This is the last in a six-part, yearlong series called Disappearing Virginia in Distinction magazine. This story originally appeared in the December issue as “The Vanishing Melody of Swamp Music.”

WET NOSES poke excitedly through the steel bars. The hounds are eager, jittery even, in crates wedged into the beds of pickup trucks. Before them lie thousands of acres of woods. And deep inside, their quarry.

When the signal comes, these dogs and their owners will hop on the trail of a centuries-old tradition.The group is participating in the Special Olympics Benefit Field Trial near South Mills, N.C., just south of the Virginia border. The event raises money for charity and offers bragging rights for the hunters who field the fleetest dogs. But it is really just a dry run; come autumn, the hunters will be loaded for deer.

This style of hunting deer with hounds, known as dog hunting, is found mostly in the South and comes alive in the rural stretches of Tidewater where vast tracts of farmland mingle with dense forests. It’s a sport that demands devotion and year-round attention. And, increasingly, it requires advocacy, too.

Brought over from Europe, this kind of hunting is enjoyed by some as a communal event, but it is hated by others as a brutal blood sport that also infringes on property rights, and as such it faces a problem that has killed other aging cultural practices.

While tools and technology have changed over time, the method has not. Half of the hunting party releases hounds on one side of a wooded or swampy parcel while the other half stands at a road or field where the prey might logically run when chased. Hunters target any deer that runs into the open.

John Morse of Chesapeake has been dog hunting in Tidewater since he was 6. Now 64, he chairs the board of directors of the Virginia Hunting Dog Alliance. He owns 15 hounds himself. What’s kept him at it all these years are deep ties to friends and community, and to his dogs.

Dog hunting, he says, allows members to pool money and resources to access large parcels that would be otherwise too expensive. The hunters find camaraderie in the community, but there’s also something alluring about the hunt itself, an electric pursuit that hunters say is hard to replicate anywhere else.

The hounds vanish into the dense thicket, detectable only by their intermittent cries. When they begin harking, or catching the scent of a deer, their tone takes on a different pitch, higher often, with increased urgency.

For the stationary hunter, the melody of the baying hounds – swamp music, some call it – mirrors the erratic course of the fleeing deer. And at some point during the hunt there’s the unmistakable crescendo of approach.

Evan Nuzzo, 21, of James City County, owns eight hunting dogs. He drives a couple hundred miles with his dogs to hunt for a single day. For him the greatest pleasure of dog hunting is the chase. Hunters, he says, remember the ebb and flow of the action more than a particular deer. The chase, Nuzzo says, “sends chills down my spine. As soon as I hear one of my dogs trailing a deer, it’s like euphoria.”

The indefatigable dogs flush deer from the nearly impenetrable thickets and inaccessible swamp, which is why it was a preferred method for centuries in the lowlands of the South. But the sport has long rubbed some people the wrong way, even within the hunting community. As early as the mid-19th century, reports were made of still hunters shooting hounds they found pursuing deer. Many states and counties outlawed the practice. Today in Virginia, dog hunting is permitted only east of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Dog hunters have noticed their ranks dwindling as suburban development spreads outward, reducing the amount of land available for such hunting. Large parcels are increasingly being divvied up by landowners and sold piecemeal, depriving dog hunters of the vast tracts they need.

But many dog hunters feel the biggest hazard is politics. State-level legislation has generally given dog hunters wide leeway, but that has changed recently. At issue for many opponents is Virginia’s right-to-retrieve law, which allows hunters to cross property without permission to collect their dogs.

Morse says the majority of hound hunters already abide by a code of ethics demanding they first attempt to gain permission from property owners. Also, technology on dogs’ tracking collars has advanced significantly in recent years, effectively allowing hunters to stop dogs in their tracks before they plunge into forbidden ground.

In 2016, lawmakers passed a statute that criminalized the act of intentionally releasing hounds on some-one else’s property, a measure the VAHDA supported because they already practiced it. Last year, dog hunting proponents narrowly defeated legislation that would have allowed fining hunters whose dogs trespassed on others’ property.

Morse says the dog hunting community is also feeling increased pressure from animal rights groups upset by blood sport. But he describes dog hunting as a necessary check on a wildlife population with insufficient predation. Current estimates of the number of deer in Virginia put the population at 900,000, more than double the figure in 1980. Dog hunting accounts for 54 percent of the deer harvest in the localities that allow the practice, according to data from the state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

What’s needed in the face of dwindling numbers, according to Morse, is younger participants, a new gen-eration willing to turn away from their screens and tune into the politics of this sport. There have been musings about mentorship programs to swell the ranks of younger hunters, but Morse says political mobilization will be the key element of sustaining the sport’s relevance and reputation. “The young guys are the future, and there’s growing insight that they need to be involved politically,” he says. 

Nuzzo recognizes that the future of dog hunting rests on the shoulders of younger men like him. Politics may be part of that, but an equal measure will be responsibility and ethics, he says. His dogs are like his children, he says, and he devotes as much time to them as he does to work and family.

As much as he enjoys being in the moment with his dogs on the trail of a deer, he recognizes, too, that his work is just as much about carrying a mantle of generations before him, that preservation of this culture, or any culture, requires effort, endurance and a total effort that will beat back the looming menace of apathy. “This is a 24/7 job if you’re committed to it,” he says. “This has become my lifestyle.”