Nellie

 

     A friend recently asked if I had a picture of my great grandfather. I had to confess that I did not know who my great grandfathers were. I have been told that my maternal great grandmother had one leg, and that both of my grandfathers came from the Ozarks of Missouri, one fleeing home because his brothers were hanging around with Jesse James. He homesteaded in a sod house in the Sandhills of Nebraska. The other proved up on a chunk of dryland in northeastern Colorado where he survived the 30’s by becoming a traveling pickle salesman. 

     The Missouri connection is what, long ago, led my folks and me to travel from Alliance, Nebraska to Rutledge, Missouri to visit my Mom’s cousin Bobbie. The year before, Bobbie had her singlewide moved closer to the highway so she could better hear the trucks climbing the grade south of her place. That is about as hillbilly as one can get.

    While we were in Missouri, we attended the National Coon Dog Auction. There were maybe two hundred hounds of all types tethered in an acre of open land. One-by-one the dogs were led up a set of stairs to a platform erected outside the hay loft of a big red weather-wrinkled barn. Then the owners bragged about the dogs and a super mumbling auctioneer would sell them to bidders below, on trial, meaning that the buyer would have the option to hunt with the dogs that night, then return the mutt if not satisfied with its performance. Apparently, there were enough raccoons in that part of the woods. 

     No one said what a no-account mangy cur they were trying to sell. The emphasis of the sales pitch usually was on the dog’s voice, how one could determine by the frequency of the yips and yaps and baying whether the pack of dogs were running a coon or whether something else had been treed. One technique of successful raccoon hunting is to let loose the hounds then sit on a stump drinking beer until you can tell by the noise that the dogs have found some critter and ran it up a tree. Then you go retrieve the hounds. I don’t think any raccoons were murdered during the process.

      It was mid-afternoon when a gentleman led an older female redbone hound up the stairs. Both had gray whiskers. I can still hear the Ozark twang in his voice as he told the following story…

     “This here’s Nellie. She is getting a little long in the tooth and a little short in the get up and go, but she’s been a real good dog, raised many a litter of good hunters and never bit nobody. She’s blood relative to a good quarter of the dogs chained out yonder. 

     “Now a feller might wonder what a serious coon hunter would want with a grandmother dog like Nellie. She ain’t gonna be out in front of the pack, that’s for sure, but she sure has a great memory, and that comes in useful sometimes. Here, let me give you an example.

     “A week or so back a feller came out to my farm and said he wanted to buy the best hound I had. I directed him toward Nellie and when he asked what made her so special, I told him it was her memory, to come in for supper and then we would take her into the woods and demonstrate her skills.

     “By the time we had our bellies full it was dark. I called Nellie, pointed off towards the trees and told her to go find us a critter. She ran straight across the pasture, jumped maybe six feet straight up in the air, then ran into the woods. Five minutes later she was telling us that she had something treed, so we took a big flashlight and found her staring up an oak tree and talking. 

     “We couldn’t see the shine from any critter’s eyes up in the branches, but she insisted that she had treed something, so I climbed up into the branches. Way up near the top, in the crook of a branch, I found a raccoon skeleton. I brought it down and showed to the feller. I had mentioned that Nellie had a pretty stout memory.

      “He allowed as he was pretty impressed, but that he figured that there was a good chance that she might be losing her mind, because why else would she have jumped up into the air back there at the beginning? That is when I reminded him that I once had a fence across that piece of pasture.”

     

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