anything or hear of anything, let me know. Ryan, tell Mr. Billy the whole thing and give him his $150. You can tell him that you talked to me about it”.
We shook hands and they left. It was lunch and we went over to Georgia Bob’s for barbecue sandwiches. On the way, we stopped by the office and got my laptop that Chris took over while we ate. He started looking over recent copper theft reports from the local counties and the news reports. There were several other than the rec department poles being stripped of copper in Macon, an irrigation system in the south part of Bibb county, spools stolen from a power company in Lizella, another irrigation system in west Twiggs County, some from Cook’s Heating and Cooling in Centerville, and a cell phone tower outside of Byron.
“This is suggestive”, Chris said. We pulled up a map and started dropping pins on those locations. Chris’ eyes looked at the pins and pointed at a creek on the map.
“Echeconnee”, I said. Most folks knew of this creek than ran down from Bibb County and dumped into the Ocmulgee River.
“There’s a train track right there, though” Chris added.
“Yes, but look at it and remember that Houston Road passes over that track with a bridge right there at Seven Bridges. But still, that is only a 15 or 20 minute ride from the Food Lion, at the most.”
“Then,” Chris grinned and pulled his hair back out of his face, “they didn’t take a direct route to get there to throw off Ryan. And when they left, they rode around to get back to the old Food Lion.
Chris was right, as usual. “Do you notice the dates? They look to be about one every two or three weeks but the last three have been in the last three weeks”.
“Let me call Jimmy Vaughn. He is the DNR man up in that area - you feel like going for a ride?”
“You bet.” Chris replied.
“You’re going to wish you had boots” I added.
I called Jimmy and soon after we pulled my two four-wheelers up to a motorcycle shop off of Houston Road. Jimmy met us and we spent several minutes explaining what we thought about Ryan’s trip. I had met Jimmy several times over the past couple years and felt that he had a good handle on the DNR business in the area.
“If they are here, they could come in from this side of Echeconnee or they might come in from the other side – there are several roads on and off the creek through here.” Jimmy said, “But there isn’t a Silver Dollar anything over here. There’s deer and there’s hunting all through here from I-75 on both sides of the creek. All except Mr. Cliff Elrod’s old place. He didn’t let anyone hunt on his place and since he died his kids haven’t either. They are all down in Florida, I think, and never come up here. To me, everywhere else in this area from the Interstate over to Houston Road is covered by hunters”
“Are there any gravel roads that head into that property?” Chris asked.
“None that I know of.”
Chris continued, “But there is traffic during deer season in the evenings and mornings, though. Not the best place for keeping something secret during the fall.”
“Or the late spring, either. Folks will be putting in food plots and working on stands then and into the summer. But from February until now, it would be fairly vacant. Not much turkey hunting going on”
“What do you think, Jimmy?” I asked.
“I am not sure about this area, Mark. If someone is coming in and out of here, especially with a trailer, I think it would be noticed.”
“How big is the Elrod place?”
“A couple hundred acres, maybe three hundred. I haven’t been out there in years. There is a road out, or there was a road out, to the east side of the property. I believe the creek runs on the north boundary of the property line.”
A few minutes later we were on the four-wheelers riding alongside the railroad track on what might have been used as a road ten or more years ago. I thought the gravel might have been what Ryan thought was a gravel road but I decided probably not since there was such an angle to the railroad bed that he’d notice that. A quarter mile or so later we turned up through the woods on what appeared to be an old logging road. There hadn’t been any traffic at all on this road for years, much less a trailer and a truck. Even in the middle of the afternoon old growth trees hung over our heads and made it darker back in this area. After a good ways, the road ran out.
FOUR
We stopped and Chris asked, “Is that the creek?”
“No,” Jimmy answered, “that is an ox-bow. In some places, creeks wind back and forth in sharp curves, like an S. When it floods, probably even before ’94, the creek can re-route itself and cut a new path across one of the curves. When the water goes back down into the main creek bed, the cut it made during the flood stays and is fed by the creek, creating what’s called an ox-bow lake.”
