Melon Ranch Hounds

It was one of those rare mornings that found me still asleep when my alarm went off. Mellon Creek Outfitters had been slammed for the four days prior to this morning, and I was tired. During the past four days I had guided two duck hunts, three cat hunts, and helped find a wounded deer. Running my hounds was the last thing I wanted to do but the weather was too good. If you want to have good hounds you better keep them in the brush hunting. So, I did just that. I loaded my hounds and planned to hunt an area that has always held plenty of cats. There is a stretch of road less than a mile from the headquarters known as The Old Road. There’s nothing special about this road, it’s just a dirt road running through the pasture with good brush on both sides. For some reason it has always been absolutely loaded with bobcats. For example, in 1998 I caught 211 bobcats, total. Of the 211 cats that I caught, 43 came from a half mile stretch of this road. It was 5:33AM when I turned the hounds out. Considering that they’d been catching cats for clients for the past three days, they were kind of like me, a little slow to get rolling. It started out with them trotting around the truck but within a few hundred yards I watched their tails start coming up over their back and the trots turn into lopes. Before long, hounds were swinging on and off the road hunting. The first half mile of the Old Road has always been the best and we hunted passed that without smelling anything. This road runs a total of around two and a half miles and then T’s into another road. When I arrived at the T, I turned south toward some farm fields. My plan was to hunt to the edge of the farm fields and turn west along the edge of a huge ag field. Sometimes the cats seem to travel the edge of these fields when they’re out hunting. When I was about a mile from the field Stormy opened on a cold trail about 50-75 yards to my left. Since Stormy started hunting, I always laugh when she starts a cat. Stormy is a smaller hound, weighing maybe 35-38 pounds. But when Stormy barks you’d swear there was Great Dane crossed on a Bloodhound making such a squalling loud racket. The trail was cold with Stormy and Bella being the only hounds opening on it at first. I zoomed in tight on my GPS and noticed Toby, Ike, Smoke, and Rain making big loops trying to find the track fresher. Toby finally found it and opened about 150 yards further in than Stormy. Once everything got to where Toby was barking the whole process started over. Rain found it a couple hundred yards further and parallel to the road. When they made it to Rain it was quite a bit fresher and all the old dogs were able to trail and move the track good. The track kept paralleling the road for about six hundred yards and then they trailed out to the edge of the dirt road. Shooter went across the road and found it again and they had the cat jumped within a hundred yards. It didn’t take them long to get almost out of hearing running due west and away from me. There was a little sendero running somewhat in the direction that they had gone so I started their way. Due to wild hogs having the sendero almost undriveable, it was slow going. As I bounced my way in that direction I watched them on my tracker. By the time I made it to them they had treed the cat. When I left the truck, the tracker showed 137 yards to the tree. This part of the ranch is thick, and I mean bad thick. Every tree and bush are covered in thorns and they all grow together like a bowl of noodles. The two main brush problems are cat claw brush and white brush. The white brush grows in all directions and its nearly impossible to break. The cat claw has thorns on top of thorns, and they are shaped exactly like a cat’s claw. The 137 yards was done on my hands and knees the entire way. I crawled up to the first tree and noticed the cat was in a small, half dead Hackberry tree. It didn’t take long for me to realize that due to the white brush, I wasn’t going to be able to stand up to jump this cat out. I extended my pole while sitting on the ground and just barely touched the cat. He jumped and the race was on. The cat went west for maybe a hundred yards and then doubled back right up his trail. He made a couple circles and then the hounds hushed. I knew he had climbed again so I just sat there waiting on one of them to locate. Dixie barked treed and within seconds there rest of them were treeing with her. My GPS showed 94 yards to the second tree and if I thought the first crawl was bad the second made it look easy. Twice during that 94-yard crawl I was on my stomach grabbing limbs to pull myself under the brush that wouldn’t break. The white brush had grown in every direction imaginable and in some places, it was less than five inches above the ground. The good news was that