KINSTON, Lenoir County — Hurricane Florence was blowing across eastern North Carolina hours before making landfall, and Bennie Lee Sutton’s hunting beagles were howling in their backyard kennel. So he was up in the middle of the night doing what he knew would quiet the pack of more than a dozen hounds: parking his pickup nearby and shining the headlights into their pen.

Sutton could be heard talking to someone, probably the dogs, shortly before dawn Friday as winds swirled 70 miles north of where the hurricane was about to make landfall near Wilmington, said his daughter, Tameria. But hours later when she and her mother looked outside for the avid hunter, he was gone and some of his dogs were outside their pens, roaming their small neighborhood surrounded by…