Читать книгу The Salvation of Miss Lucretia - Ted Dunagan - Страница 10

Chapter 3

Mojo

“Maybe the dogs just off chasing a fox or some other varmint,” Poudlum said as we were having our breakfast of biscuits and ham. They were Poudlum’s momma’s biscuits, and one of them was a plenty for anybody. We had several more wrapped up in wax paper.

“No, they would have been back by now and it ain’t like Old Bill to run off early in the morning, if that’s when they left. I think something other than a fox has enticed them away.”

I had been calling and whistling for my dog since way before breakfast and he always came when I whistled for him.

“What we gonna do?” Poudlum asked.

“I don’t know, but we got to find our dogs. You don’t think that voodoo priestess took ’em, do you?”

“I wouldn’t put nothing out of mind when it comes to voodoo.”

“But how could she have got the dogs to go with her, Poudlum?”

“A dog will go with ’bout anybody if they offer ’em a tasty bone. Who knows. She might have put a spell on ’em, or something.”

“She can do that, Poudlum? You didn’t tell me she could do stuff like that!”

“I don’t know that for a fact. I’ve just heard stuff like that about voodoo. Some folks say they can put a curse on you and make bad things happen to a person.”

“What does your momma say about that?”

“She say if you don’t believe in it, their mojo won’t have no affect on you.”

“Their what?”

“Mojo.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s voodoo for spells, curses and such.”

We decided to leave our camp intact taking only our rifles with us, and search the forest for the dogs. After we had gone in ever-widening circles with no sign of them, we returned to our camp about noon, knowing we had to make some kind of decision.

“Rip been right at my feet ever since he was a puppy,” Poudlum said.

“The way I see it, we got two choices,” I told him.

“What are they?”

“We can strike camp and go back to Mister Autrey’s, or we can go straight through this forest to Miss Lucretia’s and see if she’s got our dogs.”

“We can’t leave our dogs,” Poudlum said. “As much as I hate the thought of it, we got to see if she might have took ’em.”

“You know how to get there?” I asked.

“Lord, no! I ain’t never been back there!”

“Well, let’s see, Mister Autrey said she lived at the back of his property just before you got to an old fence that was his property line. I figure if we head straight north eventually we’ll come to that fence and then we could just follow it one way or the other until we find her cabin.”

“But when we get to the fence, which way do we go?”

“We’ll figure that out when we get to the fence. How long you think it’ll take us?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Poudlum said.

“I guess we need to think about what to take with us. We need to be prepared if we can’t get back to our camp before nightfall.”

“We need to think about hiding stuff on us, too,” Poudlum said.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“You got a short memory. Don’t you remember how Dudley trapped us in that room on the back of Silas’s cabin on the Tombigbee River, and the only thing that saved us was that we had our pocket knives hid in our boots?”

Once again, we both hid our pocket knives in our boots, and we stuffed extra .22 bullets in every pocket, and, lucky for us, Poudlum dug a four-inch piece from a broken hacksaw blade out of the bottom of his of his pack and slid it into his back hip pocket. It was a thin blade and wouldn’t be detectable in his pocket.

It was a little after noon when we departed our camp with only our rifles and canteens. About four hours later we realized we had made a mistake.

The forest had grown thicker, choked with vines and rotting fallen trees and limbs, which made our progress a lot slower. We still hadn’t come to the fence line, and it was too late to get back to our camp before dark.

“Should’ve packed up and brought everything with us,” Poudlum moaned. “Now it looks like we gonna be stuck way out here in the woods overnight.”

“We could make us some torches and probably find our way back to camp,” I told him. “But then we would have to get up and start all over again.”

“We didn’t even bring nothing to eat with us.”

“Shssss,” I whispered. “There’s our supper sitting over next to that big cottonwood tree.”

It was a big jackrabbit, sniffing around, but he hadn’t spotted us. I took careful aim on the rabbit with my rifle and squeezed the trigger. The stillness of the forest was shattered by the sound of the shot, but it was a true one that provided our supper.

