Howling fury

“Where are those dogs?”

It’s cold, damp and almost midnight. Josh Brones is prowling deserted back roads amid flat farmland near the Sacramento River. He’s leaning halfway out the window of his pickup, listening for the howls of his hounds, for that wild chorus hunters call music. It’s his favorite sound. But a growing chorus of anti-hunting activists is working to silence California’s hounds and keep hunters like Brones indoors.

A minute ago Flip, Skeeter, Dodger and Tahoe were sprinting ahead, noses to the ground, weaving in and out of the truck’s headlights. Now they’re gone. The sky is moonless, and the only sound is gravel crunching under the truck’s tires. For half an hour, Brones cruises slowly. He sweeps his flashlight across the fallow, flooded rice fields on one side of the road and swampy woods on the other. On this training run, he is armed only with a thermos of coffee and a flashlight, no rifle.

Suddenly there’s the music he’s been waiting for: a desperate, mournful, urgent cacophony. The hounds are bawling; they’ve got something treed.

Brones speeds toward the noise, stops the truck and leaps out. He races from the road down the muddy slope, slipping and charging through the brush into the spot where his loud-mouthed Walkers are leaping and yapping at the base of an oak.

“Get ‘em dogs! Get ‘em dogs!”

He trains his flashlight on the tree’s highest branches. A pair of raccoons, plump and silvery-brown, stare back with glowing eyes.

Coon hunting is considered a Southern tradition. But from the Florida Everglades to upstate New York, from the Michigan woods to these vast farmlands of Central California, hunters for generations have thrilled to the baying of hounds hot on the scent of raccoons. It’s an avocation that has yielded more than just coonskin caps and the excitement of a night chase through the woods. The American language is filled with expressions such as “barking up the wrong tree” and “hot on the trail,” an enduring cultural legacy that can be traced back to the tradition.

Brones, 28, college-educated, articulate, movie-star handsome, represents a new generation of coon hunters. But the pastime, with roots that date back to the colonial era, may be threatened.

Hunting season for raccoons in this part of California is from November through March, but houndsmen can send their dogs out to tree coons year-round as long as they don’t kill the creatures. Even such bloodless hunts rankle some.

Last year, Assemblyman Paul Koretz (D-West Hollywood) introduced a bill supported by the Humane Society of the United States and other animal groups aimed at banning dog hunting of all mammals statewide. Faced with pressure from a powerful hunting lobby, AB 342 was amended to include only the pursuit of bobcat and bear, before it was roundly defeated in committee. But that doesn’t mean the issue is dead.

Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president for communications and government affairs for the Humane Society in Washington, D.C., is pushing to spin the bill into a state ballot initiative by 2005.

“We work to stop what we regard as the most inhumane, unjustified and unsporting hunting practices,” he says. Pacelle sees dog hunting as cruel and inhumane both to the hounds and the coons, which viciously fight back when cornered. “If you’re going to put your dog in harm’s way, it’s not a big leap from there to mistreating your dogs.”

Brones, president of the 3,000-member California Houndsmen for Conservation, scoffs at that idea. “We care for our dogs tremendously,” he says. “When your puppy first learns to load up into the truck, that’s a milestone.... When they first tree, that’s a milestone. It’s heaven on Earth to see a dog that you’ve bred, raised and hunted become the amazing athlete that they do become. That’s all we care about.”

Hunters like Marty Nall bristle at being characterized as coon killers. Being a houndsman is part of this country’s heritage, he says, noting George Washington was one.

“I want the coon to climb a tree,” says Nall, a member of Tri-County Houndsmen from Arroyo Grande, Calif. “I don’t want my dogs getting chewed up.... It’s not the kill that houndsmen are interested in. It’s just the training and running of the dogs. And just being outdoors.”

