I Spent Thanksgiving with Southern Hunters Who Ran Deer Hounds. Here’s What I Realized

This story, “Yalobusha Deer,” appeared within the Nov. 1962 concern of Outdoor Life.

For the big-game hunter who likes to fireside at a fleet and agile goal to the accompaniment of canine music, I like to recommend capturing whitetail bucks forward of a combined pack of Walker and black and tan deer hounds within the Mississippi Delta cotton nation. The two-week, cut up season in Mississippi is opened in line with the custom of searching deer in the course of the Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s holidays. A hunter is allowed one buck throughout every half of the season.

Last November, Franklin Smith, an outdated buddy and bass-fishing companion, invited me to hitch his neighborhood deer camp deep within the fork the place the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers converge to type the Yazoo at Greenwood. I accepted with alacrity, for I had been a frequent customer within the camp and knew it had probably the greatest kill information of any camp its measurement within the Delta. Besides, the editor of OUTDOOR LIFE had requested me to maintain my eyes open for a superb whitetail story set on this northwestern a part of Mississippi. I armed myself with solely a digital camera and a bag of equipment, decided to dedicate my whole consideration to pictures moderately than to take an opportunity on muffing each the images and a attainable shot for a kill.

Early the primary morning that I used to be in camp, I went with Franklin to begin a drive. He parked the canine truck within the fringe of the Pugh Field, website of an historic ferry touchdown on the Yalobusha River, and we launched the hounds 45 minutes after we left the camp.

The pack, with Franklin and me shut behind, ran 50 yards throughout a cotton patch and scattered in a willow thicket that was shot by with signal. Buck struck sizzling scent instantly and gave out with a deep-throated squall. The outdated hound was unquestioned by his teammates. Long Shot wailed an acknowledgment, and the pack rushed to Buck to assist unwind the path. First one canine bawled, then one other as they leapfrogged and accelerated their tempo alongside the downwind path. Then the deer jumped and the pack opened in full cry. Chills ran up and down my backbone. I puzzled if this had been the start of the top of the jinx that Franklin advised me had been using the hunt.

I couldn’t get away from my house in Memphis, Tenn., till late the second day after the season opened November 20. I drove 100 miles to the little city of Money about 10 miles north of Greenwood, crossed the Tallahatchie, and arrived in camp at midnight. I discovered a vacant cot within the sleeping tent and sacked in unannounced.

The subsequent morning, day broke imply and ugly with a robust, moisture-laden wind blo wing out of the southwest. I’d been up about 10 minutes and was brewing espresso when Franklin poked his head by the tent flaps. “Morning, Bob,” he stated. “Glad you could come. Going to be a mean day for a drive. That wind must be blasting at least 20 miles an hour.”

“How about a cup of coffee?” I requested, including that Willie Davis, the camp prepare dinner, had breakfast virtually made within the prepare dinner shack. While we sipped our espresso, Franklin advised me concerning the robust luck that had plagued the camp.

“We’ve been in the woods two whole days and still haven’t killed a young buck for Thanksgiving,” he complained. It was a customized of the camp to rejoice Thanksgiving Day with an elaborate dinner that includes tender venison steaks. Franklin stated that Jean Everett, going to his stand on opening day, had jumped and killed an enormous, six-point buck, however the meat was robust as shoe leather-based and would require particular remedy earlier than being palatable.

“It’s been raining baby bluegills for weeks,” he exaggerated. “If it wasn’t for the flood-control reservoirs along the edge of the hills, this whole country would be under water.”

Generally, the Delta terrain is flat and all the time has been plagued with floods. During current years, dams have been constructed throughout 4 turbulent rivers, simply earlier than they emerge from the hills, to lure extreme rainfall earlier than it gushes down on the plain. Even so, Franklin defined, the common vary had been flooded, and the hunters had needed to work the ridges in unfamiliar territory south of camp. Many of the hills had been utterly remoted by water, a scenario a lot to the liking and benefit of the deer. At night time the animals waded out to feed within the woods and fields and returned to the excessive floor to relaxation in the course of the day. It was troublesome for the canines to get a buck straightened out in a race due to the myriad scents and trails on the ridges. “The deer kill nearly always is reduced during overflow conditions in the Delta,” Franklin stated.

To make issues worse, he defined, the shortening daylight had triggered the rut and the bucks had been reluctant to be chased away from the does.

“The water will be off our regular range north of camp by this morning,” Franklin stated. “We scouted it for sign yesterday. We’ve just got to have a spike for Thanksgiving.”