We set up camp right there, making do with what water we had in our canteens. We dressed out the rabbit and skewered him on a straight hickory stick. Then after we got a good fire going, we raked out some hot coals between two forked sticks we had driven into the ground and rested each end of the stick on one of them.

After that we kept adding fresh hot coals and pretty soon that rabbit was golden brown. We knew it was ready to eat when we easily pulled off a back leg. It was hot and we had to wave it around some till it cooled down enough to eat.

“Should’ve hid some salt on us along with the other stuff,” Poudlum said after he had taken a juicy bite.

It was just after dark now, and we had full stomachs and a bright fire going with plenty of wood stacked up. We had also found a grove of pine trees nearby and raked us up enough straw to make ourselves a soft bed, well back from the fire.

Poudlum’s sleepy voice came drifting across the fire through the smoke, saying, “Why you think she took our dogs?”

“We don’t know for sure she did.”

“If anything else had happened to ’em we would’ve heard some kind of a ruckus. I promise you they is some voodoo going on.”

“Well, we’ll just find her place tomorrow and see.”

I woke up twice during the night and added wood to our fire and I thought I remembered Poudlum doing the same thing, but the next morning while we were cleaning the bones of that rabbit, he said, “That pine straw made a mighty fine bed. I slept real sound all night.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Didn’t you get up and stoke the fire up a couple of times during the night?”

“Naw, I slept like a rock.”

Suddenly, I was alarmed and the first thing I did was look toward where the rifles were, or where they should have been, leaning against a big tree. The rifles were gone!

“Poudlum!” I cried out. “Did you move the rifles?”

“Huh? Naw, I ain’t touched ’em,” he said as he looked toward the tree and realized what I already knew. Then he said, “Oh, no, she done took our rifles, too!”

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “They wasn’t but ten feet away from us!”

Poudlum shook his head and said, “Stay out here one more night and she be done took our clothes.”

I could feel a little anger as well as frustration welling up inside myself. “It just ain’t right for somebody to take your dog. Anybody might be able to entice a dog away, but you can’t entice a rifle. That’s stealing!”

“You think we might ought to go back and tell Mister Autrey?” Poudlum asked.

“Naw, it might be too late by then. I miss my dog and I want my rifle back. Come on, let’s go find that fence.”

We came upon the fence not by sight, but rather by obstruction. When we attempted to fight our way through a huge growth of vines and bushes, we discovered an old fence with rotting fence posts underneath them.

“All right, here’s the fence,” Poudlum said. “So which way do we go?”

I had no idea, and when I suggested we split up and go in both directions, Poudlum said he didn’t think that was a good idea and that he thought we ought to stick together.

I realized he was correct so we decided to leave it to luck and flip a coin. Heads we go left and tails we go right. The nickel landed on heads and we turned left. We hadn’t gone very far when Poudlum suggested we cross the fence and proceed on the other side of it.

“Why would we want to do that?” I asked.

“Cause I got a feeling she might be expecting us, and if she is, she’ll be expecting us to be on this side of the fence.”

“What difference would that make?”

“Voodoo got ways of making people fall into holes, fall off cliffs, and other bad stuff like that.”

We found a minor gap and clawed our way through it over the rusty wire and emerged on the other side.

“Now then,” Poudlum said, “let’s go along quiet-like and maybe we’ll see her or her place before she see us.”

“You think that old woman’s that smart, Poudlum?”

“She took our dogs and our rifles right out from under our noses, didn’t she?”

She had apparently done both of those, so I knew Poudlum was right. We moved with caution along the line formed by the old fence which separated Mister Autrey’s land from this unknown forest.

“What if we going in the wrong direction? Poudlum asked.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to turn around and go in the other direction. We could walk by her place and not see it for the woods going in either direction.”

“We’ll just have to rely on our senses,” Poudlum said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean our sight, smell and hearing. Listen for sounds, look for maybe smoke, and be aware of anything that don’t smell natural here in the forest.”

It wasn’t long before Poudlum said, “I done got hungry. We might be in a bad fix here without our dogs and rifles.”

