Melon Ranch Hounds

Between my brother and I there is a combined almost 90 years of experience hunting and catching cats. We have been blessed with some truly good hounds throughout the years. Only a few of them have made what we call Big Time. I thought it be interesting to name these hounds in a article, followed by a story or two about them. I will start with the hounds that belonged to me that I considered big time.

Preacher: There is absolutely less than 1% chance that I will ever own a hound as good as Preacher was. I raised Preacher out of a cross between two hounds that were both really good but nothing like their son. Strangely enough, only one littermate of Preacher’s made the cut and she was a good hound. When my hound puppies reach about four months of age I used to turn them loose to run and grow. These were the days before I built a giant pen for them. They had the freedom to go wherever they wanted. One day I was home getting my things together to go hunting that night and my home phone rang. I said hello and my dad asked, “Hey, what is this pup with the big black spot on his back and kind of a dun colored head?” I told him that, that was a puppy I called Preacher and asked him why he was asking. He said, “Well, you had better come get him. He’s got one of your mother’s yard cats treed on the work bench in the garage. There is a dead cat under the bench.” Preacher was five months old when I got that call. I dropped what I was doing. Then, I drove to my parent’s house. Sure enough, Preacher was standing on his back legs. His front feet were on a grinder. He was barking in a house cat’s face. I caught him, put him in my dog box, and drove him to the pens. I don’t start my hounds until they are six months old. So, I just put him in the pen with one of the other hounds. I decided to load him on the day he turned six months old and go hunting. Like always, I turned the hounds out and grabbed him by the collar and pulled him out with them. He looked confused for just a second and followed the hounds down the road. I hunted about a mile and the road made a ninety degree turn through a huge stand of live oak trees. Just as the hounds rounded that corner Preacher but his head down and trotted off of the right side of the road. To my surprise he opened and was barking every breath. This was well before gps collars. I was reaching up on my dash to grab my Tri-Tronics control. At that moment, his mother, Maggie, started barking with him. I was shocked. Before long every hound was roaring away and I was trying to keep closer while repeating the words, “Did Preacher start a cat?” Preacher had never been hunting. He had never been with the hounds. He had never been turned out away from the house. The race lasted about fifteen minutes and they caught a sow cat on the ground. From that day until his one year birthday I have never had a more hammer headed pain in the ass hound in my life. I guess Preacher felt like he started a cat on day one so he would just run coyotes from then on. It started with one collar and that did no good regardless of the settings or how long I held down the button. With one collar he wouldn’t even show any signs of it bothering him. I made the mistake of being mad enough to test the collar on my hand and it was working just fine. My next shot at breaking Preacher was two Tri Tronic collars around his neck and simultaneously hold both buttons down. With both buttons pressed and held down, he would only turn his head side ways and keep after the coyote. It is important to note that if the hounds were running a cat he would run with them, pick up loses, he’d tree, and not leave a cat race for a coyote. But, if he smelled a coyote before or after the cat race, he was going to run it. My third attempt was three collars, two around his neck and one around his waste. I clearly couldn’t hunt him like this because the third collar would come off or get hung up. Since I knew that was an issue I drove around until I saw a coyote and placed the third collar on and turned him out. He ran a little funny with that collar around his waste but when he crossed where the coyote went in the brush, away he went screaming. With two handheld in each hand and a friend hold the third we lit his ass up. With the three collar buttons held down Preacher would stop and tighten his body. The second the buttons were let up, he’d go right back to running the coyote. We did this across an entire pasture. At this point, regardless of how special I knew he could be, I had to break him or ruin him. I listened close for a few minutes and determined the direction the coyote was going. Once I had that figured out, I drove road the coyote would cross and waited. The coyote crossed and I drove right where he ran and waited. I could hear Preacher coming about 150 yards away and when he came out I caught him. Let’s just say that I brought a rope, a shovel and a hot shot to the party and Preacher and I had a talk. That night I loaded the other hounds and Preacher and went hunting. As I was