Boys and their dogs

When I think back on my childhood it's hard for me to imagine being a young boy without a dog for a companion. Living on a farm and walking to school each day meant having your dog right by your side. I had several dogs that during those years, and all of them were as different as you can imagine. I hate to use the word mongrel, but the idea of having a pure-bred dog would have been laughable. I had feisty little terriers and big lanky mixed breed hounds, but the one dog that really stands out was my old hound, Sniffer. He was undoubtedly the ugliest dog I ever had; skinny as a rail and no matter how much we fed him he never gained any weight. Back then he would have been called a raw-boned hound. I think he was a mix between a red-bone, black and tan, and maybe a catahoula. The name Sniffer fit him perfectly.
He was given to me by old "Pop" Davis, a local moonshiner, who lived down in the Ouachita River Bottoms. When I asked Pop why he named the dog, Sniffer, he responded, "Just take him in the woods, and you'll figure it out." Well, the next day Sniffer and I headed for Flat Creek Swamp for a trial hunt. Wow, that dog hit the ground running, howling, and sniffing up every tree. I figured this was one heck of a hunting dog and he'd have something treed in minutes. Hours later he was still howling and yes---sniffing. He was a sniffer and unless he just happened to run into some old possum, he never did anything but sniff.
In my novel The Red Scarf, Sniffer has quiet a part, especially as he stars in the wild hunt for the chicken-killing coon. Naturally, the hunt becomes a disaster, as Sniffer and the boys encounter not a coon but something much bigger and meaner.
Well, boys and dogs just seem to go together, especially in a rural setting, and many of the incidents I recorded in The Red Scarf were based on actual incidents when Sniffer and his best friend, Richard roamed Flat Creek Swamp.