I took my old dog Bud hunting with my friend Stef and his dog Hook one night. We let the dogs go into a woods on the edge of town. We spent about 1/2 hour walking around while the dogs were chasing a coon. When the dogs finally treed that coon, we headed to them and leashed them up. Then we headed down a path that would eventually lead us out of the woods.
Well, it was still early and it's really not much fun to lead a dog on a leash so we thought it would be OK to send the dogs hunting ahead of us on this path. With a little luck the dogs would tree one more coon & we would be closer to the truck when we caught them again. So we lined the dogs up, pointed them down the path and unsnapped their leashes. I could tell the dogs were pretty wound up as I watched them speed off. They threw up dirt and gravel with their paws as they bolted down the path and in an instant they were gone.
We continued on our way down the path, never hearing either dog bark while walking. It took us about 1/2 hour to get back to our truck & by this time we were ready to catch the dogs and go home. Bud and Hook both had tracking collars on, so we set up our receiver and tried to locate them. We could not pick up any signal from either collar so we drove to a new position and tried again. Still no signal from the collars, again we moved, and again nothing. We kept moving in the general direction that we had pointed the dogs when we released them. Pretty soon we found ourselves in the middle of a housing development right in town and still no sign of the dogs. We were becoming a little concerned.
Finally, we stopped to listen and could hear the dogs. They sounded really odd and we still could not pick up a signal from either dogs collar. It was definitely Hook and Bud though and they were tree barking, right in the middle of town! We drove slowly through town trying to locate exactly where the dogs were. It was so strange, one minute you could hear them close, the next they sounded like they were a mile away. We drove around town until about midnight, never quite able to nail down their location. Eventually, we came around a corner and saw a man standing in his front yard with a flashlight, we could also hear the dogs barking pretty good.
We stopped the truck, got out & walked over to the man. He was on the sidewalk standing over a large iron grate that covered the storm sewer.  Steam clouds were rising up out of the sewer mixed with the loud echoing barks of Bud and Hook. Looking through the grate we could see 2 large raccoons perched on a ledge in the sewer wall.. The dogs were in a small culvert below this ledge. The homeowner informed us that this standoff had lasted for some time. He wasn't mad, but it was late & I could tell that he was tired. I thought to myself, "What are we going to do?"
We just wanted to get the dogs and go home and the homeowner just wanted to get back to bed. He said the coons were causing a lot of damage in the neighborhood & he would appreciate it if we disposed of them. Stef got his .22 and was able to shoot them through the grate. Now we still had to get the dogs. The homeowner brought a large steel bar from his garage and with his help we were able to pry up the sewer grate. I climbed down into the sewer chamber and was able to hand up the raccoons and the dogs. As I started out of the sewer, I noticed a new pair of shoes on the pavement, I looked up I saw that they belonged to a policeman.
I crawled up out of the sewer and put the grate back in place. Then Stef and I just stood there in the street while the policeman looked us over. Finally the policeman rolled back a bit on his heels and said "Walkers dogs, huh?" . It turned out that he was an old farm boy from up north and had owned several coonhounds in his youth. We stood and talked for quite a while about coons and coonhounds. He told us that raccoons were a big problem in town & that he gets several calls a week because of them. While we talked, the homeowner wandered back into his house and his lights went off. Finally the policeman had to get back on patrol and he left us there. We loaded up and drove home.

Some weeks later I went hunting up north with a friend of mine. His nephew was visiting and came along with us. We were telling stories and I started into the sewer adventure. After a short while, my friends nephew informed me that he had already heard all of this from the homeowner in the story! Quite a coincidence when you consider this is a city of over a million and we were 50 miles away from where this took place.