road hunting I looked over at a little stock pond and noticed a coyote running away from it on the back side. This was too goo be true, I just changed my course and hunted right over the dam. Preacher trotted up to where the coyote had run of and started to turn down it and I said, Hey!” Preacher dropped his head and turned and trotted on down the road. He never ran another coyote as long as he lived. When he was four years old, I went hunting right after a big northern hit. The wind was blowing at least 30. Preacher started a cat and they trailed east. They moved away and I could just barely hear them due to the wind. I was looking around in my backseat for my tracker and saw a cat come running like hell across the road in front of me. About that time I heard Preacher coming my way with screaming squalling mouth. I figured they had him jumped but it was only Preacher behind the cat. He ran straight north so I could hear him for a good ways running like hell. He finally got out of hearing so I grabbed the tracker and drove in the direction of the strongest signal. The next time I turned the engine off I could hear Preacher about 75 yards out of my window and he was treed. I walked out there and found just Preacher under the tree and a bobcat sitting out on a limb. The other hounds weren’t there and it looked like they were coming. I walked back to my truck, grabbed my pole, and went back to the tree. Out of curiosity I wanted to see what would happen if I jumped the cat out with just Preacher under it. The cat jumped and away they went about forty yards and I heard the cat growl. It probably took me a minute to get my pole back down to carrying length and another thirty seconds to walk to Preacher. I found him chewing on the cat. When I returned to the starting point, I wanted to see where the other hounds were. They were all standing in the road. They saw the truck and came running up wagging their tails. I have no idea if they caught a cat or just never heard Preacher. Lastly, in 2011 I caught 211 bobcats. Of those 211 cats, Preacher started 193 of them. Preacher ran himself into becoming old before his time. I had to retire Preacher to my yard when he was six years old. I took him to every vet in my area. I also brought him to Texas A&M Veterinary School. I was trying to figure out what was wrong. Preacher had terrible arthritis and it just was too painful to hunt. Preacher died when he was 10 years old while eating from a self feeder in my yard. That was and will forever remain the greatest cat dog I will ever own.

SHOOTER: Shooter is the only other hound in all of these years that I will hang the big time moniker on. I am currently hunting Shooter and he is five years old. Shooter is out of one of my brother’s hounds and a bitch I had named Ruby. (Ruby came close to making this list) Shooter has it all, he’s the finest looking hound I have ever owned and handles like a dream. Shooter is a cat hound in every sense of the word and he doesn’t have a weak spot in anything that he does. If starting cats makes one great, Shooter is as good as they get. I just opened my current log book to make sure my numbers are right. In this book I have caught thirty cats and Shooter has started twenty-one of them. Now, when you have 21 out of 30 starts up against Stormy, Rain, and Bella, you are a hound that people dream abouttt. A good story about Shooter happened last winter when south Texas was in the middle of a drought. When I say it was dry, I mean ponds dried up, creeks were dry, and many areas with not a single blade of grass. I was hunting one morning with a client and this kid was really wanting a bobcat. We’d been hunting about an hour when I noticed the hounds could smell a cat but nothing was opening. They’d trot from one side of the road to another with their ears perked up and tails wagging. I told the young man with me that they were smelling a cat. He said that he sure hoped that they’d catch him. Silently I was sure hoping they would too, because I knew it was dry and I knew that there was zero dew on the ground. The hounds kept doing this for several hundred yards down the road when Shooter turned and went out into the brush. He didn’t open and he was moving fast like normal but I could tell he was trying to work this trail out. On the gps his track was super crooked like he was moving back in forth across a track that he was only smelling here and there. Stormy, Bella, and Rain were still looking in the road, they couldn’t even smell where it left the road. Before long, Shooter was six hundred yards from us and still hadn’t barked. I told my hunter that we would load the other hounds and drive around closer in case Shooter figured it out. The closest I could get to him was about 350 yards so I turned the truck off, turned the other hounds out, and just sat there and waited. His path was taking him toward us but at a hard angle to the front of where we were parked. Within fifteen minutes he had made it to within 50 yards of the road I was sitting on and opened for