I was just browsing through my blog roll today, and saw this bit in Dave Hurteau’s Field and Stream Field Notes blog.  In short, it looks like Florida is trying to crack down on deer hounds being run across private property, and a recent case is putting the law to the test.

I can’t remember if I’ve had much to say about hound hunting in the past, but rather than bounce all over the site trying to see what I’ve said before, I’ll start fresh.

My first deer hunts were done over hounds in southeastern North Carolina.  I took my first deer this way, and several others later. 

The club we hunted back then, Black River Hunting Club, had thousands and thousands of acres to run.  Much of the land was dense pocosin (kind of a coastal swamp), grown over with turkey and pin oak, cat-claw briars, blackberry brambles, and a mucky peat that goes from solid ground to a bottomless mire without warning.  For a human to move through this stuff is a barely surmountable challenge.  To move through and hunt is impossible.  Deer thrived in this place, but the only way to move them was with hounds. 

Pine and hardwood ridges cut through the swampy thickets, and open “islands” of pine offered great places to set stands.  The general plan for a drive was to set standers at positions, usually a couple hundred yards apart (all ground hunters had to use buckshot… rifles and slugs were restricted to elevated stands), and then to put the dogs down at the end of the area.  The hounds would move in, until they picked up a scent.  At first there would be scattered barking, some soft, individual baying, until the trail suddenly got hot.  And then… oh, the songs they’d sing! 

If you’ve never stood in the frosty morning, shivering with cold and anticipation as the gentle woodland sounds are suddenly replaced by the baying music of a pack of deer hounds…  well, it would be impossible to convey the sensations that course through you.  Every crackle of every leaf becomes a big whitetail, slinking through the oak brush.  The scrape of a branch in the icy breeze could be the monarch of the southern forest.  Your ears cock toward the sound of the dogs.  Are they coming closer?  How far now?  How long until they pass?

Your eyes pick apart the foliage, seeking that flash of reddish-brown, or the white flag of a fleeing deer.  You evaluate every opening, each breach of the thickets for the likely shooting lanes.  All the while your heart pounds, faster with every yelp and bark of the approaching dogs. 

Then you hear it… the crack of branches, the thump of hooved feet.  You scan harder, shotgun half-raised… and there he is!  This is another reason for using buckshot, as you must swing on the speeding deer as if it were a rabbit.  Pull through, level, and the hollow boom of a shotgun makes a distinctive echo against the longleaf pines, the sound rolling down to the river and back as the acrid scent of spent powder drifts back over you.  Everything seems to go quiet in the moment of the shot, and brielfy afterward, before you hear the dogs closing now.  They break from the bushes even as you walk forward, and suddenly the baying music ends.  A few scattered barks… some whining… then wagging tails as you wade through the panting bodies to the animal on the ground. 

I’m no William Faulkner or Robert Ruark, and I know my description doesn’t touch the excitement or exhileration of a good hound hunt (read Faulkner’s A Race at Morning if you get half a chance…)  .  It’s another of thost things that has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. 

That said…

Somewhere along the lines of my early 20s I lost interest in hound hunting.  After taking a couple of deer without hounds, the dog drives just didn’t carry that same sense of accomplishment anymore.  I came to prefer still-hunting, or scouting and hanging a stand over a prime area.  Since coming to California and experiencing western hunting, glassing big country, tracking, and stalking…  well,  why should the hounds have all the fun? 

I have also participated in a couple of hound hunts for wild hogs, and while I can see where some folks would find the adventure and rush to their liking, it just doesn’t suit my interests these days.  I’d do it again if invited, and I’d have a good time, but it’s not an experience I seek out. 

Even so, I will always carry those fond memories of frozen November and December mornings… when the hush of frosted pine needles explodes into the controlled chaos of singing hounds, graceful, racing bodies, and the crack and boom of hopeful gunshots. 

Wow!  Did I just get a little sidetracked from my original point.  Maybe not…

The question in the title of this post is, Where do YOU stand? 

Here’s why I ask.

The tradition of hound hunting in many parts of the country, particularly the southeastern US, is at a pretty critical crossroads.  Some hard decisions are going to have to be made. 

When we ran dogs at Black River Hunting Club, as I mentioned the club owned and leased thousands of acres.  Even when the dogs ran past the standers (a regular occurrence), they could usually be picked up somewhere on our own property.  If not, the handful of marginal farms surrounding us were friendly and allowed us to cross their properties to recover the dogs. 

Things have changed since those days.  The area around the old hunting club has been subdivided.  The little farms, barely scraping by on ground that consisted mostly of “sugar sand”, sold out.  Developers came in.  Marketing and landscaping management turned the scrubland into nice little housing tracts.  Across the highway, the industrial plants grew as well.  The whole thing pretty much boxed in the old hunting club properties.  As landowners died off, leases went away, and the property holdings shrank even further.

The end result, as it has been for so many hunting clubs, is that it’s hard not to run a pack of hounds without crossing private property lines.  Landholdings are getting smaller, and refugees from the suburbs and cities who buy their own little “piece of paradise” aren’t as willing to open their properties for access.  In some cases these new landowners want their own little hunting spot, and in others the newcomers just don’t want anything to do with hunting.  Some lines are being drawn, and many of them are fenced with pure hostility. 

Here’s the kicker.  Age old “range laws” in many states like NC require that the owner of livestock be permitted to access any property in order to recover their stock.  The property owner is not permitted to hinder this recovery, nor is he allowed to injure the stock.  This doesn’t just apply to cattle or sheep.  Dogs fall under the range laws as well.  So if a pack of hunting dogs ranges onto another landowner’s place, the law says that the owners of those dogs must be permitted to retrieve them.  This doesn’t sit well with many landowners… especially since this law is often abused by a handful of houndsmen who use the “I was just chasing my dogs,” argument to hunt property they do not own.

The conflicts have been heated.  Some landowners, in spite of the law, have taken to killing the dogs on sight.  In other cases violent confrontations have occurred, including firefights and murders.  This is no small thing.

It’s further exacerbated by what appears to be a new breed of “hunters”.  These are the 4-wheeler cowboys, equipped with jacked up trucks, quads, radios and high-powered rifles (a common sense no-no in the flat, coastal plain geography) who race roughshod through the woods behind and around the hounds.  The idea of fair chase appears to have been lost on these guys, as they herd and pursue the deer…often without regard for property lines or habitat destruction.  It’s a relatively small segment of the hunting population, but their actions are highly visible and the souce of a disproportionate amount of negative opinion toward all hunters. 

Where’s it all leading? 

Well obviously there’s going to have to be new regulation.  I’ve seen proposals from outright bans to limiting dog drives to properties that meet certain size requirements (x-number of acres, for example).  I’m not sure what the “right” answer is, myself… which is kinda why I’m throwing this out to all of you. 

Is the traditional dog drive doomed?  Is it an anachronism that has to face its fate?  Or can houndsmen find a way to co-exist with urban sprawl and suburban refugees? 

Like I said, some tough calls are on tap and I doubt that any of them are going to make everyone happy.  What do you think?

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