According to John our fearless leader that always had to take a kitchen chair with him so he could sit down when he got tired, and he always suffered from lumbago, so that was quite often. It was always the greenhorn’s task to carry the blasted chair through the brush on one of these nightly forays. I got my share of carrying the blasted chair when I first started going on coon hunts. We would gather just as it was becoming dark there would be somewhere between twelve and fifteen of us going on any night during hunting season. John and his brother Buck would appear with the dogs. Why I tell you John had an old female “Bluetick” hound named “Old Blue” why that dog was worth more then twenty thousand dollars. He also had a Black and Tan and a Redbone hound. According to John these dogs were worth more then one hundred thousand dollars.

Everybody piled into the back of a pickup truck and we would go careening off into the darkness to our hunting ground for that night. I was only a teenager then and my girlfriend would come on the hunt too. A couple of young ladies and her used to pluck the hairs off my leg for amusement. On the ride to the hunting grounds, usually someplace where you weren’t supposed to hunt, but we did anyway. By the time we got there I was thoroughly plucked.

Roy Chapman Andrews, the curator of the American Museum of Natural History, had a summer place where we used to sneak in after he had gone to Tucson for the winter. Roy also had a skeet range on his property, and unknown to us he went to Tucson and left the skeet traps cocked and loaded. We came blundering into this in the middle of the night, dogs and all. The next thing we knew there were clay pigeons flying every which way as we hit the trap wires letting loose a whole volley of them that went whizzing all over the place just at about the level of our heads. It’s a wonder that the whole bunch of us weren’t killed by these errant birds. Much to everyone’s surprise we survived this onslaught, and beat it to heck off Roy Chapman Andrew’s property thanking our lucky stars that both we and the dogs survived the flight of the clay pigeons.