The canines, penned behind the prepare dinner shack, will need to have acknowledged the tall, slim cotton planter for they joined in a refrain of yelps and whines the second he walked as much as the fireplace. Four Walkers belonged to Franklin. Two Walkers and 6 black and tans had been the proud possessions of Harold Terry and Henry Everett. It was a fastidiously chosen pack, weeded and blended from the day the canines had been born till the time they had been prepared to hitch the crew. Franklin’s Buster, a Walker, had a tremendous, brief bark that harmonized with the coarse, lengthy voice of Everett’s Sally, one other Walker. Long Shot, a misnomer for an additional large, rangy Walker had a deep bass and was famous for the pace with which he may straighten out a drive. Long Shot known as the canines the second a path was scented and flanked them to foil any sensible outdated buck that may attempt to soar out of the race. Buck, an historic black and tan that will be retired after this season, was the most effective soar canine within the pack. Black Willie, one other black and tan, barked with a medium chop and was Buck’s understudy.

The Walkers excelled as runners of nice stamina, however they had been exhausting to manage. The black and tans had the most effective noses on a chilly path and so they could possibly be managed simply, pulled from the path of a doe and forged after a buck jumped by hunters. The pack labored superbly collectively. According to voice and expertise, the canines had been chosen effectively to make probably the most melodious and formidable packs of deer hounds within the state of Mississippi, the place 80 % of the whitetail deer killed are hunted with canines.

Willie known as us to breakfast, and the hunters started to file out of the tent. All lived within the neighborhood of Money and all had been in a single part or one other of the cotton enterprise. I shook palms with Franklin’s older brother and my good buddy, Dee Smith. I used to be glad to see Harold Terry and Henry Everett and a flock of Henry’s nephews. Myles Flynn and J. Ok. Tate would come within the following morning. Kirk Hobson accomplished the roster of hunters already within the camp. These had been veteran deer hunters carrying hip boots and drab, green-and-brown clothes moderately than the favored purple or yellow. They had been seasoned woodsmen who had hunted collectively for a few years, and they didn’t concern killing or maiming each other. A stranger or careless hunter was not admitted to the camp.

We put away Willie’s hearty breakfast whereas Franklin gave last-minute directions to the standers. “Bob and I will start the drive on the Yalobusha River about two miles downwind from camp,” he stated. “Keep your eyeballs peeled every second, unless you want boiled rump roast for Thanksgiving. In this high wind you might not hear the dogs and let a plump spike run right by you.”

He’d give the standers 45 minutes to take their positions and suggested them to get their smoking and constitutionals over with earlier than they left the camp. “Be careful,” he stated, sternly. “The law says we can’t shoot anything without horns.”

We loaded the canines within the truck and headed west towards Money for we’d should drive 12 miles across the swamp.

In about 90 jumps out of 100, a buck will run into the wind, or no less than quarter into it, so he can scent something that stands in his path. He’ll veer off target if he senses hazard however will swing again into line when he’s handed it. His capability to tell apart immobile objects is simply honest, however any movement, nevertheless slight, shouts a warning to him. His sense of listening to is acute, and he can determine sounds. But above all else, he relies upon upon his excellent nostril for self-preservation. The observe of driving upwind places the standers at a drawback due to the deer’s eager sense of scent, but it surely can’t be averted. If you attempt to drive a buck with the wind, he can’t be counted on to comply with his normal trails, and the standers’ greatest calculations are of no avail.

When Franklin remarked that the hunters had scouted the common vary the earlier afternoon, he meant that that they had gone over it fastidiously, looking for and analyzing deer signal. They’d noticed the favourite feeding grounds and bedding locations and positioned the scrapes the place bucks had honed their antlers in opposition to saplings and pawed the earth of their belligerence towards each other and of their mounting ardour for the does. The hunters had paid specific consideration to the slim, hoof-cut trails and runways the deer used to maneuver from one hangout to a different, as a result of it was at junctions and at different strategic factors alongside these paths that they’d station themselves in the course of the drives. Deer are creatures of behavior. According to Dee Smith, and verified by dates of hunts and hunters’ initials nonetheless within the bark of hackberry bushes, a few of the stands taken on this hunt had been utilized by hunters 50 years in the past.

The earlier night time after supper, playing cards had been lower for the selecting of stands. In a small camp like this one the place fewer than a dozen standers cowl an space some six miles deep and two miles huge, the success of the drive relies upon as a lot on the hunters’ talent in selecting stands as on their marksmanship.

