We had decided to stop at the next suitable site when Ben spotted a raccoon foraging along the bank. It was so busily engaged in its own brand of poking around in the shallows that it didn't notice our gliding approach, and we were within a boat's length of it before it discovered our presence.
"High-ya!" Ben yelled as the coon stood straight up on its hind legs. Raccoons normally walk slowly or scurry along with nose close to the ground when not disturbed, but this one used up its breakfast and part of its lunch in taking itself a safe distance from us.
"Ah, you scared it," I said. "We could have gotten closer."
"Good thing for it I didn't bring my .22," Ben said. "We'd of had us a nice dinner."
"Over my dead body," I said. I don't think we saw that scene in quite the same way.
We made our first camp along a sandy stretch of beach near a small meadow. I gathered firewood, which wasn't easy, not like a trip to the woodpile back home. Things were green and not very willing to burn, or rotten with little heat left in them. Ben set out a trotline, baiting it with a stinky concoction of his own making. It was unlikely to provide us anything before breakfast, though, so while I tied a popper on our casting rod and tried for bluegills, Ben took off in the woods to look for whatever entrees he could find.
While sitting by the stream I looked around at the dense vegetation and realized how alone we were. In reality The Big Thicket's borders are never very far from some kind of civilization, but it's a wilderness nonetheless. It was easy to imagine that the folds and pockets we'd been paddling through went on forever. The stream seemed to mosey around in such big circles that it nearly looped back on itself in places, and there were numerous times during the day when we saw the same tree even after paddling for ten minutes.
But if I were set there today, blind folded and ears plugged, I'd still know I was in The Thicket. You have to go there and smell it to understand. Water goes up and comes down, and stranded fish die. Countless leaves fall and molder, deer and raccoons too old to face another day lie down and wait for the vultures, insects, molds and fungi. It all produces a certain identifiable odor, not unpleasant, really, but not something you'd want under your nose everyday, either.
I hooked a sunfish, and being overeager, jerked the hook out of its mouth. Better settle down, I told myself, and so I relaxed and concentrated on the sounds around me. A bullfrog in the distance was trying hard to convince me all was 'wellll, wellll, wellll', but several gray tree frogs kept saying 'waaaatch OOUUTT'. Nuthatches seemed determined to drive me mad with their endless 'yank,yank, yank', but then a late season mourning dove started cooing and settled me right down again. There were harsher voices as well, such as the throaty croak of a black-crowned night heron, and a dispute between neighboring pileated woodpeckers. I had inventoried quite a collection of sounds when one more, unexpected, was added to the list. At first I thought it was the scream of a cougar, and my hair stood on end. But then, when a few faint expletives were added, I realized it was Ben. I dropped the pole and stood up, heart pounding. It came again, from a slightly different location, and my imagination began to work overtime.
His voice seemed to contain genuine pain, or at the very least, anguished frustration. Had he stumbled upon a bear, or a cougar maybe? Was he caught in quicksand and screaming for help before going under? Swamp hillbillies? There was little I could do, because I didn't know where he was. After calling out to him a couple of times and getting no response, I decided to make a fire, gather more wood, and wait for what might develop. I had a fire going and a single cooperative bluegill cleaned, scaled and splayed out on a stick about the time Ben wandered in. Relief flooded over me until I took a closer look at him. Straggled in might be a better description. Crawled in. His A&M baseball cap was gone. His shirt hung off his lean shoulders in long shreds, looking more defiant than sad, like the flag after a night spent under fire.
"Holy Hanna, Ben...what on earth...?"
"It got away," he said, then held out a pair of frog legs bedded on a handful of watercress.
"What got away?" I examined him, trying to see if he was badly injured. All I could find were numerous scratch marks running in every direction under his torn clothes and all across his face, and my heart rate began to return to normal. "Looks to me like you're the one that got away. You all right?"
"It was just a diller," he said, and the whole picture became clear. Humor replaced my concern.
