Jeff Davis | https://hounddogcentral.com

The first hunt after I got Ranger is another memory that’s never faded, though the years have worn the edges soft like an old photograph. By then I had grown a little taller, though not much, and Daddy had decided I was old enough to tag along when the men gathered for a real hunt. Not just him and me slipping through the woods quiet, but the whole crew. His friends. The kind of hunt where trucks lined the road and hounds filled the dark with music.

I remember climbing into the truck before daylight, Ranger whining in a little wooden crate in the back. The air was cold enough that my breath puffed white in front of me when I talked. Daddy’s old heater clanked and rattled like it might quit any second, but it pushed just enough warm air into the cab to keep my fingers from going numb.

When we pulled up to the meeting spot there were already three or four trucks there. Headlights cutting through the dark. Dog boxes rattling. Men leaning against tailgates with their collars turned up against the cold.

And the talking.

Men talking before a hunt is something special. Stories floating through the dark. Laughing. Arguing about dogs. Swearing their hound struck first the night before. Somebody always telling about the one that got away.

I stayed close to Daddy at first, mostly listening.

One of the men—old Mr. Carl I think it was—looked down at me and grinned through his beard.

“Well look here,” he said. “Boy’s getting big enough to hunt with us now.”

Another man reached into the back of his truck and came back holding a small metal cup.

“You ever had coffee, son?”

I hadn’t, but I nodded anyway. I wanted to seem older than I was.

He poured a little from a blackened thermos and handed it to me. Steam rolled out into the cold air. I took a careful sip.

It was awful.

Bitter as anything I’d ever tasted.

The men laughed when they saw my face twist up.

“Put a little hair on your chest,” one of them said.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I took another sip anyway just to prove I could.

While they talked, the dogs started getting wound up. Hounds barking inside the boxes. Chains rattling. The sound of excitement building like a storm rolling in.

That’s when the woods started to feel different.

When you’re a kid standing in the dark, surrounded by trees that seem taller than they do in daylight, your mind starts to wander. Every branch snapping somewhere out there sounds bigger than it probably is.

I remember staring into the black timber beyond the trucks and thinking about the stories I’d heard. About creatures that lived deep in the woods. Big things nobody ever really saw clear.

I leaned over toward Daddy.

“Do you think Bigfoot lives out there?”

He looked down at me and tried not to smile.

“No son,” he said. “Ain’t nothing out there but raccoons and deer.”

But the way the wind moved through the trees made the woods creak and whisper. Shadows shifted where the headlights didn’t quite reach.

For a while I wasn’t entirely convinced.

Then the tailgates slammed shut.

Dog box doors opened.

And suddenly the woods exploded with hounds.

Deep bawls rolled through the timber as the dogs struck out down the hollow. Ranger’s young voice mixed in with the older dogs, not as strong yet, but trying hard to keep up.

The men snapped on their lights and started down the trail, boots crunching leaves.

Daddy looked back at me.

“You coming?”

I nodded and hurried after them.

And just like that, the woods didn’t seem quite so scary anymore. Because wherever monsters might have been hiding, they’d have to get through a pack of coonhounds first.

And that, I figured, was about the safest place a little boy could be.