When I was young, laying on my bed with the window up, the sounds of spring in the hollow never failed to lull me to sleep. Except on the nights Old Blue, a Bluetick hound, decided to feel his lost youth and go huntin’. Which was more often than not. Old Blue was a part of the family and living in a secluded hollow there was never a reason to tie him up. One night I had lain and listen to Old Blue track and run, run and track. His baying barks seeming to come from all over the hollow as he tracked from one end to the other.
It was easy to picture yourself on the hunt with Old Blue anticipating the moment when he would stop moving and start barking in one location. That always meant he found his prey and had run it up a tree. There were a few critters he was likely to run up a tree - a raccoon, bobcat, or a bear. The coon was the only one of the three that tended to stay in the tree. The other two were less intimidated by Old Blue once they got a look at what was making that awful noise. Sometimes we would go to the tree Old Blue was barking at no matter what time of the night. Not to harm the animal in the tree but first just to see what it was and second to make sure it didn’t harm Old Blue.
It was never a have to thing to go check Old Blue but it was something that we enjoyed and was usually done by somebody in the family even if others didn’t want to go. On this night, Old Blue had something in a tree and had been barking in the same spot for nearly an hour. Most times if it was obvious nobody was coming to check on him, he would eventually give up and let it go. This time it was obvious he wasn’t going to let it go. My curiosity getting the better of me, I grab a flashlight and head for the mountains.
I knew these hollows like the back of my hand and just from listening to Old Blue I knew where he was and the hollow he was in. As soon as he saw the beam of the flashlight he started barking at an old beech tree with renewed vigor. I was immediately worried because Old Blue was called that for a reason. Two things encompassed his life by then - huntin’ critters at midnight and sleeping under the shade of the porch all day.
I approached Old Blue shining my light up into the bowels of the tree and asking him, “what is it boy?” He would look at me and then bay at the tree. I knew it wasn’t a bear because he wouldn’t have been very far up the tree or able to hide in it’s thin branches. I ruled out a raccoon as well because they didn’t climb the tree to hide but instead just to get away. More times than not they were moving around in the tree and you could easily catch their eyes in the light.
That left only one other critter Old Blue had been known to give chase to - a bobcat. Here I am with a flashlight and an old hound dog. I start circling the tree real slow shining the light up into it’s branches. I wanted to be sure of what it was before I turned my back on the tree. I made it about a quarter of the way around when something big came right at me from out of the tree. It was a bobcat. When backed into a corner animals will do strange things. In this instance the cat wasn’t attacking but was using me as a spring board to get away from Old Blue.
It jumped from the tree to my shoulder and upper back to the ground and just like that the bobcat and Old Blue were off again. I considered myself lucky for a few reasons - I didn’t have to use the bathroom, I was too young to worry about a heart attack, and the cat wasn’t out for blood. I often wondered afterward if the bobcat and Old Blue had just been playing that night. The next morning Old Blue was curled up under the front porch in his favorite napping spot with not a hair out of place and if that cat had wanted to it could have stood it’s ground and hurt that old Bluetick hound.
Old Blue has been gone for a few years but every once in a while, in the quiet of the mountains, I would swear I could hear Old Blue’s mournful baying as he tracks his friend the bobcat through distant hollows.
I sure do miss the sound of West Virginia.