“So it makes an island”.
“Something like that. There aren’t many along the Echeconnee in this part. Mr. Elrod’s place crosses this ox-bow and ends at the creek on the north.”
“Can we cross this?” Chris asked. I looked at him then looked at his shoes. Jimmy and I had on our usual boots but he had on a pair of Sperry’s that looked more at home at a frat party than the swamp.
We shut off the ATV’s and walked up to the water. There wasn’t any real flow to it but it wasn’t stagnant, either. It looked to be about as deep as the creek should be. It wasn’t very wide, maybe only twenty feet or so, and the bottom looked sandy.
Jimmy pointed up to the left where a sweet gum tree had fallen across.
“We ain’t crossing that” I said.
“Look, Mark, if you are going to do something away from anybody like they might be trying to do, isn’t this about the best place?” Chris asked.
“Ok, sure. But they aren’t getting to this island in the stream from this direction.”
“They didn’t” Chris added, “they would have come from the other way. Now get your country behind across that water – we are about to find something”.
Chris was usually right. But if I fell in this water, he had better be right.
Jimmy crossed over the tree first, then Chris. At the end of it, the trunk go smaller and bounced in and out of the water a bit. But it held them so I baby-stepped my way across. I can swim, I just don’t like to get wet.
Once across, finally, Jimmy and Chris were standing there smiling at me.
“What a baby”.
“Shut up”.
I took a look around this island. We crossed the ox-bow from the south and it appeared that we were closer to the east side. It was hard to tell exactly how big this island was but it was thick with trees and swamp grass. We went to the east side of and cut north toward the creek. We met the creek at the point where it met the ox-bow. This north side of the island was sandy – much more than the south that seemed sculpted out of the floor of the woods. We walked for several dozen yards and I began to get a sense of the size of the island. My guess was this it was probably no more than twenty acres all together.
“You smell that?” Chris asked.
“I sure do. Smells like burnt rubber or tires or something” I replied.
Jimmy was further into the woods from the creek than we were and yelled for us to come over. He was at least a hundred yards inside the island.
Chris and I walked over and looked at what he had found. In the middle of this thick growth of trees and brush were stacks of firewood and a large burn area, not very deep but about ten feet in diameter. Chris walked over and poked at the ashes in the bottom.
“Hand me a couple sticks”, he said.
Jimmy and I found a couple and handed them over. Chris dug around in the ashes and pulled up a mass of black and gray. He tossed it over towards us and stepped over and picked it up after making sure it wasn’t hot.
“What is that?” Jimmy asked.
“This is the melted covering from copper wiring”. Chris handed it to me and walked around the fire pit and waved for us to come over.
“And that is where they are melting down the copper”, he pointed over to a round metal plate that appeared to be lying on the ground. He walked to it and lifted the plate to find a hole with a 55-gallon drum sitting in it with the top a few inches below ground level that had been covered with the plate. Sitting near the bottom of the drum was a thick, square-bottomed iron pot. Under the pot was ashes; the pot was held up by an iron rod that ran across the hole and through the metal drum.
“I’ll be danged”, Jimmy said, “that’s an overgrown Dakota fire hole. Look over next to this fire hole and there ought to be – there it is”. He pointed at a plastic pipe angling down toward the bottom of the fire hole a few feet away. The pipe looked like the thick PVC pipe and was about eight or ten inches wide. It came out of the ground at an angle about ten feet from the fire hole.
“What happens is that the fire is down in the ground and it draws air in through this pipe. You would use this to have a fire without the light being seen if the fire was on top of the ground. And the way it is set up draws air in from the side hole and makes the fire a heck of a lot hotter than if it were at ground level. They are melting the plastic covering off over there then bringing the wire over here and melting it down.”
“It takes almost 2000 degrees to melt copper,” Chris said, “will this fire get that hot?”
“It could because the air coming in from that side pipe, along with holding the fire in this drum, makes it a very efficient and very