Dad was a hound dog man, therefore, we always had several howling, floppy eared, drooling dogs that shared our life. Some were hitched outside to square wooden boxes with a small opening hung with a canvas flap. Barr was one of Dad’s favorite hounds and was allowed to live inside with the family. The big, white and tan, over grown beast spent his days sprawled in front of the wood stove sending up a cloud of fine ash as he ran after an imaginary raccoon and drooled out the side of his mouth.
They all set up a ruckus to alert us, and the neighbors, when a car drove in the drive way or someone fished down the brook.
In the late summer Dad would hear from a local farmer of raccoons raising havoc in his corn field and off he’d go into the night with a truck full of howling yapping dogs to ferret out the pesky varmints. Mom would sometimes go along too dressed in a black and red checkered wool jacket with a knit hat pulled down over her ears usually with a twenty-two rifle slung over her shoulder.
They joined a group of fellow coon dog owners on weekends and had trials where the dogs competed to be crowned “Hound Dog of the Year.”
Dad practiced for these trials at home. By wrapping a board with a rag saturated with rendered raccoon fat and dragged through the woods to hang in a tree. The dogs would be set loose to uproarious barking and gleeful jumping and off they’d go to tracking the scent and find the tree with the rancid reeking contraption.
Dad usually made some money every year by selling the hides . He skinned the raccoon and scraped all the fat of the inside of the fur then nailed the stretched fur hide to a wall in the wood shed. They dried into a smelly, crusty, crispy pile of gray and black fluff with four stiff outstretched limbs. He took them off the shed wall and stacked them up like a deck of cards and when the season was over he sent hem off the be sold to make coon skin caps, stoles or fur collars.
One bright Saturday morning Herbie, our neighbor, stopped in to visit and peeking out from his cupped hands was a tuft of gray and black fur with tiny pointed ears, a baby raccoon. We were delighted and became mothers over night. We feed him warm milk and carried him around in our loving arms. As he grew he followed us around like a puppy and made us laugh when he dunked his bread in milk before stuffing it in his mouth. We all agreed, Cookie, would be a good name for our precious baby.
Herbie’s wife Norma was scared to death of our new pet. She would shout “Get that creature away from me”! We thought Cookie sensed her fear and playfully teased her by climbing on the back of her chair and trying to snuggle in her hair. With a mighty whoop she would leap into the air swatting at our innocent baby and calling him a nasty little varmint, as she ran for the door.
He was our constant companion all that summer as he followed us around the yard scurrying along behind us in his funny little hunched over walk, his nose to the ground and his tail sticking out straight.
He not only teased Norma but also enjoyed teasing the hound dogs by walking just out of reach of their out stretched chains. They barked and snarled much to the delight of our little Cookie.
When school started in the Fall and his being alone, for the first time, he ventured further and further out in the yard in an ever widening circle until one day he got too close to the well trained hound dogs and our adventurous little Cookie teased one time too many. We sobbed at the dreadful news and Dad unsympathetically shouted “That’s what they’ re trained to do – kill raccoons!”

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