welcome for me, did not begin well for Ben. The bait was missing from the trotline, with nothing to show for the effort. And worse, Ben's legs were covered with tiny red welts.
"That derned diller led me right through a whole nest of seed ticks," he said, pulling his pants off and rubbing the lesions. "Better get the fire going and heat up a knife. They'll drive me crazy if we don't get 'em off."
There were hundreds of the tiny one-sixteenth inch wide bloodsuckers covering his calves and thighs, and I spent the better part of an hour heating each one up with the point of the hot knife, and then quickly flicking it off. It was slow, delicate work, requiring good eyesight and a steady hand, and where each had been attached an angry red bump was left as an itchy reminder. As I worked my way up his legs my thoughts wandered around to his psychology assignment, because we were both seeing basically the same things: the same ticks, the same hot knife, the same nearly naked boy. As I removed one from his inner thigh, noting with relief that none had attached themselves any higher up, I asked him casually, "Tell me, Ben, what are you thinking about?" He took little time in answering. "Calamine". It wasn't what I had expected, but it was a good answer, and something inside me, something indefinable, seemed settled. I felt an unexplainable relief.
Our stomachs did not go completely empty, as we broke out the premixed flour and baking powder, added a little water and baked the dough in the pot to form a ball of bread. "Good bannock," he said, munching away hungrily. "Sorry I didn't get anything to add to it."
"It's okay," I told him, and meant it, but I could see he was disappointed. He finished and wrapped his arms around his bent legs, supporting himself, and began chewing his inner cheek along with his thoughts.
"Have to do better," he said. "There's things to eat here."
For now, however, the bread was all we had to carry us to our next camp, and though it was adequate, we spent a lot of energy using our paddles getting there. By the time we beached our canoe we were ready for more than a crust of frontier bread apiece, and there was a certain amount of pride at stake. Dad was picking us up the next day, and Ben, his clothes in tatters, his legs red and swollen from the tick bites, did not want to end the trip looking like a 'back water swamp hillbilly' with an empty belly. He needed something dramatic, some bit of woodsy fanfare to exit on, and he set to work right away.
"This is the last of the bait," he said as he wadded balls of stinkum around a couple of hooks. He set the trotline out, and then headed into the woods again. "See if you can get a fire going, and maybe try for more sunfish."
While I gathered wood and kindled a fire I noticed that the weather was changing. A cool breeze mingled with the warm fall air we had been enjoying, and wispy clouds sailed in from the northwest. With a pot of water placed on the fire to heat, I again rigged up the pole and began tempting sunfish with poppers.
Dusk was approaching when Ben returned, and the sheepish look on his face only drew my attention to what he was hiding behind his back.
"You get anything, Ab?" he asked, and his voice had a hopeful quality to it.
"Not yet," I answered. "How about you...any luck?"
"Get the frying pan out and heat up some grease."
I set the pole on the ground. Ben loved to keep me in suspense, so I humored him and readied our skillet. I was in high expectation of a tasty dinner, perhaps fried rabbit. He went to the stream to clean his offering, and when he returned I had the grease just smoking.
"What is it?" I asked, and with only a grin as a response he pushed a cylinder of pink meat two feet long and one and a half inches in diameter close to my face. It's a good thing I wasn't holding the fry pan, because I would probably have heaved it at him out of reflex. Instead I screamed and fell backward off the log I was perched on and came up slinging words. "What the heck is that?"
"Dinner!" he said enthusiastically, shaking the snake in my direction.
"Dinner? I'm not touching that thing, much less eating it. What is it?" It didn't really matter what kind of a snake it was. I wasn't on friendly terms with any of them.
"Copperhead. It got my finger a little," he said, like he had just picked up a splinter, then he knelt by the fire.
"What? Ben Joules, are you kidding me? A copperhead?" This was not good news, for we had no way to get out that night. I swallowed my aversion in the face of this development and crept closer, keeping a watchful eye on the naked carcass of the snake that hung limply from Ben's hand, seemingly more sinister without its covering. "Where? Come on, show me so I can get a tourniquet on it."
