PeeWee and Blondie add their high-pitched “chop” to the chorus. The pack is off, and the race is on.
Rabbit hunting with beagles is a coast-to-coast American tradition. From the alder thickets of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont to the Mojave Desert scrub, from Dixie’s swamp woods to the Midwest’s endless farms, the sport assumes the vernacular character of whatever field it’s played on. It can be done with one dog or a large pack. But a few things hold, no matter the region. Rabbit hunting is a congenial pursuit, commonly undertaken by a small group of hunters whose connections to each other cross multiple generations. It demands a chess player’s logic and a gunslinger’s reflexes.
Square off with a wild rabbit, and the deck is firmly stacked against you. Cottontails can exhibit blazing speed—they run up to 35 mph—and when that’s not enough of a safety margin, they call on agility, camouflage, and an impressive capacity for strategic thinking. Rabbits feed mostly at night, and dawn finds them slinking into the thickest, gnarliest brier-thatched cover they can find. On cold days they seek a sunny, south-facing slope. There they hollow out a small bowl-shaped nest called a form and hunker down until dark.
The one chink in the rabbit’s armor, however, is its well-known habit of circling back to the very patch of ground where it was jumped. A prize rabbit dog—using its extraordinary sense of smell—can pinpoint the loafing bunny, startle it to a chase, and ultimately run it past the hunter on stand.
Of course, a lot can happen between the first bawling cry of a beagle and the crack of a shotgun, and Taylor has seen it all. Now 49 years old, he learned to rabbit hunt under the eyes of his grandfather, who would place him against a sturdy tree so the recoil of a 12-gauge wouldn’t knock the six-year-old boy down. “I just fell in love with it,” Taylor recalls.
The Taylor family is still known for its love of beagle packs, and Dungee’s father, Edward, and uncle Bill still hunt with him. “Growing up,”his uncle Bill tells me,“we were hunting for the pot. And we hunted rabbits, coons, possums, and any bird big enough to clean.” Days spent behind a mule and plow were followed by nights chasing dogs through th
e big woods, and the dogs were in the game for more than sport, too. “Back then the dogs were poor—hungry all the time—and they would run the daylights out of anything, yes, sir,” Bill says. He grins behind dark sunglasses, his smile turning the corners of trim lambchop sideburns. The beagles weren’t the only ones with limited resources. “We didn’t hardly have any shells. We used sticks, rocks, whatever we could to save those shells. The dogs would run ‘em so hard, they’d go into holes, and that’s what you wanted them to do. We’d just dig them up.”
These days, of course, running bunnies with beagles has more to do with the hunt and the hound music than filling an empty belly, and modern rabbit hunters have definite—and differing—ideas about what makes a good dog tick. Some dogs are particularly adept at scent trailing once a rabbit hits the road; others make a name for themselves through an ability to find and jump rabbits from the bed. When a rabbit changes course dramatically, some dogs naturally tend to hunt back and forth for the new scent trail. Others stay on the track, noses glued to the ground, and take longer to decipher the mystery.
With hounds in pursuit, a rabbit first pours on the speed to gain ground and a little bit of thinking room. That’s when the fun begins. Cottontails are notorious for their cunning when chased, and their daring tricks to throw off the dogs are legendary. “I’ve seen them do crazy things,” Taylor tells me as we break through the thicket to find a clearing for a stand. “Those rabbits will run full bore for a few hundred feet, then hop to the side and squat down tight as the dogs race by just a hand’s width away.” A rabbit on the run will suddenly spin 180 degrees, step to the side of its trail, and come running right back at a pack of tonguing dogs too intent on scent to notice the bunny. “He’ll lick his feet real good to clean them off, then slip through the woods to sit up by some tree, and the dogs will never find him,” Taylor says. Swamp rabbits will lie underwater alligator-style, with only their eyes and noses above the surface. Cottontails squirt through hollow logs, then hop to the top of the fallen trunk and head the other way.
Of course, it’s not a dog’s game alone. After the first few hours of daylight, the scent trails laid by feeding bunnies diminish, and hunters can jump as many rabbits as the beagles. “You’ve got to get in there with them,” Taylor says. He kicks every downed treetop and hummock of grass. Rabbits will hide in culverts, drainage pipes, tree hollows, and ground burrows. He pokes and prods the shadows and looks for droppings and cuttings—shoots of greenbrier and blackberry cleanly snipped off at a 45-degree angle, showing that a bunny was snacking in the neighborhood.
They say a man’s dogs are a reflection of him, and that’s clearly the case with Taylor, who owns a moving company in Durham, North Carolina. “I just can’t stand still. I’ve got to be moving, got to be moving, all the time,” he says, each sentence a volley that chases the one before. “And that’s how my dogs are. I want them pushing that rabbit. Don’t give him too much time to think and duck those dogs. When they run like that, you don’t hear nothing but sweet music.”
At the moment, the music means a rabbit is headed my way, and fast. I take up a stand at the intersection of two trails. Robert Steed, Taylor’s boyhood friend and hunting partner, is 40 yards away. “That rabbit comes running at you,” he hollers, “you shoot at the ground in front of him, you hear?” I nod.