Brones, who was raised in Willton and learned to hunt big game with his father, fell in love with hounds as a young boy after reading the Wilson Rawls classic “Where the Red Fern Grows.” At his house in rural Woodland, 10 miles north of Sacramento, he shows off his beloved hunting partners. Flip, the oldest at 4 years, is a brindled mix of Catahoula Leopard Dog, Plott Hound, Blue Lacy and Southern Blackmouth Cur. The other five are purebred Treeing Walkers -- lean, long-eared dogs with beagle-colored coats. They leap and bark in the open-air kennel he’s built them, eagerly awaiting dinner.

He sets down their usual fare of kibble soaked in warm water and watches them lap it up. “I wanted to enlist in the Army. I’d even passed my test to train as a helicopter pilot, but I honestly couldn’t imagine being away from my dogs.”

By night, Brones prowls for coons, or wild boar and bear. By day he works for a pest-control company. “Hunting’s always been my way of escaping the stresses of ordinary life,” he explains. The hunters in his group dedicate every spare moment to breeding and training their dogs, he says.

In the East, houndsmen trudge through fields or stands of woods. California’s open spaces call more for “roading,” in which a hunter lets his dogs loose and follows them in his truck.

Brones’ pickup has a customized dog box in the bed, a kind of mobile kennel. “If they smell the raccoon while I’m driving down the road, they’ll let me know ‘I smell something,’ and then I let them out so they can chase it.”

Man and dog have been hunting together for more than 14,000 years. Initially early humans scavenged off the kills of wolf packs but eventually they harnessed the animals’ talents to aid them in their quest for meat. “Dogs were the first domesticated animal,” Brones says, scanning the woods with his flashlight during the hunt, “and it wasn’t for pets. Early man didn’t have the luxury of stealing a wolf pup and calling it a pet. It was to provide him with food in one of two ways: to raise the wolf and eat it, or to raise it to help him hunt.”

Though raccoons are hunted primarily for their fur, they’re eaten by some Southerners. They wreak havoc on farmers’ crops and are canny and vicious adversaries. With their sharp teeth and nasty temperaments, coons fight when cornered. The sight of one bristling up its back, baring its fangs and screeching has forced many a hound to back down.

“When people see a coon on TV, they’re these little docile animals,” says Elroy Hinsz, founder of Stockton Houndsmen. “But if a dog is unwise and gets him on the ground, those cute little critters turn vicious. I’ve seen a dog end up with teeth marks in his ears, his face, because a raccoon climbed up on his head and tried to eat him.” Many hounds have shredded ears and scarred snouts as proof.

During a chase, coons often double back to throw the dogs off their trail and utterly confound them before taking refuge in a tall tree or plunging deep into dense underbrush. Brones has scrambled through thickets of blackberries and briars for hours chasing them.

But that’s not their deadliest trick.

“A raccoon is truly in his element in the water,” says Brones. He knows of two dogs that were drowned by the same critter in a single night -- something that almost happened to his own dogs. He was standing on the edge of a flooded slough not far from here on another cold night. It was three dogs against one raccoon, Brones says, but the dogs were the ones that were outmatched. The coon lured them into deep water, waited for one to get close, then suddenly turned and clambered onto the dog’s head, pushing it down and holding it underwater. The critter didn’t let go until another dog paddled up within striking distance.

“This went on for 45 minutes. I was stripped down to my underwear ready to swim out there and save them.”

Tonight’s finale is less chaotic. Brones shouts praises as his dogs leap at the base of the tree and howl and squall for about 10 minutes. Then he calls them back to the truck and loads the four of them, panting, into their box in the pickup. On the ride back, both hunter and hounds are calm again. Brones is perfectly happy the coons and dogs stayed a safe distance apart.

“There are a lot of people who just want to go out in the woods with their dogs and be left alone,” he says. “They don’t realize that there’s a very realistic possibility that hound hunting could end in the next few years.”

Brones says that for him, this type of pursuit is linked to another. “I’m what sociologists would call a spiritual hunter. I do it because it helps me keep my sanity. It’s how I commune with nature. It’s when I’m most appreciative of what I’ve been blessed with.”

Andrew Berg is a freelance writer and Redbone hound owner who lives in New York City.