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Grab Your Hip Waders and Let’s Go Coon Huntin’!

The fish finally quit bitin’ on that pleasant April afternoon on Lake Lafayette in Tallahassee. After catching about 20 bass within a half-hour, including an 11.5-pound lunker (my biggest bass to date), I probably had hooked every fish in that hole and figured it was time for me to go home. Willie Williams, who I’d just befriended, had himself caught enough specks for diner, so he too decided to call it a day.

But before we left the lake that afternoon, we talked for a spell and admired the huge, trophy bass I had caught. That’s when Willie mentioned to me his love for coon huntin’ and said he had some “sureenough coon dogs.”

I remember Willie getting excited and saying, “They ain’t nothin’ like the feelin’ that comes over you when you hear your dogs open up on a hot trail.”

He also told me: “People get crazy ’bout them dogs,” and then suddenly, his mood shifted to melancholy. Willie began to speak slower and more deliberate, telling me about the time his best coon dog got stolen. As he reflected on that painful memory, he got a little teary eyed, and his voice got choked-up when he told me: “I ain’t never cried over any woman like I done cried over that dog.”

That phrase would become part of the chorus on a slow-tempo, 12- bar blues song I later wrote and recorded in memory of Willie’s beloved dog, Belle. “Coonhound

As Willie and I trudged up the hill, he offered to let me park my truck at his place the next time I went fishing. Doing that would make for a shorter walk, and I thanked him for the kind gesture. When we neared his house, Willie said his prized female treeing-Walker coonhound had recently given birth to a litter of pups and asked if I wanted to have a look at ’em.

“Sure,” I said.

There were six puppies, about a month-old -- “saddlebacks” with lots of distinctive black “ticks” on their undersides. They didn’t have much white on ’em, like a lot of Walkers do, and had only a touch of brown around their faces and rears.

Willie said if my wife and I wanted one, he’d give us pick of the litter.

I took him up on his offer. My wife, Elizabeth, picked out a pretty female that took a liking to her immediately. Dakota, as we named her, turned out to be a fine coon dog, a great pet and a welcome addition to our family.

We now have two treeing- Walkers, because we bred Dakota and kept a female we named Star.

I returned the favor by giving Willie a female puppy out of the same litter. This special “gift-ofgiving” had now come full-circle. Willie has since bred that dog and kept three of its offspring.

Between the two of us, we plan to keep the bloodline going, but