The dogs are in full cry, baying like a dozen cars locking up the brakes, moments before impact. When the rabbit squirts out of the brambles, it gives me a glancing look, then leaps across the trail. My shotgun bead points at an empty spot in the woods. Now the bunny takes two hops and spins like a top. It nearly runs over Steed’s feet, ducks into the brambles, and is gone.
There will be more rabbits to come, and a few that aren’t so lucky. But for now we haven’t fired a shot, and all we can do is grin.
“That rabbit, now, he’s a smart one,” Taylor says, wiping the sweat from his brow as Rip, Brenda, La Verne, and the gang go tearing off again. “Don’t think he ain’t.”
Reprinted with permission of the author and Field & Stream Magazine.
PART V
Upland Birds
The Sundown Covey
LAMAR UNDERWOOD
Nobody ever used that name, really. But it was the covey of bobwhite quail that we always looked for almost with longing, as we turned our hunt homeward in the afternoon. By the time we came to that last stretch of ragged corn and soybean fields where this covey lived, the pines and moss-draped oaks would be looming darkly in the face of the dying sun. The other events of the afternoon never seemed to matter then. Tired pointer dogs bore ahead with new drive; we would watch carefully as they checked out each birdy objective, sure that we were headed for a significant encounter before we reached the small lane that led to the Georgia farmhouse. I always chose to think of those birds as “the sundown covey,” although my grandfather or uncle usually would say something like “Let’s look in on that bunch at the end of the lane.” And then, more times than not, the evening stillness would be broken by my elder’s announcement, “Yonder they are!” and we would move toward the dogs on point—small stark-white figures that always seemed to be chiseled out of the shadowy backdrop against the evening swamp.
There’s always something special about hunting a covey of quail that you know like an old friend. One covey’s pattern of movements between fields and swampy sanctuaries can be an intriguing and baffling problem. Another may be remarkably easy to find, and yet always manage to rocket away through such a thick tangle that you’ve mentally colored them gone, even before your finger touches the trigger. Another might usually present a good covey shot, while the singles tear away to . . . the backside of the moon, as far as you’ve been able to tell. My best hunts on more distant but greener pastures somehow have never seemed as inwardly satisfying as a day when a good dog and I can spend some time on familiar problems like these. Give me a covey I know, one that has tricked me, baffled me, eluded me—and by doing so brought me back to its corner of the woods for years.
In this sense, the covey we always hunted at sundown was even more special. As the nearest bunch of birds to the house, it was the most familiar. Here, trembling puppies got onto their first points. A lad learned that two quick shots into the brownish blur of the covey rise would put nothing into his stiff new hunting coat. A man returning from a war saw the birds running quick-footed across the lane and knew that he really was home again. The generations rolled on through times of kerosene lamps and cheap cotton to Ed Sullivan and soil-bank subsidies. And that same covey of bobwhites that had always seemed a part of the landscape still whistled in the long summer afternoons and hurtled across dead cornstalks that rattled in the winter breezes.
The hunters who looked for that covey and others in the fields nearby disciplined themselves never to shoot a covey below six birds. That number left plenty of seed for replenishment, so that every fall the coveys would again number fifteen to thirty birds, depending on how they had fared against predators.
Eventually, all that acreage moved out of our family. My visits to those coveys became less frequent as I necessarily turned toward education and then fields of commerce that were far away. But even during some marvelous quail-hunting days in other places, I often longed for return hunts to those intriguing coveys of the past. Would the swamp covey by the old pond still be up to their usual trick of flying into the field in the afternoon? Where would the singles from the peafield covey go now? Would the sundown covey still be there?
Finally, not long ago, the opportunity came for me to knock about a bit down in the home county. Several hunts with friends seemed as mere preludes to the longawaited day when I got a chance to slip away alone to the old home grounds.
A soft rain had fallen during the night, but when I parked the truck by a thicket of pines just after sunrise, a stiff breeze had started tearing the overcast apart, and patches of blue were showing through the dullness. Shrugging into my bird vest, I ignored the shufflings and impatient whines that s
ounded from the dog box and stood a moment looking across a long soybean field that stretched toward a distant line of pines. I was mentally planning a route that would take me in a big circle to a dozen or so familiar coveys, then bring me to the sundown covey in the late evening. I unlatched the dog box, and the pointer, Mack, exploded from the truck and went through a routine of nervous preliminaries. I did the same, checking my bulging coat for shells, lunch and coffee. Then I clicked the double shut and stepped into the sedge alongside the field, calling: “All right, Mack. Look around!”
The pointer loped away in that deceptive, ground-eating gait that was his way of going. At age four, he had not exactly developed into the close worker I had been wanting. His predecessors who had run these fields in decades before were big-going speedsters suited to those times. Controlled burning and wide-roaming livestock kept the woodlands open then. Now most of the forests were so choked with brush and vines that wide-working dogs brought a legacy of frustration. Mack was easy to handle but tended to bend out too far from the gun unless checked back frequently. I really hated hearing myself say “Hunt close!” so often, but I hated even worse those agonizing slogging searches when he went on point in some dark corner of the swamp a quarter-mile from where I thought he’d been working.
