Animals: Texas Wolf Hunt

A wet, grey dawn was breaking over Texas last week when a strapping, six-foot figure in cowhand clothes strode out. on the 80,000-acre Storey Ranch near Cotulla. The hard-preaching, hard-riding pastor of South San Antonio’s FirstBaptist Church, Reverend Robert Gaddy Baucom, faced an impressive, tensely quiet assemblage. Lined up in front, 257 eager hounds strained at their leashes. At one side a Master of Hounds and twelve field judges sat their horses. Behind the dogs ranged 150 other mounted Texans, more than 1,000 in automobiles and trucks of every size and shape.

Hats went off, heads were bowed as Brother Baucom boomed a prayer.Master of Hounds John Aiken Rowan raised a Texas steer horn to his lips, blew long & loud. At this signal the hounds were loosed and, amid a great uproar of babbling dogs, roaring engines and shouting men, women & children, the whole assembly moved off into the brush. Thus began :he 1936 field trials of the South Texas Wolf Hunters Association, biggest “wolf hunt” in U. S. history.

When settlers from Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri pushed down to Texas last century, they took their foxhounds with them. Looking around for choicer game than Texas’ quickly grounded grey fox, the settlers found it in the wily, hard-running coyote or “Mexican Wolf.” At first the new quarry proved too fast, too long-winded for their hounds. Huntsmen sent back to Kentucky for dogs of the famed Walker and Trigg stock, soon bred a hound which could more than match the coyote’s speed and stamina.

With their dogs cooped in trailers behind sturdy automobiles, Texas wolf hunters gather at 2 or 3 a. m., motor far out into the brush. Best time to cast the hounds is just before daybreak, when the land is wet and the dogs, running with heads up. can catch the wolf’s strong scent from the bushes. Loosed, the dogs spread out fanwise, baying when they catch the trail. Behind them ride the huntsmen, bouncing ‘hell bent over rough prairie, plowed ground and fields of cotton stalks. The coyote may run for several hours, stray far afield. As he tires, he returns to his home range, begins to run in ever narrowing circles like a fox. At the kill, the hounds pile on their prey, often smother him before they have ripped him badly with their teeth.

The South Texas Association’s field trials began 15 years ago. First day of last week’s meet was devoted to the Bench Show, in which dogs are judged solely on build and looks. In this event a 13-month-old black, white & tan Walker “gyp” (Texan for bitch) named Bess, owned by Paul Johnson of Liberty Hill, took the grand championship. Inexperienced, she made no showing in the field trials of the next three days, in which judges picked a 3-year-old gyp named Keno, owned by Robert Spurgeon Guyness of Poteet, as best of the 257 in speed, endurance, skill in trailing and driving.

Tennessee Boar Hunt (Cont’d)

Not for 14 years had Dr. Graeme Alexander Canning, a professor of Zoology at the University of Tennessee, fired a gun, but when he heard about the wild boar hunt being planned in his State’s Cherokee National Forest (TIME, Nov. 16), his sporting blood was stirred. He paid his $5 fee for ambulance service, borrowed a rifle, set out one morning last week with the first batch of 30 hunters. His guide was an oldtime woodsman named Homer Bryson. The hunt for the savage, sharp-tusked progeny of Russian boars imported some three decades ago had been made doubly dangerous and difficult by rules that the hunters must go afoot instead of by horse, must use no dogs for fear of injury to the Forest’s fawns.

When the 30 hunters straggled back to their rustic hotel that evening, only Professor Canning had bagged a boar. He told his story with becoming modesty: “Bryson saw the tracks and said, ‘Get in front.’ About that time he pointed out two boars in a briar patch. I tried to shoot the big one, but I started shaking and my eyes watered until I couldn’t see. When I got control of myself the big one was gone. I shot at the smaller one and he went down. We got close and had to shoot three more times to kill him.”

Crestfallen were two other huntsmen when the Forest rangers pronounced their scrawny trophies of the day to be merely wild hogs, with little if any boar strain in them. Real boars were credited next day to a Tennessee housewife, a Chattanooga grocer. When the footsore hunters went home from the hills at the end of their third & last day, rangers revealed to reporters that not one of the six animals bagged was of the true wild Russian stock. This week, however, in a new batch of huntsmen, two Knoxvillites named Carey House and Hugh Vandeventer killed an authentic Russian 250-pounder which suddenly dropped after rushing “so close that we were unable to shoot during the latter part of his charge for fear of hitting each other.”