RACCOON HUNTS PROVIDE THRILLS OF LARGER GAME : TALES ABOUND FROM THE FIELD.

Byline: Conrad Grove Philadelphia Inquirer 

These were not the silent woods of night. The wind spit sleet sideways. Snow that had fallen just hours before crusted and snapped under each footstep. And Nitro was who-knows-where.

But Rocky Dillow was not about to turn tail just yet, even though that wind and sleet had combined to shear off a sizable tree limb a few yards away. Nitro is his big bluetick hound, and somewhere, Dillow figured, he was hard on a coon and about to bawl a blue streak.

``A night like this might make or break a beginner,'' Dillow said. ``But once you get coon hunting in your blood, there's no turning back.''

So it came as no great surprise when Jerry Vickers showed up with his dogs the next night at Dillow's farmhouse a few miles outside Unionville in Chester County, Pa.

``Go out last night?'' Dillow's wife, Joan, asked Vickers, only to draw a look and three words.

``I got sense,'' Vickers said, though his smile made plain he wasn't exactly sure of that himself.

Because in coon hunting, a sport that - like the raccoon population - persists despite suburban encroachment, any night might turn up something you've never seen before.

``If I died tomorrow, I've had a lifetime of memories,'' said Fred Moran of Suttersville in Western Pennsylvania, who breeds redbone hounds, one of the six breeds allowed to compete in coon-hunting contests sponsored by the United Kennel Club, a national registry.

``You don't go out without taking home a story,'' Moran said, ``and I go out every night I think I might get a bark.''

The wind that sent that limb crashing to earth probably sent any coon with a lick of smarts into hiding, Dillow reasoned.

``I could be sitting at home in front of the television,'' said Dillow, 47, who manages a 250-acre farm, ``but Nitro's got a good mouth on him. It sounds like country music to me.''

Sure enough, two woodlands over, Nitro finally let it rip, throwing his 85 pounds into full-throated pronouncements. He was maybe a mile away, but, as Dillow observed, no one measures distances accurately at night, especially through brush, over logs and across hummocks.

``I do know one thing about the night air, though,'' he said. ``You can sure walk a lot farther in it.''

Nitro bayed and circled a 30-foot tree. Halfway up, a 10-foot-long split in the trunk undoubtedly housed raccoons, which do not hibernate in the winter but will lie low during severe weather, relying on stored body fat. The coons never revealed themselves.

Nitro is 9. His hocks were a bit stiff the next night, when Vickers arrived with Jody, a 3-year-old treeing walker, and Buster, a 6-year-old registered yellow cur, but Nitro holds his own.

Both Dillow and Vickers, 52, a retired machinist from Aston, Delaware County, have hunted coons since boyhood. Vickers spent his youth in the mountains of North Carolina, one of 10 brothers and five sisters, in a house that had no electricity until he was 13.

``I remember crying as a boy to go out coon hunting with my dad and older brothers,'' he said. ``I guess I was about 5 or 6 before they first took me. I just didn't want to stay home and look at dark walls.''

Nitro hit scent first that night, leading the pack. Somehow, that seemed altogether right: Dillow got his first name in honor of Allan ``Rocky'' Lane, a football player at Notre Dame who went on to renown as a Western movie actor and as the voice of television's Mr. Ed. Lane's last film role was in 1961 - in ``Posse From Hell.''

The quarry managed to elude this posse of hounds, finding sanctuary in a barn after slipping through a small ground-floor opening. Handlers and hounds tramped farther into the woods.

Deep in a swamp, the dogs sounded again, bawls turning into staccato chops that indicated a treed coon. Buster, his lip swollen after tangling with a coon earlier in the week, wanted it bad.

When Dillow and Vickers arrived at the base of a massive white oak, Buster had worked his 45 pounds into full fury.

He chewed on the tree trunk. When he couldn't gnaw it down, he sprang up about five feet and latched onto a dangling vine. He chewed on that for a spell, too, until his grip gave out. Clearly, this was a dog with no quit in him, which pleased Vickers mightily.

``You never know what you'll see out here,'' he said. ``Some nights are good, and some bad. If there is a secret to this, it's to go out every night.''

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--color) ``You never know what you'll see out here. If there is a secret to this, it's to go out every night,'' says raccoon hunter Jerry Vicker.

Carl Havener / Special to the Daily News

(2) Any coon hunting trip might turn up something you've never seen before.

Siegfried Matull/Special to the Daily News