Franklinton resident Trey Riley fits into his surroundings even better than the game that frequently finds itself in his sights.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fifth installment of a 12-part series introducing readers to young Louisianians who have accomplished great things in the outdoors.
If I didn’t know any better, I would swear that Trey Riley was from Route 4, Liberty, Miss., rather than Franklinton, La. I could imagine him having cousins named Marcel, Odell, Claude, Eugene and Clovis. And it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe he had a coon-hunting monkey tied up behind his house.
Although Riley probably doesn’t even know where Yazoo City is, you can bet that if Jerry Clower were still alive today, he would be spinning a few tales about Trey’s adventures complete with treed mountain lions and swarms of unseen bees at night.
Imagine if you will a hunter heading out to the woods early in the morning trying desperately to keep hold of all his gear as he struggles through the briars and the brambles. He has a backpack on, so you wonder why he’s holding so much stuff in his hands — that is until you see a head sticking up out of it and two little legs dangling out of a couple holes at the bottom of the pack.
That head and those legs belonged to Trey.
“He was, and still is, my hunting buddy, so what can I say?” Trey’s dad William Riley said in his defense. “I started stuffing him in that backpack when he was only 3 months old. He was a little bitty thing, but I guarantee you he never was a baby about it. He never even cried.”
Like most of Clower’s fascinating tales, it’s hard to discern if Riley’s story is true or if the truth has been stretched just a bit. Told with the right amount of snorts, guffaws and hoo-wees, though, and it’s worth listening to whether it’s true or not.
“I always believed that if I could get little William hooked on hunting, it would help keep him out of trouble,” Riley said. “I’d say it’s worked so far. The only thing I’ve had to adjust to as he has gotten older is how much he picks on me when he kills a bigger deer or turkey than I do. That’s a ribbing I’ll gladly take any day of the week.”
If there is an animal in Louisiana with hunting season dates behind its name in the hunting regulation booklet, it better beware of Trey. Deer, turkey, rabbit, squirrel, dove, duck — you name it, and he hunts it. All those animals won’t be able to rest any time soon as Trey just got his lifetime hunting license this past season.
As much as he loves to hunt all different kinds of animals, it is his love of coon hunting that makes him one of the more unique outdoor kids around. He is heavily involved in competition hunting through organizations such as the United Kennel Club (UKC), Professional Kennel Club (PKC) and the American Kennel Club (AKC).
Trey has taken it a step beyond just being involved, though. He travels across the nation to compete in coon hunting trials, and he has a way of making sure everybody at each one knows who he is before he heads for home. He and his dog Git-R-Done are the state AKC leaders in Louisiana, and the coon-hunting pair have also won such events as the Louis Devoltz Memorial Texas AKC Youth Championship. Trey has also taken first place at several coon squalling competitions across the south.
“I really like the coon hunting competitions that test my dog,” said Trey. “What typically happens is they divide all the hunters and dogs into groups of four or five called a cast. The judges line all of us up, and we let our dogs go at the same time. Then we have to listen for our dogs to tree. Dogs have distinct barks, and there’s hardly ever a dog that sounds just like another dog.”
When Trey hears Git-R-Done strike a scent trail, he has to call out, “Strike, Git-R-Done,” to the judges. If his dog strikes first, he gets more points. After a strike, Trey begins to listen for his dog to actually tree the coon. He can tell when Git-R-Done has treed by the way her bark changes.
“Then we go up to the tree with the judges to find the coon,” Trey continued. “We get plus points if we can spot the coon in the tree with our lights, but if we can’t find the coon, and we can tell there isn’t any place for it to hide, we get minus points or even get scratched (disqualified) because the dog treed something other than a coon.”
Trey recalled one particular time when he treed something other than a coon. He was at a competition out in Paris, Texas. He was leading his cast after a successful strike and tree, and he had turned Git-R-Done loose again to keep it going.
“She got on the trail and started barking because she had treed another coon,” Trey recollected. “I got there and shined my light up in the tree and saw these big, bright orange eyeballs looking back at me. I thought it was a coon, so I started walking up to the tree, and about that time a mountain lion started shimmying down toward the ground.
“Git-R-Done took off like a shot with her tail between her legs … all I could do was freeze. It all happened so fast that I didn’t have time to think. I just stood there and stared in disbelief.”
And then there’s the one about …
“As long as I’m telling stories,” Trey continued, “I might as well tell you the one about how fast old Git-R-Done is. We were out in Texas competing in a drag race (a competition to see whose dog can get to a treed coon the fastest), and the first dog to the tree wins. Git-R-Done was so fast that she ran 200 yards past the tree, turned around and came back, and still beat all the other dogs to win.”
