In
the eastern forests occasionally an old time hunter would own one or two
track-hounds, slow, with a good nose, intelligent and obedient, of use
mainly in following wounded game. Some Rocky Mountain hunters nowadays
employ the same kind of a dog, but the old time trappers of the great
plains and the Rockies led such wandering lives of peril and hardship
that they could not readily take dogs with them. The hunters of the
Alleghanies and the Adirondacks have, however, always used hounds to
drive deer, killing the animal in the water or at a runaway.
As soon, however, as the old wilderness hunter type passes away, hounds
come into use among his successors, the rough border settlers of the
backwoods and the plains. Every such settler is apt to have four or five
large mongrel dogs with hound blood in them, which serve to drive off
beasts of prey from the sheepfold and cattle-shed, and are also used,
when the occasion suits, in regular hunting, whether after bear or deer.
Many of the southern planters have always kept packs of fox-hounds,
which are used in the chase, not only of the gray and the red fox, but
also of the deer, the black bear, and the wildcat.
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