Yo Yo Yo, Rowa Uh Rowa, Hru Hru

"That ain't from saying good morning, dear dad, that's from grabbing coon. Feel that dog's ears. They're chewed, Mr. Man, and that's birdshot stuck in 'em. That is a dog there that's been hunted. Now feel my ears."

Nobody does, but one bystander who is staring at Troy's dog goes so far as to say, "They ain't supposed to be pretty to run coon. They look kinda woolly when they run coon."

"I don't give a damn what they run," says Troy with obscure logic, "from a mare mule to the Queen of Sheba—that black and tan, when I strike him he'll be trailing coon, dear dad, and when I tree him he'll be on the tree. And in one hour or two months or the next morning, when we go back, Mr. Man, he'll have his toenails jabbed into that tree."

So Troy gets up a hunt, with a man who has a dog that digs out so fast after coon, he maintains, that you better not put it down on a gravel road or it will knock the windshield out of your truck.

On the way to the woods in the pickup, Troy mentions a few of the wild and bloody fistfights he has been in with people. "I ain't never met a man I was scared of," he says in conclusion. "But I have met a few I wish to hell I had been scared of." When someone asks him if his dog is really as good as he claims, Troy says this: "My daddy told me, 'Son, I got one ol' boy I could never tell nothing about, whether he was lying or not,' and that was me. He sure couldn't whip it out of me. 'Cause he tried that, a plenty of times."

And then Troy is out in the woods with his dog out farther, and the dog isn't opening yet, and still isn't, and here is what Troy says when he is encouraging his so-far silent, distant dog:

"Lemme hearrrrr ya holler." And, "Talk toooo 'im." And, "Get them coooooon."

Troy is not just saying these things, he is bawling them, and he is in good voice. Also he moves well in the woods or the underbrush, he is noted as a climber, he fights bigger men ferociously. Troy might be too inclined toward inscrutability to be a top honest coon dog, but he would be an interesting one, and in still another life he would make a line rough coon.