the first time. Shooter has three different barks. If he’s smelling a cat super cold he ends his scream with a hoarse almost laryngitis sound and that’s what he did here. The hounds heard him and went to him and as soon as they made it Stormy and Bella could smell it and opened. These three took the track across the road and into the brush on the other side. Rain made a huge Lupe and opened about two hundred yards out in front of Shooter and the rest of them. I watched as they stopped looking and ran in the direction of Rain. Luckily, Rain opened one more time before they got there which made it easier for Shooter to know where she was. When he got there he had it and I knew it because the hoarseness went away and all I heard was that high pitch ball/scream. Other hounds started putting in and within a few minutes we had the cat treed. I have no idea how long it had been since that cat came there but if Bella can’t smell it, it’s a long time. Shooter just does everything right. Based on the story above he clearly has a nose and heart to make it happen when it isn’t even supposed to happen. If I get after a wild running sow cat, she better turn her after burners on with Shooter’s speed. More important than his speed is what I call cat sense. This hound has the ability to just know where to be. I was running a cat in a pair of white brush thickets two years ago. The thickets were both within fifty yards off the road so I had a front row seat. The cat would go in one thicket, make some circles and then leave and run to the other thicket fifty yards away. This went on for thirty or forty-five minutes. On the last time the cat left the thicket on the right and made a break for the other thicket, Shooter came out on the road. He ran past me, past the race, and cut in ahead of it all. The next thing I heard was Shooter baying like hell followed by the cat growl and it was over. He knows where he needs to be and his only mission is to catch and kill the cat he’s running.

I have hunted a lot of cats with my brother Joe’s hounds but I wanted him to tell me which if any he’d hang the big time on. Like me, he has only two. I asked him to come to my house and I interviewed him about these two hounds so that this article will be accurate. The following are the two hounds and why they are his choices.

MINI: “Mini was a hound that was littermates to Shooter’s mother, Ruby. Mini’s father was a full blooded Trigg hound that we got from Mr. Cecil Bogs and her mother was a running walker gyp. She had it all and did it all right; she had the speed, the nose, and sense to do everything right. She would start cats, jump cats, and locate trees as good as any hound I’ve ever owned. I start my hounds at five months old and when that litter turned five months old I walked in their pen. She was the first one to run up me and that is how I decided which one I would start first. To be honest, I hadn’t named any of the puppies. She’d always been a little smaller than the rest of the litter so when she walked up to me I named her Mini right then and there. I put a collar on her and loaded her with my hounds and left to go hunting. That evening it was plenty cool and it was only about 3:00PM when I left my kennels. I decided to hunt the north side of the ranch and start on the far east end. As I drove through a stand of live oak trees where the road turns and winds through the trees I heard her barking and noticed her head sticking out the side of my dog box. I don’t tolerate barking in the truck but this was day one so I let it slide. I drove a couple hundred yards further down the road and turned the hounds out. Unlike most other puppies on day one, I didn’t have to drag her out she ran out like she knew what she was doing. Mini hit the ground running and ran straight back to where she barked and turned in and started barking every breath. None of my other hounds would even go and check so I walked them down there. I didn’t want to correct her at this stage of the game. To my surprise when the other hounds made it to where Mini went in, they exploded and left too her. Within twenty minutes I had a bobcat caught on the ground and when I got the catch, Mini was chewing on the cat. Mini is the only hound I ever owned in forty years that I never had run anything but a cat. Too this day when I hear someone say naturally deer/coyote proof I call bs. I assume Mini was because she never once ran something that she wasn’t supposed to. From day one until she died she just kept getting better and better. Sadly, Mini died way too young. I got a call to take some people on a deer lease cat hunting. I didn’t know it but the hounds caught a cat in a concrete drainage canal and by the time I got there she was gone. I managed to get every hound out but her. I cannot imagine ever having a hound any better than she was. In fact, she is where I came up with the big time name that we call them. One of the hunters helped me lift her out of the water and asked me if she was any good. I said, Yeah man, she was big time good.”

