188 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



one or more coon-trees, which he would locate by 

 signs unknown to any white hunter. In each tree he 

 would find from four to six fat coons, whose fur and 

 flesh he would exchange for gunpowder, tobacco, 

 hard cider, and other necessities of life. 



Mr. and Mrs. Coon are good parents. They keep 

 their children with them until the arrival of a new 

 family, which occurs with commendable regularity 

 every spring. A friend of mine once saw a young coon 

 fall into the water from its tree in the depths of a 

 swamp. At the splash, the mother coon came out 

 of the den, forty feet up the trunk, and climbed down 

 to help. Master Coon, wet, shaken, and miserable, 

 managed to get back to the tree-trunk and clung 

 there whimpering. Mother Coon gripped him by 

 the scruff of his neck and marched him up the tree 

 to the den, giving him a gentle nip whenever he 

 stopped to cry. 



In spite of his funny face and playful ways, Mr. 

 Coon is a cheerful, desperate, scientific fighter. In 

 a fair fight, or an unfair one for that matter, he will 

 best a dog double his size, and he fears no living 

 animal of his own weight, save only that versatile 

 weasel, the blackcat. I became convinced of this one 

 dark November morning many years ago, when I 

 foolishly used to kill animals instead of making 

 friends of them. All night long, with a pack of alleged 

 coon dogs, we had hunted invisible and elusive 

 coons through thick woods. I had scratched myself 

 all over with greenbrier, and, while running through 

 the dark, had plunged head first into the coldest 



