A November Night In Florida

Last night was a beautiful, starlit night in central Florida. Temps hovered around sixty degrees throughout the evening making the perfect setting for a raccoon hunt with friends and our Plott dogs. Earlier in the day I made arrangements with Gordie Schroeder who operates a lawn care business servicing clients in the mega retirement complex The Villages, about 100 miles north of my home in Port Richey. We planned to hunt with our Buckeye friend Bob Frazier on one of the area cattle ranches where he has permission. The plan was for me to pick up Bob, who is 82 years of age and who still very much enjoys coon hunting, and meet Gordie at a gas station near the hunting spot.

All went according to plan and after a cup of coffee, we switched Bob’s seven-year old Plott female Candy and my 8-month old Plott female puppy Dancer, along with our lights, gear, cooler and snacks into Gordie’s truck where his Plott female, Bayou Banana (Nana) was anxiously waiting to get on with our hunt.

We drove a short distance to a cattle ranch and after a brief stop at the ranch house where Bob let the landowner know we were going to hunt, we negotiated a gate and were soon on the way to cast the hounds. As mentioned earlier it was a beautiful, clear, starlit night. Gordie commented several times at the number of meteorites we saw streaking across the wide Florida night sky.

Each time we cast the dogs on this hunt, three times in all, we struck fresh tracks within a minute of releasing the hounds. Each of the strikes quickly turned into red hot races and the voices of Candy and Nana had the woods and swamps ringing with hound music. Dancer, on her third trip to the woods, has yet to begin to open on tracks. She’s still very much in a discovery stage, like a computer trying to pair with a Bluetooth device. She didn’t hunt out as good as she did in Virginia on her two previous nights out but on the second track of the night, the one that was to end at a hollow cypress tree, she did go with the other dogs for a distance of about 150 yards before returning to find me. The Garmin device showed her checking several trees throughout the night’s hunt, evidence of the treeing instinct, although unrefined, that courses through a well-bred tree dog’s veins. Dancer's actions are standard issue for pups of this breeding. They tend to start a little slower and progress fairly quickly once they do start.

The first track of the night ended with both Candy and Nana treeing very hard, each convinced they had Mr. Raccoon dead to rights. Gordie and I elected to go to the dogs while Bob stayed at the truck to “holler” us out as is the custom among coon hunters in swampy places in the South. As we approached the treeing dogs we realized the tree was actually two bell-bottomed cypress trees that reached way up in the clear Florida night sky. We employed dim red lights and blew the reeds out of our coon squallers but the efforts were in vain. We did not see the tell-tale glow of the coon’s eyes in our lights. Having marked the location of the truck on our Garmin GPS units we soon were back in Bob’s company with the hounds loaded for a short drive on the ranch lanes to our second drop of the night.

Once again, we had a quick strike and the dogs really burned this track up! We remarked at how those two Plott females could really run and before long, they were both giving playing the music every coon hunters lives for, the coveted tree bark. We walked toward the tree and as we neared, encountered some ankle-deep water and a fair number of cypress knees to negotiate before reaching the treeing hounds. Gordie, while leashing Nana, quickly discovered the tree to be hollow at the bottom. Nana had sounded to be in the distance as we walked in due to having her head inside the whole on the opposite side of the tree. Dancer got her first whiff of fresh coon scent here and repeatedly stuck her head in the hole. She did not bark but was definitely liking that smell.

Again we had to walk back to the truck without having seen a coon. That’s when the usual banter among coon hunters starts as the night wears on. “Do you want to make another drop” is the question with which every coon hunter is familiar and it’s usually that one more drop that turns into a long walk, lost dogs and all sorts of interesting happenings. We elected to turn loose again but good fortune was our friend in that the dogs quickly struck and after yet another good chase the dogs came treed. We were able to drive within a hundred yards or so of the dogs.

Walking in we discovered a huge, moss-covered live oak tree. Again we employed our Zepp and Bad Man coon squallers, our red LED modules, and our best vine-pulling efforts to no avail. Both Nana and Candy are known for being accurate tree dogs. That’s to say when they tree there’s a good chance the raccoon is there. Each of the trees could have easily concealed a coon and judging from the conditions of the tracks the dogs had we felt confident they had done their job as expected. Perhaps it was our coon-finding skills that were suspect or maybe the coons, in the wake of bright Super Moon nights, had hidden themselves with no intention of looking at our lights.

We all agreed it was time to call it a night and after returning to the staging area at the local Shell station, we had a cup-of-coffee nightcap, swapped a yarn or two and headed our separate ways toward home. When I put Dancer in the kennel, the clock said two-thirty in the AM. With Ella out of town visiting family I was soon making the walls rattle with the snores of a tired but contented coon hunter. It was a good night to be alive.