A squirrel-dog revival is happening in South Carolina's Piedmont Woods, and the hunter behind it all is Mac English. With his prized mountain curs and a deadeye—if unorthodox—shooting style, English drops 300-plus squirrels a year. And if you think that's good, just wait till you try his squirrel chowder.

Two hundred yards away, on the far side of a veil of ash, hickory, and muscadine vine, a dog breaks into a steady, chopping bark.

Ark…ark…ark-ark-ark!

Mac English doesn’t miss a beat. “Whose dog is that?” he asks. He gives a playful smirk. The question is directed at English’s grandson Colby, who’s having a hard time fighting off a grin of his own. “My goodness,” the old man says. “I just know I’ve heard that dog somewhere before.” The barking grows incessant, more purposeful. “Could that be my Jack?”

“I don’t know, Papa,” Colby says. He shakes his head, giving up the fight to keep a smile off his face. “Sounds like some ol’ trash dog is ruining my Buckshot’s chances again.”

English, 77, is lean and wiry with a head of white hair that’s easier to follow through the woods than the man himself. He wears denim overalls and a battered hunting coat, and when his dog barks, it’s time to go—but not until he’s had a chance to rub somebody else’s nose in the fact that his dog was first on the job.

When you’re hunting squirrels with squirrel dogs and the English clan of South Carolina’s rolling, red-clay Piedmont, it’s sometimes hard to say exactly what the quarry is: a squirrel, or bragging rights as to whose dog treed the squirrel.

Comeback Story
Once upon a time, squirrel dogs were as common in the South and Midwest as cotton gins and working mules. These small-to-middling-size breeds—mountain curs, treeing feists, Kenner curs, treeing brindles, and the like—were a family staple with pioneer roots. “When our early settlers came into this country,” En­glish tells me, “they brought these little dogs with them and they hunted everything. They’d tree a coon or a squirrel, run a deer, run a hog. You couldn’t get by without them.”

Such breeds are a part of American sporting literature as well. George Washington wrote about yellow cur dogs. Abraham Lincoln was a fan; a “short-legged fice” was hot in pursuit of bruin in his poem “The Bear Hunt.” These treeing dogs figured in William Faulkner’s “The Bear” and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling, and the dog that played Old Yeller in the movie, many say, was a black mouth cur. By the middle of the 20th century, however, most of these specialty hunters had nearly disappeared, and with them a small-game tradition with a storied past.