Jill McCorkle is the author of nine books, including July 7th, The Cheerleader, and Going Away Shoes. Five of her books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books. She is the recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and many other awards. She teaches writing at North Carolina State University.

This story, Dog Hunting, specially for 27 Views of Hillsborough.

A couple of years ago my husband, Tom, and I were out walking in the woods. He had his gun in case he saw something he thought he should shoot. I didn’t have a gun which is a good thing as I don’t know the first thing about them, so I was perfectly happy to walk around, listening to the birds and then the wind while momentarily we rested and perched way up a tree in a deer stand. There wasn’t a whole lot happening that day as far as I could tell, except that it was a really nice time to be outside.

After the quiet time, we walked around again only to find one of our neighbors propped against a tree. He was wearing camouflage and blended right in except for the orange cap, which is what startled us into seeing him. We stopped and talked for a little while, as he had no trouble talking. He was very skilled at hunting and telling a story, and glimpsing his verbal talent affirmed to me that this was indeed a good way to spend my afternoon. I can do this, I was thinking. I can hunt words—catch, skin, and string them into nice long colorful sentences.

It seemed this was all we would find that quiet afternoon but we kept walking off toward the river, still hoping we might see something Tom might want to shoot. I have to confess here that I am someone who has no experience whatsoever with hunting and was surprised that I was even out there at all. But I was and also was relieved that I didn’t witness Bambi on the run or Thumper shivering in the bushes. Let’s just say I was not prepared to haul something dead or dying. 

What I did see was a little pack of beagles with wires sticking up out of their collars like they were on remote. They came out of nowhere—wiggling wind-up toys with wagging tails, snorting and sniffing the ground. There were three brown and whites about the same size—let’s call them Larry, Curly, and Moe—who were stumbling and rolling all over each other, and then there was the leader—a black and white beagle who looked just like her name: Dottie. And how did we know her name? Because some man was yelling, “Dottie? Dottie?”

At first I thought the voice was coming from one of the trio and that we had stumbled on The Famous Talking Dog. An If a dog talks out in the woods and there’s no one to hear him . . . sort of thing. But then we glimpsed a man (also wearing orange) way off in the distance and it was clear that he was a little upset with Dottie. She had stopped doing what she was supposed to be doing. She was a working girl out to survey the territory and the little wire in her collar was her global positioning system.

I had never heard of “Dog Hunting” but this was what I was witnessing. It isn’t as bad as it sounds. It’s a sport where the dog is co-participant with man, kind of like Frisbee. The object of this sport is for the dogs to sniff out and run deer up and out to where their master men can rise up from where they’ve been slouched against the trunk of a tree or hiding up in its branches, maybe drinking and talking a little, aim and shoot. 

Clearly Dottie was tired and taking a little break. The man kept on bellowing her name but she didn’t seem to give a damn what he said or what he wanted. She and Larry, Curly, and Moe were deep in the woods, the Eno River within view and she was far more interested in what the boys were doing which was sniffing us, peeing, and humping one another. 

“Dottie. Dottie. Go girl.”

Dottie did not give one single damn. I think if a deer had walked right up, Dottie would have looked the other way. She was on strike and who could blame her? It was a scene right out of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Dottie and her handsome suitors deep in the woods, the river rushing, the wind blowing. It was idyllic, not a deer in sight. It’s a dog sport. It’s what they do when they stop listening to people and get together in the middle of the woods.