The Old Man kept the small variety of beagles, presuming it’s all beagles that they were. Maybe they were entirely beagles, but various of his hunting companions were not loath to accuse this dog or that one of “having a little Feist in him” or suchlike from time to time. I assume they meant the dog and not the man, though either could have been the case.
The Old Man traded for his beagles at flea markets, no pun intended, where the dogs’ provenance was considerably in doubt if you wished to prove much more about their bloodline than that they were, in fact, a dog. I never understood the value of “having papers” on such a creature, as I could not see how that proved anything. If you’d fake a dog, you could certainly fake a paper. These dogs weren’t meant for anything fancy, anyway. What he was looking for in a dog was heart, and he consistently found a lot of little beagles with a lot of notable heart. These were hunting dogs of the sort where the hunting came first, well before any features of the dog.
Breed regulations let beagles classify as the small variety if they stand up to 13 inches tall at the shoulder, but members of the Old Man’s pack were nowhere near that big. His philosophy said smaller dogs that had struggled to get where they were generally weren’t lazy and, generally, he proved to be exactly right. Like the dogs, he had struggled considerably himself and so could appreciate the value of a challenging start.
The Old Man wore leather-topped boots that were run down at the mouth, worn and pliable from miles of steps along cotton rows and through briar patches. They were a style that joined a leather top to a rubber bottom, and had the kind of gummed sole tread you don’t see much anymore. They left a distinctive track that was easy to mark because it ran in and among those of the dogs.
When we hunted, he preferred to be with the beagles. As soon as my friends and I were old enough to be trusted to go armed without him right by our side, and probably a little before then too, if truth be told, he never walked along with us once the chase began.
Rabbit hunts underway occupy one of two stages: jumping one, then chasing it. Jumping one to get the race started is the first place a little dog’s heart will show, or not, and rare was the second hunt for a beagle that wouldn’t dive into the briars to get things moving along. The aggressive got names and the uninterested got sold.
Beagles, if you’ve never been around them in their natural hunting pack environment, don’t act like setters or retrievers. Most don’t care about being talked to or petted, and pleasing their owner doesn’t even appear on their list at all. They’re strictly professionals. They live to trail and chase rabbits. People running alongside them would usually be a distraction, but the Old Man’s pack considered him one of their own. He ran in their midst without getting in the way.
I often asked him why he liked to run with the dogs that way, and he said it was the way he’d always hunted. In his childhood, he couldn’t afford shotgun shells, he said, but he put meat on the table by knocking over rabbits with whatever could be thrown, and chucking rabbits is a close-quarters proposition if ever there was one. He didn’t chuck when he hunted with us, though usually he didn’t even carry a gun either.
Even then I could tell there seemed to be more to it, but I thought the rest of the story was probably something obvious I couldn’t see. Decades on, I think I can make it out.
Experience has taught me that everyone finds their stress relief somewhere. I had to see this for myself because, when I came along, those of his generation who’d found theirs in less wholesome places had mostly been destroyed by their choice. The surviving remnant wasn’t a large enough sample to let me connect the dots. It’s taken seeing the process in action to understand. Now the lessons I saw as a boy connect with those I’ve outlived as a man, and I have a more complete picture of how things go.
What’s more, there’s considerable enjoyment to be found in doing something you’re good at once you’re to a point in life when the stakes in play are merely theoretical, not life-sustaining. Hopefully I can demonstrate that to a few others along the way.
Most good things in life require a mentor to learn, becoming a mentor not the least of these. The Old Man’s not here to show me the way anymore, but, luckily, he left a lot of good tracks I can follow.
Kevin Tate is the outdoors writer for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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