Shotguns, chainsaws, and viral video. Welcome to God’s country and one of the wildest hunting tales ever to spill from the deep woods.
On a crisp winter morning, as a pair of UTV buggies crashed through a Louisiana realm of monster bucks and wild pigs, surrounded by cathedral cypress stands and dripping Spanish moss, a manic Jack Russell chased a gray squirrel around the base of a red oak and vanished. Inside the walls of the 70’-high tree, the terrier lodged 12’ up the hollow trunk, a prisoner held by the vise of its own gravity. Asphyxiation assured. Death by tree tomb.
“Craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve experienced every kind of crazy in these woods,” says Red Perry, lifetime hunter and Louisiana to the bone. “The only chance was to find a chainsaw or she’d suffocate with us standing right there listening. We had to get her out without the treefall or the blade killing her. There was no plan B.”
“No doubt: It was the biggest ‘Oh, sh** moment of our lives,” he adds. “And we had no idea millions of people worldwide were gonna watch it.”
Hellfire Dog
Lil Bit was special. Raised in the shadow of owner Wes Weaver, she was born to hate squirrels. With 15 pounds of quivering muscle packed into a white body broken by brown and black splotches, Lil Bit operated on two modes: coiled and uncoiled. Blessed with a motor that didn’t quit, she was a canine tornado.
Red Perry, 62, longtime hunting partner of Weaver, has walked behind the finest dogs in the South, but he’s never encountered another in the class of Lil Bit. “Best natural squirrel dog I’ve come across in my life. I’ve seen her alongside professionally trained champions from other states and she smoked them all. She was just that dog. Extreme intelligence. She knew. She really knew.”
And in action beneath a tree harboring hidden squirrels flattened against the highest limbs, she threw sparks—hellfire. “It was like somebody tried to break in your house,” Perry continues. “She’d bark like hell, jumping on the tree and biting it. Any real hunter knows to shake a vine to get a squirrel to move, but she learned so quick and caught on to that. She started biting the vines, kicking her legs and swinging in the air, doing our job for us.”
On Jan. 31, 2015, with deer season winding down and roughly a month of squirrel season left on the table, Lil Bit disappeared.
Squirrel and Dog, Adios
In the wooly woods of northwest Louisiana’s Bossier Parrish, on a Saturday morning a stone’s throw from the Red River, Perry and Weaver, along with three other hunting brothers, cranked a pair of side-by-sides and drove away from a pine and cypress cabin into the freedom of a 1,000-acre kingdom dotted with old-growth hardwoods on flatland heavily saturated with gray squirrels.
Armed with .12 gauges and enough high-brass No. 5 shot to start a war, the five-man hunting party was led by a single sentinel, Lil Bit, at a prime five years old, riding on her throne—the passenger seat of Weaver’s buggy, atop Perry. “She kept her back feet on my legs, and her front feet on the dash, and we rolled while she hunted by sight.”
“When she spotted a squirrel, it was like an explosion. The buggy had no windshield, so she’d go over the top and out the front with us never braking. Then we’d drive as close as possible to wherever she treed and start shooting.”
By mid-morning, with a bulging game bag of squirrels, the hunt was still hot. “Things were going great just like always,” Perry says. “Until they weren’t.”
Eyeballing squirrel movement on the horizon, Lil Bit bailed from the buggy, scrambled 30 yards toward a red oak in pursuit of a gray blur—and never checked up. Both squirrel and dog, adios.
“We drove over and ran up to the tree, but all we could hear was muffled barks and whimpers way up the trunk,” Perry recalls. “Lil Bit had darted in a hole at the bottom, but we didn’t hear any movement. Minutes were going by and we were calling, but she didn’t answer.”
At 6’2” in height, Perry began knocking and tapping on the oak, reaching upward to determine Lil Bit’s location. “All I could tell was that she was way above my arms. It shows her incredible physical ability that she could even get that high.”
Confusion changing to alarm, Perry’s son, Zach, stuck his head and arm in the hole, reversed position upwards, and shined an iPhone light into the darkness. The end of the beam’s reach caught a pair of almond-shaped, bulging eyes.
“I see her,” Zach said. “She’s stuck.”
“What in hell do you mean, stuck?” Perry asked.
“I mean head down, feet down, she can’t move.”
Lil Bit was suspended 12’ up the hollow, curled in a u-shape. She had scampered up the cavity and attempted to come down. Instead of backing, she turned headfirst, wedging her body against the taper of the hollow.
“As far as Zach could tell, her breathing was ok, but we knew we were playing with time,” Perry says. “At first it’s funny; then you’re scratching your head; then you’re concerned; and then you’re plain scared, knowing she’ll die if you don’t get her out.”