the tree the cat had climbed was a big hackberry. Big trees mean big canopies and big canopies means that not enough light shines through to allow the brush to grow. Once I made it underneath the canopy I could stand up and operate the pole. The cat was out on the end of the highest limb so I positioned myself where the pole would be coming in behind the cat. The second the end of the pole touched the cat he jumped. He landed in the middle of a white brush hell hole and the hounds had hell getting to him. Some of the older hounds have the experience to not even try but to go around. They hit his trail on back side of the thicket and the race was on again. This time, the cat ran east in a big half-moon before turning back toward me. He made it about 80 yards from me and climbed again. This time Annie was the first to locate and the crawling started again. Luckily, most of the way to the third tree was on my feet. I was still bent over 90 degrees at the waist and having to break cat claw branches, but I was somewhat walking. Tree number three was a dead mesquite. In fact, the tree was so dead and terrible looking I wondered how the cat hadn’t broken the limb off that he was standing on. I got my pole lined up and gave it a shove and the cat and limb came crashing down. For a second I thought it was over. I saw the cat disappear into the thicket the hounds were standing in and now I heard them baying. 99 out of 100 times that my hounds start baying the race is over. As I moved closer to watch the fight the cat jumped at least four or five feet straight up in the air, stood on top of the white brush, and ran across it. The hounds were jumping and running with him, but he was just a little too high. This cat did this for thirty yards and jumped to the ground and ran off to the south. I stood there listening as they turned and started back my way screaming. It wasn’t long before I heard the cat coming. Once you hear a cat breathing hard and running you never forget the sound. I think it is best described as a thumping sound. The sound was getting closer and if I had to guess, I’s say the cat was inside ten yards. It was way too thick for me to see him. He had been passed me about thirty seconds when the hounds came roaring by. To further explain this thicket, there were fourteen hounds running within ten yards of me and I only caught a glimpse of two of them. The hounds ran about forty yards behind where I was standing and treed again. Back on my hands and knees I went, this time not as far. This tree was more like a bush than a tree. The cat was less than a foot from the hound’s highest jumps or he’d have never stayed there. I didn’t do any more than kick the bush he was standing in and away he went. He ran back in the direction of the truck for a little ways and then turned and came back in my direction. As usual, he didn’t run far before he was back up again. By now, it was starting to warm up and I hoped that the cat was getting tired. Crawling to the next tree I lost one of my GoPros which I never did find. The cat jumped from this tree easily and they ran around the tree and maybe at the most twenty-five yards and treed again. It was so thick that I was inside thirty yards from this tree, and I couldn’t see hounds or cat. I crawled into the tree and found the cat in a smaller mesquite tree. By now the cool of the morning was wearing off; the hounds were getting hot, the cat was in the tree hot, and they were all doing much better than me. The cool mornings in south Texas in October don’t last long. The cat wasn’t high enough for me to need to extend my pole, I simply hit the limb the cat was on, and he jumped. This time he ran straight away for 200 or 300 yards before doubling back. Before he doubled back, I was hoping like hell that he didn’t tree again. Crawling under a hundred yards was bad enough I wasn’t wanting to do it that far. The hounds ended up running him back to within a hundred yards of me and treed for the seventh time. Once again, I didn’t even attempt to stand up, I just started crawling. By now my pole had to weight close to hundred pounds and to make matter worse, it would hang up on every bush, limb, or stump that I crawled by.  