During the depression poor people knew nine-banded armadillos as Hoover hogs, and in truth they aren't bad tasting. For us they were the armored oddities of a bygone age, favorite playthings of dogs and country kids from Brownsville to New Orleans. I've seen city folk looking at them for the first time, without a shred of belief registering on their faces. It's as though they half expect a Triceratops or a T-rex to go walking past next. I'm told that an armadillo has a brain the size of a pea, but I reckon it's stuffed with the knowledge of the whereabouts of every patch of catclaw and wait-a-minute in its home range. This one had obviously taken Ben on the grand tour.
"Oh, well," I said as I examined the skinny little frog legs. "I caught a fat bluegill, so we won't starve." A grand table it was not, but it was sufficient to take us through the night and maintain a sharp appetite for something better in the morning.
This was my first night in The Thicket, and the onset of darkness added an extra layer of mystery to the surroundings. There was something about the narrow corridor of stars that focused my mind and sharpened my imagination. I got into my bag next to Ben and got mostly undressed, and as we lay next to the stream (we had no tent), we spoke about our day, about all we had seen, and about how far we were from...anything. The familiar world around us became opaque and quiet, less accessible even than the sliver of moon toying with the black edge of night through the trees. The countless points of light, remote beyond measure, took on a familiarity, burning without guile and available for lengthy examination. Ben knew his stars well and delighted in pointing them out with a nearly invisible finger. He described the positions of those he could name, as though each were an old friend. I could never remember them, but it was satisfying, somehow, to know that they had names, and that Ben knew them. "You think someone's out there somewhere pointing a finger at us?" he asked casually. I didn't know, but in the quiet my eyes began searching from star to star, looking for likely candidates.
"WeeeeeeeEEEEEE aaaaAUGH-AUGH-AUGH!"
Every hair on my body stood up as the incredible sound came to us from somewhere on the other side of the river. Low and then rising, piercing and then guttural, it ended abruptly. We both sat straight up in our bags, and when I looked at him his eyes shone in the starlight like silver dollars. "Ben!" I hissed. "What’s it?" There was no reply at first, just the thick sound of a dry swallow. Finally he whispered, "Not sure."
A minute passed while we tried to dissolve the bones of fear that had lodged in our throats. Low down swamp hillbillies roamed at will through my imagination and when a snapping twig broke the silence, I reached for Ben and he put his arm around me and held me close. I could feel my flesh trembling beneath his protective embrace, and then he stroked the top of my head and said in a whisper, "It's okay, Sis. It's nothing, just some little critter." Some little critter! It sounded like the revenge and war cry of some very big critter to me, and I burrowed closer to him, seeking the safety of his youthful strength and older wisdom, hoping he was right.
I was only thirteen, fresh into the throes of hormonal turmoil, and as he stroked my head I couldn't help but wonder if the tension I felt that night, sheltering in his strong arms, was similar to the excitement of having a boyfriend, or if I would ever find male hands as soothing as his, or a refuge as comforting.
I hadn't long to contemplate those heady and strangely disquieting questions, for the silence was again broken by belly-deep grunts, and then what sounded like a football game being played in the mud. Ben decided to use our little flashlight, and we
searched the far shore in its paltry light. The beam seemed to disturb the guilty party, and it remained still, until finally two, then four, and finally a half dozen or more pair of eyes were illuminated as if from within, emerald embers that glowed as cold fires out of my worst nightmare. A pair of them winked, adding sentient contemplation to their owners, and my shriek cut through the night. Bedlam erupted in a shower of mud, foam and water as a family of wild pigs sought the refuge of the dense forest, each vying for the single trail that led into the underbrush. The flashlight was knocked from Ben's hand as I clawed my way closer to him, and he spent the next minute or two calming me, stroking my hair, gently laughing at my terror, talking me down from the emotional ladder I had climbed. It was only then that I realized I was naked from the waist up, and the recent changes that were transforming my body added embarrassment to my turmoil. I pushed away from him, snaked into my bedroll and pulled it over my head.
"You okay, Sis?" I heard him ask.
Fine, I thought. Stupid bunch of pigs. How could I explain?
The dawn is a wonderful time in any wild place, a time of possibilities. This one, however, though one of the most