Indeed. The mummified ghost of a Georgia coon dog was calling.
Ol’ Stuckie
In 1980, 35 years prior to Lil Bit’s lockup, a logging crew was harvesting trees along the upper Alabama-Georgia border. On the Bama side of the line (Cleburne County), the loggers toppled a chestnut oak and chanced on a stunningly well-preserved canine. Tucked almost 30’ up the oak, a coonhound was lodged in the tree, hidden from sight, but shielded for almost two decades from predators, insects, and weather.
In the early 1960s, entering a hole at the tree’s base, the hound had scrambled up the hollow that slimmed to a narrow exit, providing an ideal escape hatch for a raccoon, but a trap for a hound. The oak operated as a preservation chamber. The tannins (acid) within the wood were absorbed by the dog, resulting in a mummified canine.
Still encased in the trunk section, the macabre coonhound—dubbed Stuckie—resides today in a Waycross, Ga., museum, Southern Forest World.
Seven-hundred miles west of Waycross and Stuckie’s remains, Perry raced against the clock in a bid to free Lil Bit from a similar fate. “I’m talking about a chainsaw and a little dog,” he says. “I’m talking about no room for error.”
Reborn Hard
Half the hunting party roared away for a 10-minute drive to the cabin for a chainsaw.
Perry, Weaver, and Zach waited at the tree. “We were starting to panic a little bit because she could have suffocated and we couldn’t help with no chainsaw. Zach kept getting in the tree to look, and Lil Bit kept whimpering with those big eyes staring right at him. She was pinched and she knew it.”
Twenty agonizing minutes crawled by before the buggy returned. Chainsaw in hand, the plan was to fell the oak, hope Lil Bit survived the ride down, and then continue cutting in small sections until she could be pulled from the squeeze.
As Weaver prepared to make the initial cut, Perry pleaded for precision. “Don’t go to hacking. Whatever, you do, don’t go all the way through the tree.”
“I’ll keep around the edges of the hollow,” Weaver answered. “But if she comes loose or falls on the sawblade, that’ll be the end.”
Turning the blade backwards, Weaver masterfully circled the trunk as the tree teetered.
Roughly 2,500 pounds of wood smashed to the ground and shook the bottomland. But before Weaver could put a foot forward with the chainsaw, the red oak surrendered its hostage, spitting out a canine Lazarus. Emerging from the end of the horizontal trunk, Lil Bit bounced to the oak’s shorn base and into the surrounding leaves—without skipping a beat. No injuries. No wounds. No limp. Reborn hard.
“She was jarred loose by the crash. I was in total shock. Total surprise,” Perry says. “We’d been hoping the force of impact didn’t hit where her head was because we were afraid it would break her neck. The collision on the ground was something else to see and hear, knowing a little dog was on the other side of the wood.”
“But our fear switched to relief and then to downright hilariousness when she popped outta the tree, had a good shake, and just stood there looking at us, basically asking to chase squirrels again. Hell, why not? We kept hunting. The whole thing was plain nuts.”
On with the show.
All Dogs Go To Heaven
Perry had filmed the fall. Days later, he showed the video to a friend, Chad Cole, who posted the outrageous clip on Facebook and TikTok. Lil Bit went global. Millions of views.
“What the public never realized,” Perry says, “is that the video was only a tiny piece of what happened. I was raised in the woods and I’ve seen so many things, but never anything to top Lil Bit getting stuck and coming loose. Deer stories, frog leg stories, wild pigs, snakes like you never imagined; all those are part of the redneck life we love. But Lil Bit in that tree was just something else. Something too nuts to be captured in a video.”
“Anybody out there who hunts or lives in a rural area knows that if you want to find crazy, just go wait in the woods,” Perry continues. “That’s all true, but you still won’t experience a squirrel dog jammed 12’ up inside a tree.”
Ten years past the most unlikely outdoor experience of his lifetime, Perry pays tribute to Lil Bit, killed by coyotes beside the Red River two years after the oak tree incident.
“Our conversations about wonderful Lil Bit never end,” he adds. “We’ll never, never quit talking about her or remembering her. There’ll never be another like her.”
Respect to Lil Bit, 2010-2017; “The dog lives for the day, the hour, even the moment.”—Robert Falcon Scott, 1911
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man
Ghost in the House: A Forgotten American Farming Tragedy
Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic
Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.
Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years
American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud
Judas Goats: Agriculture’s Bizarre, Drug-Addicted Masters of Deceit Once Ruled the Killing Floor
Evil Grain: The Wild Tale of History’s Biggest Crop Insurance Scam
Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam
The Arrowhead Whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland
Skeleton In the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas Farmhouse Hides Civil War History
