Puppies' First Coon Tree

and there will be many more to come ....

Last year, my sole focus was on catching bobcats with my dogs. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, the first two years of my hound hunting career were spent pursuing raccoons almost exclusively. If you want to learn more about my early days as a coon hunter, I highly recommend you check out my book, Cat Dog Chronicles for the full story.

Honestly, I had no real intentions of coonhunting with my dogs ever again—to me, bobcats are where it’s at. But, as everyone knows by now, Coulee had that epic litter of blue pups this spring and that prompted me to revisit my roots a coonhunter. You see, if Coulee and Roux were 100% solid and dialed in on catching bobcats by now, I may not have needed to dust of my headlamp and hip boots. But I quickly realized—with some help from my mentor—that in order to get these pups on serious quantities of game this season while they’re still young, hitting the creek bottoms to knock some coons out to them would be essential.

So here we are. I’m a coonhunter once again.

And in the latest video on the Hound on the Run YouTube channel, I share the puppies’ first two nights spent in the coon woods.

On the first night, I thought Coulee and Roux had treed a raccoon, but it all fell apart at the last moment and I’m not too sure what really happened … but treed they were not.

We had better luck on the second night and the puppies got their first dose of treeing action under the expert tutelage of their mom, Coulee, and Roux … who looked particularly stunning and located the hell out of the tree.

Filming at night is inherently difficult, especially running solo. I end up relying on the light from my headlamp to illuminate the scene, and since my primary focus is not on cinematography but on watching my dogs and trying to figure out what they’re doing, the shots are less than elegant. With the headlight swinging all over the place, the video ends up with a somewhat chaotic feel. I hope you don’t find it too distracting.

When I filmed this video, it was still only the pursuit season so we couldn’t shoot the racoons (there were 3 in the tree). But now that December 1st has passed, we are now in the clear to start blasting away, so stay tuned for some more action-packed videos coming down the pike. (Side note: I’m really not into people sharing dog-on-game videos and photos, so don’t worry — we’re gonna keep the imagery clean around these parts and not give the anti-hunting activists any more fuel than they already have to use against us hound hunters.)

In other news, my wife and I both came down with Covid this past week which means I missed out on opening day of bobcat and raccoon harvest season. Needless to say, I have some catching up to do and this weekend can’t get here soon enough.

As always, thanks everyone for following along with everything I’m doing here at Hound on the Run. The YouTube channel has been my main focus lately and I’m proud of how it’s slowly but steadily growing. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the channel and be sure to like all my videos — you have no idea how much a simple “thumbs up” helps the channel grow. Thanks everyone!!

Best wishes,

Niklas