Are there any coon hunters still out there? Anyone still chasing the elusive Bandito around? Or do you know anyone who is? Have you ever been? Hey, don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. Don’t scoff at those who partake in the oldest of hunting traditions. These are not just the rednecks and poor folk that TV portrays.

I grew up coon hunting. When I was about 12 years old, a coon hunting gentleman moved next to us in Newton County. Virgil Brown was from New Castle, Virginia, so far back in the hills he used to say that they had to pipe in sunshine. He grew up in the mining and railroad part of the mountains and knew all about the mine strikes, bombings, shootingsand lore. In fact, he had lived a lot of it. He had been a railroad detective for Norfolk Southern Railroad after a stint as a Roanokepoliceman and detective. He had stories about stakeouts, shootings, murders, bombings, moonshiners, drug dealers, and just plain old outlaws. Me, well I had a grandfather who bought milk for Sealtest Dairies and his territory was Putnam, Greeneand Taliferro counties. I had connections to hunting properties plus, I liked to talk so I talked my way onto many a farm on my own!

From the time I was 12 until I graduated from Social Circle High School, we hunted about 200 nights a year. We had good dogs. We didn’t competition hunt much, but we had good dogs and we had a good time. We were hunting the night that the famous blizzard hit Georgia. I still remember looking at the snow falling through big old oaks in the beam of NiteLite head lamp on a farm outside of Covington, Georgia. When Sid slid home in Fulton County Stadium I was leaning against the tailgate of an old Isuzu diesel pup pickup truck in which he taught me to drive a stick shift.

To us this was not just a wintertime sport. We ran coons all year. Of course, we only shot them during the season, but we trapped coons year around. We caught them in a live trap so we could turn them loose for our dogs to train on and run. We ran dogs up and down dirt roads for hundreds of miles in Newton County. We went to bench trials, night hunts; we hunted our farms and our deer leases that we knew. Back then we didn’t have to go far. It was just right around the corner to find a good place to hunt. There just wasn’t many folks down here… A lot of these stories in fact took place right off Lower Harmony Road. Others took place off Highway 278 between the Hub and I-20. Some even took place down in White Plains. We had the run of a lot of land, and it was simply heaven for a young boy like me to get to be out at all hours of the night and to listen to the stories, the dogs trailing, the tree barks, the sharp crack of a .22 at night. I can still hear and feel all of that to this day. I still walk around my little piece of earth without a light because Virgil taught me to never turn on a light because it might run out of battery (or carbide for him as a kid) when you needed it most. I learned from him to never argue with a compass, and to protect those you love and your dogs at all costs.

We lost Virgil about 22 years ago to cancer. I still think of him almost every day and I wish I could introduce our kids to him, an old mountain man in the truest sense of the word.