RAMBLINGS IN THE NIGHT..... Coon fight in the Hollar.

RAMBLINGS IN THE NIGHT……. Coon fight in the Hollar.

            This story happened a few years back, in 2010. I was living in Atlanta, GA at the time. I had just come off active duty from the U.S. Navy. I decided to surprise my folks and visit one weekend. It was around the end of April or the first part of May. I drove up to Robbinsville, NC to my Moms home. I got there and there wasn’t a person at home. I called Moms cell and come to find out she had gone up to Asheville, NC for the weekend, to stay with my cousin Melanie and her family.

            Well, I called my cuz April and went down and hung out with her and her husband Calvin for a little while. We grilled out some steaks and hung out for a while. Getting caught up on everything going on in Robbinsville.

            Well along around 10PM I headed back up to Moms. I was beat from the drive up from Atlanta. It was time to get comfortable watch a little TV then call it a night. Robbinsville is a dry county, so alcohol was out of the question. And Mom don’t allow that stuff in her home. 

            Anyways around midnight and had decided to hit the sack. Now I am used to living in the big city. There is always some kind of noise going on in the back ground in Atlanta. Man it was so quiet at Moms, you could hear the wheels turning in the little heads of the crickets outside. And dark, it gets dark at Moms house when the sun goes down. There aren’t any street lights. So walking around is out of the question unless you have a flashlight.

            I finally drifted off to sleep around 1AM. And I was just getting into some good sleeping when all of the sudden, there was the awfullest racket commenced to going on outside up on the mountain behind Moms house. It was a pack of dogs and man they were hunting something. I knew or had a good idea what they were hunting at that time of the night.

            You could hear those dogs barking and they were on the trail of some animal. They went up around the barn and then down by Moms house, right outside the bedroom window I was sleeping or I should was attempting to sleep in. They were hot on the trail. Then went on for about an hour. When it first woke me up, it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It scared me something bad. Once I calmed down and realized what was going on, I got into listening to the dogs hunt.

            All of the sudden them dogs found what they were hunting for, up around the barn. Now let me say right here that the fight that was taking place up at the barn would give a person nightmares. It was vicious. And it was going up and down the side of the mountain around the barn.

            Well I could only think of a couple of things that would be putting up a fight like that, a bear, a wild hawg, or a coon. I knew that my Stepdad Jimmy had been having some trouble keeping the coons out of his garden. So I suspected that it was a coon that was in the fight with that pack of dogs. Mind you that I was considering all this at like 5AM.

            Well finally the battle was over. The dogs evidently got their prize or the coon whooped every dog there and walked on off. I wasn’t sure which at the time. It was still dark outside, and my night was shot because of this fight in the night outside the house. I tried to go back to sleep, and I dozed for a little while. When the sun started creeping in the window around 7:30 I finally got up and made some breakfast.

            Once I had eaten and put on some clothes I decided to go see if I could find out what those dogs were hunting and if they killed it. Or if any of the dogs had got injured or killed. I walked up to the barn and hit the trail up behind it. Jimmies garden is situated on the side of the mountain behind the barn. I got to the back side and it looked like World War III had taken place. There was a path 10 foot wide that ran down from edge of the woods through Jimmies garden by the branch to in front of the of the barn and smack into the creek.

            I started at the edge of the woods and worked my way down the path of destruction. I found patches of fur all the way down. I knew that it was a coon. I got to the barn and the chaos around the barn was really bad. That is when I saw it. There half in the creek and half out on the bank, was a coon trap and a nasty filthy mad coon trapped in a cage. The cage looked as bad as the coon did. Those dogs and did a number on the cage, trying to get to the coon.

            That coon was not happy. It was hissing at me and clawing at the cage trying to get out of it. Well I got a hold of the handle and lifted that poor half drowned coon up out of the creek and walked it down to the house and set it in front of Jimmies work car. I know Jimmy would be glad to see it when they got home. The coon well his temper did calm down at all.

            Mom and Jimmy came home early Saturday afternoon. Jimmy took one look at the cage and the trapped coon. He looked at me waiting for an explanation. So I go into full story mode of what I heard in the night and what I found once I got out and went to check. 

            So I ended up taking the coon to the head of Long Creek and setting it out in the woods. It was happy to be out of the cage and took off up the creek. I was happy. That meant I would hopefully get a good night’s sleep. Jimmy was happy that the coon was gone. Mom was so happy she cooked a nice supper. The end..

Written  01APRIL2016 By: David Shuler