I went together with Franklin to begin the drive as a result of I needed to get an image of a buck and the canines in a race. It can be a miracle if I bought the prospect, as a result of a buck normally doesn’t desire a pack of canines shut sufficient to pose in an image with him; nevertheless, if the chance got here it might be at first of the drive. Any jumped deer would take off at breakneck pace, abandoning all precaution. Then he’d flip into the wind, and, after he’d run a few mile and put a large distance between him and the canines, he’d hunt down one in every of his common trails and decelerate to a lope or a stroll, stopping typically to look, hear, and scent earlier than fastidiously continuing. If the buck circled again by us earlier than the canines straightened him out, I simply may get my image.

From Money, Franklin and I drove north two miles, then turned northeast throughout Six-Mile Lake and labored our manner by fields and woodlands to the Yalobusha River about two miles east of the McIntyre Scatters, an enormous, sprawling cypress brake on the head of McIntyre Lake (see “Miracle of the Scatters,” OUTDOOR LIFE, June, 1958). That was once we forged the canines into Pugh Field, as I stated on the outset.

When the pack lined out downwind after the soar, Franklin sprinted towards a strip of timber behind the truck and yelled for me to take a seat tight and have my digital camera prepared. “If it’s a buck, he’ll circle and head into the wind,” he stated. “One of us might get a shot.”

The wind had torn a rift within the clouds and solar was shinning brightly. I propped my again in opposition to a purple oak and checked my digital camera, targeted the space on infinity, set the shutter pace at 1/100 second and aperture at f/11. Then I stored my eyes on the sting of a woods within the course of the bedlam raised by the canines.

Suddenly, the pack turned and bore straight towards me. A doe broke out of the woods which bordered the cotton patch on the north. Moments later, a monstrous buck appeared, and the pair tore throughout the cotton patch straight towards me. The canines exploded from the woods not over 100 yards behind the buck.

Without wanting down, I rolled the focusing knob on my digital camera to twenty ft, as a result of that was how shut the deer would cross me. I modified the shutter pace to 1/200 seconds and the aperture to f/8. Then I couldn’t see something however buck and horns. If I’d squeezed the shutter launch at that in foreground in floor glass and the canines would have been getting into on the prime. But I didn’t launch the shutter. I didn’t even purpose the digital camera. I couldn’t. The deer thudded away down a cotton row behind me. Then the canines blasted by.

As quickly as I used to be out of the road of fireside. Franklin let go along with three photographs on the buck, quartering away from him at 100 yards. The distance was too nice, for by that point the buck was leaping 20 ft to the stride and zigzagging. The photographs had been fired extra as a sign to the standers {that a} buck was working than with intent to kill.

It wasn’t a good shot, so Franklin’s shirttail was protected. I puzzled about mine. Franklin ran over, smiling. “Boy, you must have got a honey of a picture,” he stated.

“I didn’t shoot,” I replied, actual low.

“You didn’t what?” he demanded in amazement. Then he sneered, “Buck fever! Well, let’s get going. We’ve got a well-racked buck making a beeline for the Scatters.”

A deer holds no aversion for water, and its use to clean away scent is the animal’s greatest stratagem for eluding hunters and canines. The hounds will swim after him throughout a slim slough or bayou and decide up the path on the opposite aspect, however they’ll lose him if he sprints throughout a large, shallow pan of overflow water, plunges into an enormous brake, or swims down a river.

Franklin Smith, in his early 40’s, is the most effective woodsman I do know. Lean and wiry, be set a painful tempo by two miles of swampland. It was all I may do to maintain him in sight. The deer handed north of Flynn on the Yellow Elm Stand ( a landmark splashed on a tree with yellow paint), and the canines misplaced them within the Scatters. Franklin gathered the hounds together with his horn, and we set them to searching again towards the truck for a brand new path. In about an hour and a half, Black Willie jumped close to the Duck Hole, a small, swampy lake south of the Pugh Field. The final we heard of it, the pack was working straight towards the standers. “If that deer keeps on course,” Franklin stated, “it’s going to run right over Shorty on the Lost Lake Stand.”

We went again to the truck and set out for camp. Normally, we’d have stayed for a attainable rerun of the course from the opposite finish, however the sky had turned darkish and it was starting to rain. No deerhound on earth can maintain a path in a downpour.

On the lengthy experience to camp, I admired the attractive Delta panorama, now washed by a mild rain. The late David Cohn, eminent Greenville writer, stated that the Delta begins within the foyer of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row beneath the bluffs of Vicksburg. The big, leaf-shaped plain, 50 miles huge between Greenville and Greenwood, is walled in on the west by the Mississippi River levee and on the east by the sheer cliffs on the foot of the Mississippi hills. In the winter, it’s a land of huge, snowy-white cotton fields hemmed in between naked, brown forests and swamps that mark the programs of swift, rain-swollen rivers and bayous. In the spring and summer time, the Delta is an angler’s paradise, in fall and winter, a mecca for hunters.