“Maybe we made a mistake by not going back to Mister Autrey’s,” I said.

“Miss Lucretia might’ve already been eating dog stew by the time we done that,” Poudlum said.

Dog stew sounded awful, but it did remind me that I was hungry, too.

Several minutes later Poudlum suddenly came to a halt and said, “Listen!”

“What?” I whispered. “I don’t hear nothing.”

“Listen hard. Hear that buzzing?”

I cocked my head to listen better and sure enough I heard it. “It’s bees!” I said. “There’s a honey tree around here somewhere!”

It took us about ten minutes to find the bee hive. It was in a hollow tree and there were a few bees buzzing in and out of it.

“We gonna have to light a little fire, just enough to get a little smoke to run the bees off long enough to get to the honey,” Poudlum said.

“What if she sees the smoke?”

“That’s a chance we got to take. We can’t pass up this honey. It may be the last thing we get to eat for a while.”

We gently put a pile of dry leaves at the bees’ entrance to the hollow tree and Poudlum lit a match and stuck it to them. As soon as the smoke started, I fanned it into the entrance of the hive with a broken pine tree limb.

It didn’t take long before all the bees disappeared, and then we stamped out the fire and poured a little water on it from our canteens to make sure it was all the way out.

“We got to move fast,” Poudlum said as he reached inside the hollow tree and pulled out a big hunk of honeycomb. His hand went straight to his mouth. Then I heard him sighing with pleasure as he bit into it and began chewing.

It felt soft, but almost crunchy to my hand, as I blindly tore off a big chunk myself. The comb was made up of lots of little waxy-tasting cells filled with sweet, golden honey.

My taste buds sent waves of pleasure to my brain. I don’t know if it was the sweetness of the wild honey or the fact that I was so hungry that made it taste so good.

By the time I spat the wax part out after I had chewed the honey out of it Poudlum was reaching inside for a second helping. I did the same just a few moments before we heard a faint buzzing over our heads.

“Grab a hunk and let’s run with it,” Poudlum said as he reached into the hive again.

We escaped without a single sting, and dashed off back toward the fence line, both of us with a handful of honey comb. When we were at a safe distance, we finished off the honey and then concerned ourselves with the stickiness of it. We had to use some of the precious water from our canteens to rid ourselves of it.

While we were washing up, Poudlum said, “I hope them bees don’t go hungry on account of us.”

“They won’t. How much honey can a bee eat? There was plenty left and they’ll just make some more. What we got to worry about now is water. How much you got left?”

Poudlum lifted his canteen, shook it, and said, “Ain’t but a few swallows left in mine.”

“Mine either,” I said. “We need to be on the lookout for some water.”

“Something else we need to be worried about, too.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You remember Mister Autrey said they was panthers and bobcats in these woods? What we gonna do if we run up on one of them critters and us with nothing but our hunting knives?”

What we did was cut down two straight hickory saplings and used our knives to sharpen one end of each to make us spears.

“I do feel some better now,” Poudlum said as he hoisted his. “Between the two of us we could probably fight one of ’em off.”

It was just luck that we found water. How it happened was I stumbled on a root and fell on my face. As I was getting up, I spied a small game trail through the underbrush.

A game trail is faint, but still a trail, and it told me that small critters went that way often, which probably meant it led to water.

The trail took us about a hundred yards deeper into the unknown forest before we found the spring. It was small, but there was plenty of crystal-clear water to quench our thirst and fill our canteens.

We couldn’t believe our luck when, just beyond the spring, we spotted a grove of huckleberry bushes and proceeded to eat our fill.

On our way back to the fence line, with some concern in his voice, Poudlum said, “That honey and them berries was good, but come nightfall, we gonna need us a real meal.”

We walked for another few minutes, and then suddenly I remembered what Poudlum had said about using our senses. It was my sense of smell that made me remember.

I came to a halt and held my hand up for Poudlum to do the same, because I could smell that distinct odor of a goat once again, except this time, it wasn’t a rattlesnake.