e weather was
favorable. We waited for February when we knew that the old dog coon
would begin his rounds of calling on his friends.

We managed to pass the time away fairly well as we would get a fox,
mink, marten or something nearly every day so that we busied
ourselves. About the middle of February we had several warm days and
the time had now come for us to get busy and we were out as soon as
it was light. We would follow up all the spring runs until we found
the trail of a coon, then follow it up until it went into a tree.
Sometimes it bothered us which tree to cut down for the coon would go
from one tree to another so that it was hard to tell which was the
tree that was the home of the coon (some call it a den). One day we
chopped down a great large oak, three or four feet in diameter and
nearly sound all the way through and nary a coon to be found. I asked
Bill why he did not say cuss words and he said he thought we had
spent enough wind in chopping the tree down, without wasting any
unnecessarily.

Well, as I said, the coon had been up and down so many trees that we
did not know which one was the most likely one. We went to a large
basswood tree that had only one track going to it and one away from
it but when we pounded on it with the axe, we saw that it was very
hollow. I suggested to Bill that we chop it down. Bill thought there
were no coon in it and I had but little faith myself but I told him
that as he had been wanting a wood job, here was his opportunity and
Bill agreed with me, so we laid off our coats and went to chopping.
The tree was only a shell. We soon had it down and to our surprise,
coon began to run in all directions. Not having had much hopes of
finding any coon in the tree we had not prepared ourselves with clubs
to kill the coon. We used the axe handle as best we could but one
coon got away and went into a hollow stump which we had to cut down.
We got five coon. We then took up the trail of the coon that left the
tree and after following it about a mile it went into a large hemlock
tree that had a hole in it close to the roots. Pounding on it we
discovered that it was hollow.

There had been several coon tracks both out and into the tree. We
circled around some distance from the tree and found no tracks
leading away from the tree farther than a small spring a few rods
away. As it was getting well on towards night we did not fell the
tree but went back to the old basswood where we had lef