When I made my way up to tree number seven the cat was out on the end of a big Anaqua limb. Anaqua trees are super thick with limbs, twigs and leaves so getting to pole to the cat was challenging. Anaqua trees make it challenge on the first tree but after what I’d been through it was a real pain. After a few minutes I threaded the end up through all the branches and gave the cat a push. Due to it being an Anaqua tree the cat had the option of jumping to another limb. I’ve played this game before and I’m not a fan. Knowing that I might be doing this for a while, I needed to reposition to get the best possible angle I could so that he would jump. When you have a tree like this, I’ve found that the best place to be is directly under the cat. Positioning myself beneath him I slowly got the pole as close as I possibly could without making him get nervous and move to another limb. When cats want to run from limb to limb the best bet is to give him a huge push straight and as high as you can possibly push him. Once I got the pole inches away from the cat’s chest, I gave a push straight up with everything I had. The cat did just what I needed him to do and flew up four or five feet above the limb he was standing on. Luckily, he came crashing down in such a panic that he jumped and ran south. He didn’t go very far before he was in tree number eight. By now I was getting plenty tired of this whole scene. Tree the cat and crawl, tree the cat and crawl, repeat, repeat, repeat. I was hot and had started to have mild dizzy spells. By now I had sweat through my brush jacket and my chaps. Unfortunately taking the brush jacket or chaps off wasn’t an option because I’d end up being one solid thorn. Back on my hands and knees to the next tree. Another mesquite tree was where this cat had climbed this time. Luckily, this tree was in an area that wasn’t terribly thick, so I had high hopes of this finally ending. Man was I wrong. The cat jumped and started circling the tree making a circle about seventy-five yards wide. Unlike the other times this continued for about five minutes, and I saw him tree in a hackberry about thirty yards away. It took a minute for the hounds to locate this time. By now the hounds were hot. After maybe sixty seconds, Dixie located, and I started moving in her direction. Once I got underneath the tree, I decided I had to call someone to bring me a gun. The hounds were hot, and the day was only going to get more and more hot. First, I called a guy that was hunting hogs on the north end of the ranch. When I asked him if he could bring a gun, he informed me that he was currently running a hog and couldn’t get away. He did say that he would call Billy, one of the ranch employees and see if he could help. I jumped the cat out and hoped like hell that they would catch him. When he jumped, he disappeared into the thorns along with all the hounds. It dawned on me that today was Jazz’s first time to be out. I was super impressed that she had gone with the hounds but more importantly she had stayed with them through everything. I knew right then and there that she was going to make it. The hounds ran the cat about two or three minutes and treed for the tenth time. They weren’t that far from me, but the crawl felt like it was miles. I made it to the tree and just sat down. Thankfully, Billy called and said that he could help and to send him a pin. I sent Billy the pin to my location and sat down under the tree. I had to cool down before I made myself sick. There was a fallen tree next to the tree the cat was in, and I sat down on it and took off my jacket and shirt. Sitting there staring at my chaps wondering how much one must sweat to sweat through them I realized that somewhere along the way I’d lost another Gopro. I was determined to wait for Billy to get there as I knew the hounds were hot and they’d go until they dropped if the cat jumped. I was sitting on that fallen tree petting Jazz for hanging with them on this insanity when all hell broke loose. At this point the hounds were under the tree and barking sparingly. Suddenly, while I was looking at Jazz, I heard all the hounds start breaking brush like they were running. Half a second after I heard the brush crack, I heard them start braking and I realized the cat had jumped.  Away they went about 90 yards and treed again. Leaving my shirt off and putting my jacket on, I crawled to the eleventh tree. This tree was a giant of a mesquite, and I hoped that cat would sit tight until Billy arrived. While I was crawling to the last tree, I heard Billy’s truck out on the sendero my truck was on. At the tree I just sat and waited for what seemed like hours. Finally, I could hear brush cracking and some heavy cussing behind me, and I knew Billy was close. When he was about 12 or 15 yards behind me, I saw his blue shirt and asked him if he could see the cat. He told me that he could see the cat and he had a clear shot. I will never forget what I told him. I said, “Billy, shoot this son of a bitch.” Seconds later I heard his 22 crack, and the cat fell dead out of the tree. The hounds swarmed him and did what they do. I looked at my GPS and it showed one hundred and forty-seven yards from where we sat, to the truck. It took forty-two minutes to crawl out. I’ve treed cats more times and I’ve been in worse brush, but I’ve never been in brush that bad and tree a cat eleven times and I’ll be just fine if I never do again.