In this week's edition of Slow TV, Roux, the big ass puppy, got a chance to tree his own coon on our favorite river bottom. This video is a bit more entertaining than the last featuring more dog action from start to finish. It's hard to tell exactly what happened in the video, but trust me, I know, because I was there. Here's the story from that night.
In terms of tracks a fine young hound like Roux might run, and much to his disappointment, it wasn't much of a track and there was no chase to be had. Cutting straight to the uneventful climax, Roux winded a whole crap load of raccoons hanging out in a patch of trees next to an orchard. On the left side of the road in the orchard, there were at least 5 sets of eyes I could count all clumped up. In the video, you can hear all the other dogs in the box striking their heads off and then Roux goes off right as he's next to the big clump of blackberry bushes. You see me speed up and awkwardly try to decide if I want to turn around and where to park, and Roux was barking up. He was looking straight at them, though I'm not sure how much of them he could actually see with all the blackberries in the way.
On the opposite side of the road, there were 3 trees holding raccoons. One tree had 2, the next had 3, and another had 2. What is that? 12 raccoons all within about a 20 square yard area? Roux was treeing, yes, and he certainly found himself some coon, but I was sitting there shaking my head because … what the heck? He barely had to work for it. I thought about not shooting one, but I had to for Roux. He did exactly what I was asking of him.
I edited the video cutting out me shooting it out and Roux getting his teeth on it. Though the bumper cam didn’t capture it visually, sonically it was quite the scene. What's funny about Roux is that, while he does get plenty aggressive with a raccoon, he's not a savage about it. He's always been that way with everything, though, ever since he was a puppy -- not a shredder, more of a nibbler. I wanted to make sure it was fully dead before I picked it up, so I let Plum and Finn out of the box to help him out.
After all that, I put Roux and Plum away and let Coulee, Whiskey, and Finn run the road and see if they would pick up anything Roux would have missed. News to me, dogs don't get menopause and little ol' Whiskey is in heat so "No Nutz Finny" is the only boy who has been getting to run with the girlz.
Coulee ended up going deep and struck a track, they ran that around in circles for a while, then started moving it back towards the trees full o' coon Roux had found, so I decided to pull them off and head towards home.
Why pull them off a track like that? Because I'm really wanting these dogs to be focused on cats.
Whiskey, being a cat specialist, will tree on a coon but won't really run the track unless the other dogs really get it going first and confirms she ain’t gonna get in trouble. Over the last few months of owning Whiskey, I have recorded many hours’ worth of video content that will be coming to YouTube soon, documenting my journey into the cat hunting with hounds with a real veteran cat dog. I can’t wait to share it with everyone.
Coulee and Finn both do great on coon and Roux was on plenty of trees last season, his first-year hunting, but only had him out solo a few times. On cats, he's doing really well as Whiskey's understudy and I can tell he's putting some pieces together, striking when she does from the box, checking all the same bushes and leaves she's sniffing…. It's awesome to watch.
It's not that I'm not going to hunt raccoons with my pack ever again—I certainly will—but my focus has shifted. Cat hunting has been tough since the pursuit season opened with all the big game seasons in effect (thankfully those have mostly concluded). I don’t mind seeing people in the woods, but when I'm with my dogs it adds too much pucker factor, so I decided to play it safe and wait it out. This night of film was actually right after I came home from a 3-day elk hunt during the general Oregon Coast rifle season. I didn't kill an elk and missed hunting with my dogs so much when I was out there, there first thing I wanted to do was load them up and go hunt somewhere, anywhere. Our local coon spot was a perfect choice.
Enjoy Slow TV by Hound on the Run on YouTube.