“Franklin, what was the biggest buck you ever killed?” I requested above the whisper of rain on the truck’s roof.

“One morning I started a drive at the camp just as the sun peeped up,” he answered. “The canines jumped fast and ran a doe and fawn into Sorghum Mill Lake. I blew them again and forged them once more. They scattered. About 9 o’clock, Long Shot hit a sizzling observe and lined out west, working plumb out of listening to. If it was a buck, I figured he’d swing north and are available again down an outdated path a few mile north of the place I used to be, so I took off as quick as I may.

“I’d watched the trail for over an hour and had just about given up hope when I thought I heard old Long Shot. Then I could hear him plainly. He was really dogging that deer. I glanced to my left front and there was a monster buck coming at a fast, easy lope. At 15 yards I raised my 8 mm. Mauser and centered his neck with a 180-grain soft-nose bullet. He fell like a wet boot. The buck had 12 points and weighed 260 pounds, the largest ever killed from this camp.”

We bought again to camp in time for me to get an image of Sno and Fat Everett amputating Shorty’s shirttail. “Bob, did you get a picture on the jump?” Harold Terry requested.

“No, he didn’t,” Franklin answered for me. “But a king-size buck, a doe, and a whole flock of dogs almost ran over him.”

“Get his, boys,” Henry Everett ordered, and so they bobtailed my new purple shirt a superb two inches above the belt line.

Henry crammed us in on the stander’s finish of the drive. The deer Black Willie jumped was a doe and he or she ran proper by Shorty. The bother began when Shorty stood up within the mattress of his pick-up for a greater view of the race. In the commotion, a spike buck bought up from a weed discipline close by and tried to slide away. Shorty opened up with three blasts of No. 1 buckshot from his full-choke, 12 gauge computerized and took off behind the spike, reloading as he went. He bought in three extra photographs on the deer with slugs after it swam a bayou and earlier than it disappeared in a canebrake, white flag nonetheless excessive in an impudent sign that it wasn’t even nicked.

Dee and Harold left in a truck to attempt to find the canines that may nonetheless be working the doe someplace between the camp and Greenwood. Bad luck nonetheless rode the camp.

I went to mattress early that night time. A torrent of rain beat down on the tent till the wind switched to the north. Within two hours the temperature dropped from 60° to twenty-eight. I pushed down deeper in my blankets and slept like a child till Willie routed us out for breakfast.

It was Thanksgiving Day, and the 20-mile wind had slackened to a five-mile breeze. The floor was white with frost. The solar rose large and purple with promise. “Perfect day for a drive,” Franklin stated, gleefully.

Because of the shift in wind course, Franklin and I swapped sides with the standers and chatted over a second cup of espresso whereas they had been going to their stations, principally the identical ones because the day earlier than. We talked concerning the terrific enhance in Mississippi deer, estimated to be over 125,000 in 1961.

During the late 20’s, whitetails had been virtually extinct in most of Mississippi. In 1932, the newly organized Mississippi Game and Fish Commission closed the season and inaugurated a vigorous restocking and game-management program.

Four hundred deer had been imported and launched in rigidly protected refuges. As the deer multiplied, about 2,500 had been trapped and stocked in each county within the state. The success of this system exceeded all expectations. The prolific price of enhance throughout current years is indicated by the truth that solely 3,700 deer had been killed as late because the 1956 season in contrast with a complete of 9,700 bagged in 1960.

Franklin, who’s a deputy state recreation warden, advised me a few current dialog he’d had with W. H. (Bill) Turcotte, recreation and fisheries chief for the fee. “Bill says we’ve become dangerously overstocked with deer in some areas along the Mississippi River. The bucks run smaller and are not as well antlered as our deer here in LeFlore County,” he stated.

Bill advised Franklin that for this season (1961-62) the fee had issued 100 antlerless deer permits to only one membership in Bolivar County. The permits, in fact, had been for kills over and above the some 200 bucks that members of the large membership could possibly be anticipated to kill in the course of the season. Other golf equipment in Washington and Bolivar counties had been granted permits in line with the necessity to skinny their herds.

“In LeFlore County, we’ve had no trouble keeping our deer and range in balance,” Franklin stated. “That’s why we kill such big, fine bucks. I expect the standers are getting chilly and would like to hear a dog bark. Let’s turn them aloose.”

