A mentor of mine once told me this story from his early days practicing law, back when there were only two firms in town and only two judges worth paying attention to. We were sitting on his porch when he said it all started with a night of coon hunting—one that unraveled the world he thought he had a handle on.
His name is Cecil McRae, and we met nearly thirty years ago when I was hired on at his firm. Cecil was the McRae in McRae and Dobbs, and he was looking for a young lawyer he could overwork and underpay. I was fresh out of law school, hungry, and needed every scrap of experience I could get, so I applied.
Cecil had a big personality, like many trial lawyers do, and he knew just about everyone in town he cared to know. His office was a downtown fixture, planted squarely where both of our town’s streetlights stood, and it had been operating for more than a decade by the time I came on as a junior lawyer—grunt work and all. He wasn’t mean, just quick to speak, slow to listen, certain he was right, and incapable of concealing his emotions.
When Cecil first started his firm, he didn’t have a family of his own, so most nights found him in the office well past dark, thumbing through case files and yellow pads. But on this particular Friday afternoon, he shut things down right at five so he could go coon hunting—Dobbs already way ahead of him.
He drove out toward a piece of private land he had permission to hunt, the kind of place you don’t talk about and don’t bring strangers to. It was a mix of timber and cutover, with a creek bottom that held coons like a pantry when the acorns were falling. He’d hunted it once before but had barely scratched the surface of the 650-acre tract. The land belonged to a hunting club made up mostly of out-of-state members who came down for deer and turkey season. The rest of the year, it sat quiet. Cecil had met one of the members by chance, struck up a friendship, and suddenly had a place he could hunt freely outside of big-game season. It was the sort of luck hunters dream of, and he had no intention of sharing it.
The walker hound he had then was fairly new—not a pup, but green enough that Cecil still watched her the way he and Dobbs watched me in the early days, waiting for mistakes and hoping they’d come less often with time. She’d open strong and stay hooked to a track, but she was quieter than any hound Cecil had owned before. He said she’d work a track, then go nearly silent, with long gaps between barks until she treed. And when she did tree, she’d throw her head straight back and send her voice straight up. In an open field that didn’t matter much, but in thick timber her sound disappeared into the canopy. Cecil said, you’d swear she was a mile out only to find her treed a hundred and fifty yards away.
The property had a network of dirt roads running through it and was bordered by other hunting leases. It was mid-July, so Cecil had free rein and no concern about drifting onto neighboring land. One thing worth knowing about Cecil is that he has a habit of hiding his truck. His father once represented a young man who’d been arrested after driving home from coon hunting with a wrecked front end. The boy had parked along a dirt road within a Wildlife Management Area, and some fleeing poachers had plowed into his truck while they were speeding out. There was a hit-and-run in town that same night, and when the boy drove through at two in the morning with a smashed grill, he became the prime suspect. Cecil’s father taught him early: don’t park on the road. Ease into the woods, back in if you can, and always be ready to leave in a hurry.
So to this day—thirty years later—every time Cecil and I go into the woods, even on my own land, he insists we hide the truck.
That night, Cecil parked about forty yards off the dirt road, using a break in the trees to get as far in as possible. He was near the northern boundary of the property and planned to turn his walker hound, Anne, loose toward the south. If things went right, she’d work in that direction toward a large forty-acre pond sitting just north of the southern line, about a mile away. He didn’t expect to go that far, and he didn’t want to walk all the way back, but his plan was to hunt the property in long vertical passes, picking up next time where he left off.
Because of the terrain and the winding roads, Cecil didn’t cut Anne loose until around 8:30pm. The woods were pitch black under the heavy canopy. There was a creek nearby, an open field not far off that had surely been planted with deer feed, and acorns everywhere. It was the kind of place you don’t forget. As he leaned against the tailgate and waited for Anne’s quiet voice to come alive, he took in the silence and thought about how fortunate he was to have this place all to himself.
Within ten minutes, he was headed to his first tree. Anne stayed true to plan, working south instead of back toward the truck. Cecil said she was on fire that night and made four solid trees by ten o’clock. The last one put them three-quarters of a mile from where he’d parked and only a quarter mile from the southern boundary—farther than he’d intended to go. He had a map and knew there was a road to the east that would eventually loop back near his truck. It was a longer walk, but it was July in Mississippi, and he was soaked through. He’d take a dirt road over brush, creeks, and knee-high grass any day.
After the last tree, Cecil sat down, gave Anne some water, and ate his supper: a pack of Lance peanut butter crackers and a Coke. He figured the walk would take thirty-five or forty minutes and expected to be back at his truck before eleven. Sitting there, in the dark, he noticed a light in the distance.
Between Cecil and the light was a wide open field, maybe five acres. Dense brush ringed it on all sides. Cecil quickly turned off his headlamp and followed the light. It was coming from northwest of him, nearly half a mile away. Without the open field, he never would’ve seen it.
He was supposed to be alone—miles from pavement, miles from town. It was July, long before deer season, and too early for any of the club members to be around. He stayed still, and the woods filled in around him. The light stopped sweeping and fixed itself just north of Cecil’s position.
A few seconds passed and the silence was broken by the crack of a .30-06.
He knew immediately what had just taken place. He was angry, but he didn’t like the idea of a face-off at night, with high-powered rifles involved.
Suddenly, headlights flared to life. They bounced as a truck barreled through a trail that hadn’t existed minutes before. Cecil angled toward the dirt road he’d been trying to reach. It wasn’t a straight shot, but it would take him closer to his own truck—and closer to whoever had fired that shot.
From the road, he could see the vehicle stopped and a shadow moving about ten yards in front of it. He stayed on the road until he was within a hundred yards, then slipped back into the woods, paralleling it for cover. When he got close enough, he knelt behind a brush pile and waited.
It didn’t take the poacher long to load the deer into the bed of his truck. Cecil couldn’t make out his face, but he could tell he was alone.
The truck eased back out the way it had come and rolled onto the dirt road. When it drew even with him, Cecil stepped out, hoping to catch the license plate as it passed, but there wasn’t one. The poacher had been smart enough to remove it before illegally entering the property.
But in the end it didn’t matter. Cecil had seen enough. It was a 1967 Chevrolet C10—black, rust worked into the driver’s side of the rear bumper, oversized tires, and CHEVROLET stamped across the tailgate in bright white. On the passenger side of the rear windshield was an Ole Miss bumper sticker, sun-faded by years of loyalty, the kind you never remove.
Just two months prior, Cecil and Dobbs attended a birthday party at a private estate just outside of town. Cecil was new to backslapping events such as this, so at one point in the evening he stepped outside for some fresh air and had a look around. While wandering the property, he noticed an old truck parked amongst the cars of all the other guests. He’d always loved the 1967 Chevrolet C10, so he walked over to inspect it up close. Before long, the owner appeared, eager to explain every upgrade in detail. “She was just painted” he’d said, startling Cecil in the process as he walked up from behind him. A dark, almost matte black, with “Chevrolet” written across the tailgate in bright white. “I put those big tires on so I can take her deer hunting.” As was expected, Cecil had politely noted the Ole Miss sticker on the passenger side of the rear window, and the two alums chatted as they made their way back to the party.
The owner of the truck had introduced himself as Raymond Wallace. But in court, he went by another name: the Honorable Judge Raymond T. Wallace—one of two local judges Cecil expected to spend his entire law career arguing in front of.