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Camouflage and cordite. Four-wheel drives and RVs. Dog boxes, bowls, leashes, collars, harnesses and, naturally, thousands of coon dogs baying for attention.
Fitting into all that is the Grand American Hunt and Show is one seasoned Upstate hunter who has attended every coon hunt since its inception. He was back again Thursday at the Orangeburg County Fairgrounds for first day of the event.
“I’ve been going to every one since they started in Anderson,” Larry Moore says of the Grand American Hunt and Show. “And I’ve been squirrel hunting about 15 to 20 years. That squirrel hunting is like daylight coon hunting.”
A native of Piedmont, Moore has friends who call him “L.D.” Although he’s been hunting squirrels for 20 years, he’s been hunting other game even longer. All his life, if truth be known.
Moore’s friends say the avid hunter has been out stalking game since the days before flintlock smoothbores. Maybe even before the Old Testament’s David and his famous sling.
“He’s been around hunting a long time,” said Bud Ducker, smiling. “He’s a real character.”
Moore is attending this weekend’s Grand American Hunt and Show not only to sell a few dogs he’s trained but to slip in a hunt or two before it’s over.
But that’s the way it’s been all his life. He says hunting gets in your blood and isn’t easily removed.
That love for the outdoors may have come, he said, from his love for the various animals he’s had in his life. Moore says he “had 122 Walker dogs at one time. But that was when food was $7 a hundred” pounds.
“I’ve always had a squirrel. I like climbing a tree and finding them,” the 74-year-old Moore said. “I had 18 at one time.”
When asked if he still climbs trees at his age, a spunky Moore related the tale of a recent hunt in which he shimmied up a tree which was hiding a nest of racoons in its upper branches.
The nest turned out to be holding an adult female racoon and three “kittens,” as Moore calls the baby racoons. The much younger hunters standing at the tree base were told to catch the racoons as Moore dropped them.
But, one by one, as they were dropped, the racoons made their escape past the more timid hunters below. There was only one racoon left.
“I told them, ’If you don’t catch this one, I’m going to come down there and cut somebody’s tail!’” a 5-foot-5-inch Moore said, laughing at the recollection.
A stint in the military didn’t deter Moore or put his desire for the outdoors or hunting on hold one bit. He simply took it with him when he was sent to Korea during the war in the early 1950s.
Utilizing his trusty, military-issue .45-caliber handgun, Moore bagged his first pheasant near his camp.
“We took a gallon can from the chow hall and made us a stew out of it,” he said. “We hunted all over the mountains. It’s a wonder we didn’t run up on a land mine.”
These days, Moore still holds his own rabbit or squirrel hunts, which can wind up being jaunts up to seven miles in a day.
A younger whippersnapper found out about Moore’s hunt club, the Upper Carolina Coon Hunt Club, and wanted to join.
“He saw it on the Internet, and got gigged up and wanted to go with us,” Moore said. “We walked two or three miles on that hunt. He didn’t go with us anymore.”
As deep as L.D.’s love for the hunting and the outdoors is, his wife Margaret couldn’t care less for it. Nor do his three daughters and son.
But his grandchildren? All 12 of them? Different story. They’ll go hunting with granddad anytime. And they know he’ll be out there all the time.
“If anybody got squirrels, it don’t matter to me. I’m going squirrel hunting,” he said. “I go every day but Sunday, if it ain’t raining.”
T&D Staff Writer Richard Walker can be reached by e-mail at rwalker@timesanddemocrat.com or by telephone at 803-533-5516. Discuss this and other stories on-line at TheTandD.com.