Old Dan opened up first. It was a beautiful thing to hear. The deep tones of his voice rolled in the silent night.
A bird in a canebrake on our right started chirping. A big swamp rabbit came running down the river-bank as if all hell was close to his heels. A bunch of mallards, feeding in the shallows across the river, took flight with frightened quacks. A feeling that only a hunter knows slowly crept over my body. I whooped to my dogs, urging them on.
Little Ann came in. Her bell-like tones blended with Old Dan's, in perfect rhythm. We stood and listened to the beautiful music, the deep-throated notes of hunting hounds on the hot-scented trail of a river coon.
Rubin said, 'If he crosses the river up at the Buck Ford, it's the ghost coon, as that's the way he always runs.'
We stood and listened. Sure enough, the voices of my dogs were silent for a few minutes. Old Dan, a more powerful swimmer than Little Ann, was the first to open up after crossing over. She was close behind him.
Rubin said, 'That's him, all right. That's the ghost coon.'
They crossed the river again.
We waited.
Rainie said, 'You may as well get your money out now.'
I told him just to wait a while, and I'd show him the ghost coon's hide.
This brought a loud laugh from Rainie, which sounded like someone had dropped an empty bucket on a gravel bar and then had kicked it.
The wily old coon crossed the river several times, but couldn't shake my dogs from his trail. He cut out from the bottoms, walked a rail fence, and jumped from it into a thick canebrake. He piled into an old Slough. Where it emptied into the river, he swam to the middle. Doing opposite to what most coons do, which is swim downstream, he swam upstream. He stopped at an old drift in the middle of it.
Little Ann found him. When she jumped him from the drift, Old Dan was far downriver searching for the trail. If he could have gotten there in time, it would have been the last of the ghost coon, but Little Ann couldn't do much by herself in the water. He fought his way free from her, swam to our side, and r&n upstream.
I could hear Old Dan coming through the bottoms on the other side, bawling at every jump. I could feel the driving power in his voice. We heard him when he hit the water to cross over. It sounded like a cow had jumped in.
Little Ann was warming up the ghost coon. I could tell by her voice that she was close to him.
Reaching our side, Old Dan tore out after her. He was a mad hound. His deep voice was telling her he was coming.
We were trotting along, following my dogs, when I heard Little Ann's bawling stop.
'Wait a minute,' I said. 'I think she has treed him. Let's give her time to circle the tree to make sure he's there.'
Old Dan opened up bawling treed. Rubin started on.
'Something's wrong,' I said. 'I can't hear Little Ann.'
Rainie spoke up, 'Maybe the ghost coon ate her up.'
I glared at him.
Hurrying on, we came to my dogs. Old Dan was bawling at a hole in a large sycamore that had fallen into the river.
At that spot, the bank was a good ten feet above the water level. As the big tree had fallen, the roots had been torn and twisted from the ground. The jagged roots, acting as a drag, had stopped it from falling all the way into the stream. The trunk lay on a steep slant from the top of the bank to the water. Looking down, I could see the broken tangled mass of the top. Debris from floods had caught in the limbs, forming a drift.
Old Dan was trying to dig and gnaw his way into the log. Pulling him from the hole, I held my lantern up and looked down into the dark hollow. I knew that somewhere down below the surface there had to be another hole in the trunk, as water had filled the hollow to the river level.