REDNECK: Redneck is the only other dog that I would say I’ve owned that earned the “big time” tag. I got Redneck from Clinto Brown and if my memory serves me correctly, he was around a year old and well started on cats. Although he was already running cats and doing a good job of it, he loved to run coyotes and not pay attention to me. I got the listening to me and handle better under control within a couple days. But the coyote deal took a bit longer. One of the best stories (although there are literally hundreds) about Redneck was a time when I went to Pearsall, Tx to take some deer hunters cat hunting. We hunted the first day and all of the following night and had nine bobcats to show for it. By midnight on the second night, I was so tired I couldn’t see straight. The land owners allowed me to stay in an old house at the headquarters that had a dog proof fence around the yard. After I poured an entire bag of dog feed in the yard, filled up all of my water buckets and turned the hounds in the yard I went to bed. About 8:00AM the next morning I got up and went outside to check on the hounds. Everything was fine except no Redneck. These were the days before gps collars and I’d taken off my telemetry collars before putting the dogs in the yard. In other words, I had no idea where Redneck was or where to start looking. The most logical thing to me was to start looking around the headquarters. It made sense that with all of the houses. vehicles, and food lying around, he’d be nearby. I drove around the headquarters honking my horn and stopped a time or two to call his name. No sign of Redneck, so I started widening the search. By noon I had driven every road that I could find and hadn’t seen him or any dog tracks on the sandy roads other than tracks where I had hunted the previous night. As I topped a hill going to back to the headquarters I met a guy coming in the opposite direction and he flagged me down. This guy rolled his window down and said,” Are you Joe?” I said that I was. He told me that he had seen the strangest thing close to a water well he had checked on earlier. He said that about a hundred yards from the windmill he noticed a bobcat just sitting in a tree. I asked if he had seen a dog and he said that he hadn’t seen any dog or heard one. After getting directions to the well, I drove there and to my amazement there was a bobcat sitting in a mesquite tree above a draw. I walked over to the tree and lying in the bottom of the draw panting was Redneck. I have no idea how long he ran it or how long he had been treed. In either case I shot the cat so he could chew on it and took him back to camp. Another story about Redneck that I can’t leave out was on a lion hunt down to Coahuila,Mx. Upon arriving at the ranch we were hunting, we drove to a water trough to look for lion tracks. Finding what appeared to be a fairly fresh track, I turned the hounds out and off Redneck and company went trailing to the west. It didn’t take very long for them to get out of hearing and shortly there after, the telemetry collars lost signal. We drove for the rest of the day and half of the night trying to get a signal and never picked up a single beep. The owner of the ranch had a piper cub airplane and he thought it would be a good idea to take the airplane up with the receiver and see if a signal could be found. One of the guys that went with me jumped in the plane with the owner and took off. They were gone a long time and I had about decided that they’d flown that pile of junk into a mountain when I heard them coming. I was surprised when my buddy got out and pulled three hounds out of the backseat. Redneck, Gal, and JJ were on a leash made out a blue hay string. He explained to me that he picked the dogs up on the neighboring ranch. The fence line was fifteen miles from the water trough where we originally turned loose. The house the hounds were found was another five miles past that. He said that the landowners had heard the hounds and went to them and found a lion in the tree. They had shot the lion and brought all of the hounds home with them. I also learned that the hounds were living on a screen porch eating human food while the people were trying to figure out how to get in touch with the name and number on their collars. My phone didn’t have service down there so they weren’t having any luck calling me. They ended up bringing all of the hounds back in four separate trips in the airplane. Redneck was special and his nose was better than any hound I have ever owned. He was twice as tough as any hound I’ve ever been around and his best attribute is likely that he threw outstanding puppies. There was a time a few years ago when Dan had ten cat hounds and nine of them were sons and daughters of Redneck.