The hounds scattered in a sparse woods like pool balls on the break. They had been nonetheless in sight when Sally sounded off. Long Shot squalled for the opposite canines. The hounds strung out alongside the path, barking intermittently. The deer broke away and the pack opened in unison, filling the forest with a steady roar. We sat on a log and had been having fun with the symphony once we realized that the canines had been swinging away from the standers. In a couple of minutes they turned again into the wind, and we heaved sighs of aid. One hound, nevertheless, stored going away towards the east, bawling for all he was price. “It’s Long Shot,” Franklin stated. “We’ve got deer running in two different directions.”

He guessed {that a} buck had tried to make a protracted soar out of the race and let the canines go by after his working mate. “Long Shot was flanking the race, luckily on the right side, and caught him in the act,” Franklin stated. The acoustics of the swamp had been excellent within the crisp, frosty ambiance. We may hear each twist and switch of the chase and select every canine by the pitch of its voice.

Suddenly, they stopped barking — “Just like you’d caught them in a sack,” Franklin laughed.

The hounds had overrun the path at a flip or misplaced it momentarily in a stretch of water. Buster struck it up once more, and the music resumed. Shortly thereafter, we heard three rifle photographs in fast succession, adopted by a single blast from a shotgun. The frenzy of barking dwindled to at least one half-hearted yelp. “Buck number one, I hope,” Franklin stated, elevating a finger. “I don’t like the sound of a barrage. I’d rather hear just one, echoing shot.” We took a stand on the south finish of Sorghum Mill Lake and waited, understanding the hunters would forged the canines once more whether or not a deer had been killed or its path misplaced by the canines.

In about half-hour the hounds jumped once more and ran an enormous circle round Splice Brake, a watery cypress jungle to our left entrance. Then Franklin bought his single, echoing explosion. “Business is picking up,” he stated. “That sounded like Henry Everett’s old 12 gauge double. If it was, that’s buck number two.” He raised two fingers.

“Henry doesn’t miss. Let’s get in the truck and find out what’s going on.”

We drove throughout an enormous triangle of cotton fields that pointed on the fringe of a dense swamp surrounding Splice Brake. Franklin parked, and we set out by the woods on foot. We hadn’t gone 100 yards once we met Flynn and Tate dragging a 225-pound buck by its big, 13-point rack. Flynn, again on the Yellow Elm Stand, had killed the buck going at a quick clip after Dee glimpsed the buck and a doe trotting by his stand out of vary. The three successive photographs we’d heard had been a warning sign from Dee’s .30/30. Tate advised us that Henry Everett had gone to borrow a tractor to haul out a 10-point buck he had killed.

We returned to camp and had been dressing the large deer when Henry drove in together with his 200-pounder thrown throughout the tractor behind him. It was the deer that had circled Splice Brake. With outstanding pace, Henry, anticipating the deer’s course, left his stand on the jap finish of the brake and intercepted the buck because it swung round an outdated path that ran alongside the northern shore. He dropped it with a rifled slug not 100 yards from the place Flynn had made his kill.

Also by this writer — Gollywompers: A Secret Old Bait for Giant Bass

An hour later, face smeared with the blood of his first buck, Troy Everett got here staggering throughout a cotton patch in entrance of the camp with our Thanksgiving dinner draped round his shoulders. We’d by no means recognized whether or not the spike jumped out of the race or whether or not, as Dee surmised, he was flushed by the primary buck and doe. We do know that Long Shot stored doggedly after the buck till it lastly took a path that led by Troy, standing within the fringe of a plowed discipline on the head of Horseshoe Lake. The younger hunter killed the spike immediately with a detailed sample of buckshot that went proper into the rib cage.

It was a grateful group of hunters that sat all the way down to a bountiful venison-steak dinner that night time. The jinx was damaged. Next yr, nevertheless, I’d depart my digital camera at house; I’d moderately have an assault of buck fever with a rifle in my palms.

Bullet Recovery

Many totally different strategies of recovering fired bullets have been tried, however thus far none have been solely passable. Bullets fired into water increase a lot as they’d on watery tissue. Flight of fired bullets in fluffed cotton or wool is erratic. Cork mud stirs up a number of particles. Gun nut I do know fires bullets at lengthy vary into snowdrifts, then gathers them up when the snow melts in spring. He’s a affected person hombre.

Winchester claims to have licked the issue by use of blocks of polyurethane foam, the identical stuff that’s typically used for cushioning bedding and furnishings. In the lab, a sequence of blocks is lined up and the bullet fired from a distance of 4 ft. Bullets are recovered unmarked aside from the rifling. — Jack O’Connor