I used my Western Field .22LR rifle with a 4X scope to go coon hunting. I'd walk the river bank and use my 6v lantern beam flash light to see their eyes glowing. Put the cross hairs between the eyes and squeeze a round. That was back in the 1970s when hides were $5 to $10 each. I'd usually come back with at least 5 of them.
Back then I was teaching at Clarks HS and lived out in the country, about 5 miles south west of Clarks, Ne, about a mile from the Platte river. The owner of the local Standard gas station, Ralph Rose, used to go with me. He also bought the hides. One year he bought a Red Bone coon hound but didn't want his wife to know, so he left it at my place. The dog was supposed to have been trained.
The first time we took him hunting and let him go he ran off into the night. It was about 8pm. Never saw him again until around midnight. That dog never barked, bayed or anything else to let us know he was on a trail or had one treed. Just disappeared.
I resorted to my beam flashlight. Ralph and I walked in the opposite direction his dog took off in. We had collected about 3 or 4 coons each. It was about midnight. My lamp caught the shining eyes of another coon about 75 yards away. The eyes scurried toward the river embankment and disappeared. Almost immediately a pair of eyes popped back up in the exact same spot the first pair had gone down. I put the cross hairs between the glowing eyes and squeezed off a round. For the first time that night we heard a noise come from a dog. Covering the 75 yards to the spot we found Ralph's Red Bone hound laying on the ground with a hole between his eyes, dead. Ralph picked the dog up, walked the two or three steps to the edge of the embankment and toss the dog into the river.
I don't know if he got his money back. He never said. I don't know if his wife ever found out about it. He never got another dog, and we continued to used flashlights for the rest of our hunts.