"Ah, it's all right, Ab. Just one fang, and only a nick. I don't think much poison got in. See? No swelling or anything." I had to admit it didn't look very impressive for being snake bit. "Stop being so goofy and let's get this cooking," he added.
"No dern way, B. J. I'm not near that hungry. And I don't think I want that thing in my pan, either." Ben informed me it wasn't my pan, then proceeded to lay the snake in the ten inch skillet, coiling the sputtering cylinder into a circle until it's whole length rested in the hot fat.
I knew something of the longevity of amphibian and reptile nervous systems, having watched in fascination as fresh frog legs twitched and jumped in hot oil. This was a freshly killed and cleaned snake, however, probably little more than twenty minutes from its last narrow breath to fry pan. What I witnessed along a bayou in the Big Thicket was in a different league altogether from a pan of frog legs.
The snake seemed to stiffen as it entered the oil, then Ben told me he had eaten it before. "I think it tastes like...turtle, or maybe..." His voice trailed away and his mouth hung open as the coils contracted, and both of us stared in macabre fascination as the body gathered itself, quivered, and finally slithered over the lip of the pan and straight into the hot coals. The pink tube of flesh contorted and flared with light as the oil caught fire. The end where the head had been attached rose straight up, flamed, and writhed as it died a second, agonizing death.
I let out a yell, but then I covered my mouth and began to laugh. I couldn't help it. It was hysterical, in part because Ben was so frustrated. By the time he retrieved his dinner, holding it up on the end of a branch, covered in ash, seared and very unappetizing, I was like an over tickled child coming up for air, still shaking and holding my aching stomach.
I was also greatly relieved that I was not going to have to eat a snake. No matter what Ben said it tasted like, I would know what it was.
"Hope you're satisfied,” he said. “I'm not done with this thing yet, though. No snake that bites me is going to get off this easy." Grumbling to himself, Ben cut chunks of meat from the carcass for fish bait.
"You know," I said, watching him, "you killed that snake, lopped its head off, skinned it, fried it, burned it to a cinder. Now you're cutting it up to stick on a hook so you can throw it in the river and let some fish chew on it. You say it got off light?" He gave me a pained look, and finished what he was doing.
"Whatever," he said, "but this was my dinner, and I'm still hungry, and I'm still planning on eating."
With that he grabbed up the casting rod, walked downstream of the trotline a ways, and heaved the snake-on-a-hook temptation into the water. And there he sat for half an hour, scratching his tick bites, growing ever more frustrated while the stars came out. I sat down to watch for a while and a barred owl gave it's "Who-Cooks-For-You; Who-Cooks-For-You, All" call. Then it got so quiet I could hear both our stomachs growling along with some bullfrogs in a distant pond.
I stretched out on my bedroll as close to the fire as was safe, watching the burning logs turn into glowing coals. The breeze died away but the night air had turned sharp. I was pleased we would be heading home the next day, as we were not well prepared for a hard rain or cold temperatures. And I felt the trip could hardly be improved on, either. The weather had been fine, the scenery beautiful. We had found a few scattered honeydew plants, one of several insectivorous species of plants
in The Thicket. Though we had not encountered any bears, we had seen their tracks and smelled their musky scent. We had managed to sneak up on the one raccoon, and even caught a glimpse of a bobcat stalking something along the shore. A pair of bald eagles had scolded us from a tall dead snag, and anhingas, the 'snake birds' of the swamp, dried their wings in the sun after a day of fishing. My stomach complained again and I knew Ben felt humiliated at not being able to wrestle a living from the land as expected. But he'd get over it, and besides, the trotline might be more successful this last night. A plate of fried catfish sounded very good about then.
"Holy Cow!" Ben was on his feet, the rod bent in a quarter circle, and he was inching unwillingly toward the water.
"What is it?" I asked for the second time that day.
"Don't know, but it's big enough for dinner, that's for dern sure. Oh, MAN!"
Just then the biggest set of jaws I'd ever seen broke the surface, gaping and shaking and trying to fling away that treble hook, and Ben, he said, "Abbie! The sheath knife—hurry it up!"
I was up in a flash, and when I got back Ben was knee deep in the water doing what little he could to keep that monster from cutting through the line. He couldn't take the knife and handle the rod at the same time, and I couldn't imagine