If you think that’s something …
“Then there was the time we treed a coon in an old hollow tree,” Trey added. “It was pitch dark, and I knew the coon was in the cavity of that tree. I started beating on the side to try to make it come out. The next thing I knew, it felt like needles were sticking in me all over. I couldn’t tell it, but that hollow tree had a bee hive in it, and they didn’t take too kind to me pounding on their house.”
Trey’s other love besides coon hunting and telling stories is turkey hunting. He is heavily involved in the JAKES youth program of the National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF), and he has been competing in turkey calling contests and turkey hunting contests for as long as he can remember. He also was invited to the national JAKES Day that Porter Waggoner puts on in South Carolina, where he got to meet Rob Keck, president of the NWTF.
“I really like the turkey calling contests,” Trey said. “I won the Louisiana State Youth Championship in 2005. You get to pick the call you want to use, and, like duck-calling contests, you can soup it up a little bit to get the judge’s attention. I’ve got a little routine I do that lasts a minute or two, and it has some yelping, purring and clucking in it. I practice a lot. That’s probably why we have so many turkeys around our house.”
Trey also regularly enters the turkey-hunting contest at Pro Stop in Franklinton, which features two age groups for youth — 8 to 11 and 12 to 17. Youth hunters who place first, second and third get to go to Baton Rouge to meet the governor — something Trey did in 2004. His third-place turkey had a 9-inch beard and 3/4-inch spurs.
“We’re really proud of him,” said Jennifer Riley, Trey’s mother. “His dad is the one who got him involved in all this stuff, but we both encourage him because of all the peer pressures young people face today.”
Trey has tried to encourage some of his friends at Franklinton Junior High to join him on some hunts. In a rural area like Franklinton, students typically swap hunting and fishing stories and brag about who killed the biggest deer or turkey or who caught the biggest bass. Even in that type of environment, though, there are still some kids who don’t hunt.
“I’ve got a friend named Conner who didn’t hunt at all,” Trey said. “He started coming over to my house some, and I would want to go hunting. He kept asking me to go, so I let him go with me. Now he’s going with me all the time, and he’s even going on his own. He even goes to some of the coon-hunting competitions with Dad and me.”
William Riley believes one of the reasons so many young people are growing up never having hunted is that they just don’t know how to get involved if nobody in their family hunts. Even if they are exposed to hunting, finding a place to hunt is often a door that’s too hard to open.
That’s why William Riley encourages parents to get their kids involved in programs like JAKES. Getting to know other kids who hunt is a key to opening up doors and getting invited to hunt with different people. He also recommended that parents look into all the youth hunts that the state of Louisiana puts on each hunting season. These youth-only days are great ways to get involved.
“I know the WMAs around Franklinton like Ben’s Creek and Sandy Hollow have some good hunting,” he said, “and the Bogue Chitto NWR can be a good place to go. There are enough opportunities out there that if parents are really serious about getting a kid hooked on hunting they can make it happen.”
Trey is so involved in hunting that he wants to make sure he has a job one day that allows him to be around it as much as possible. At 14, he has his sights set on becoming a game warden or a wildlife biologist one day. He knows the only way to do that, though, is to put school before hunting. And, for this year at least, school has been made much more fun by a teacher who loves to hunt just as much as he does.
“My teacher’s name is Mrs. Tina Stafford,” he said. “Her husband is Mr. Jimmy Stafford, a wildlife biologist at Ben’s Creek WMA. Mrs. Stafford and I always get to talk about hunting, and we rib each other about who killed the biggest deer or turkey. I remember one day, we had a substitute who didn’t really seem to like hunting too much. She told me she was an animal activist, so I showed her some of my hunting pictures. She hasn’t been back since.”
Trey concluded with the thought that he just wanted every kid to have the hunting opportunities that he has had all his life. He killed his first turkey with his grandpa, Wayne Jenkins, and it’s such a fond memory for him that he wants other kids to be able to experience that same feeling because there’s nothing quite like being able to hunt with your grandfather, dad or mom. It creates life-long bonds and traditions that get passed down for generations.
As for the present, though, Trey has something else in mind. He’s got his eye on a white coon that he’s been trying to get for a little over a year now. He thinks he’s been treeing him, but it’s been in a den tree every time. At least that’s his story.
“I’ll get him sooner or later,” Trey insisted. “He can’t escape me forever.”
Killing a white coon that’s eluded him for over a year without the help of a coon-hunting monkey — now there’s a story Uncle Versie would be proud of.
