Whenever it happened, Uncle Putt would spin around where he was sitting crammed up against Mr. Hall and hammer on the rear of the truck cab, cussing the dogs by name and spraying Cotton Boll fumes over the side of Mr. Hall’s head. Mr. Hall had broken a good sweat under his camouflage suit and was beginning to feel increasingly nervous about the cat-hunting pack swarming in among all the portable beds, canned goods and kitchen utensils in the Nomad living compartment.
“They certainly are lively,” he remarked at one point to Uncle Putt just after the old hunter had called Goddamn Son-of-a-Bitch every kind of a goddamn son-of-a-bitch for causing a major collapse of several objects just behind the heads of the people riding in the pickup cab.
“Yeah,” said the old man, “they having a time. I believe they purely love being in that little house back yonder. Just listen at them tussling with one another.”
About then, the dim logging road petered out completely in a burned-out clearing covered with blackened pine stumps, waist-high huckleberry bushes and saw-briers. Mr. Hall killed the engine, and everybody unloaded and began looking around in the rapidly fading light. The tops of the long-needle pines were already disappearing into the night sky, and by the time Uncle Putt had let the dogs out of the back of the pickup there was barely enough light left to make out details in the burned-over clearing.
“So this is the forest primeval,” said Mr. Hall’s friend and lifted a pint of whiskey to his lips.
“What did he say?” asked B. J.
“He reads a whole lot,” said Mr. Hall, switching on the light in the rear of the Nomad and cautiously sticking his head inside to estimate the damage. It wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be and he came out in a minute, smiling, and reached for the whiskey bottle.
“He says things like that all the time. Gets them out of books.”
“Uh-huh,” said B. J. and checked the action of his .22 rifle. Satisfied, he set it against a stump and began watching Uncle Putt tying a rope around Johnny Ray’s neck. He had finished with the curse-word dog and Johnny Cash, and Elvis waited on his haunches near the old man, patiently bobbing and weaving in time to the music only he could hear.
“Some people question a Baptist preacher hunting,” B. J. announced to the clearing, “but the reason I like to come on cat-hunts with Uncle Putt every year about this time is to get out into nature and look around for signs of God.”
Nobody said anything. The book-reader took a measured sip of whiskey.
“You can sense His presence out in the woods like this,” B. J. went on. “He talks to us in the movement of the breeze and the motions of the animals.”
“You fellers,” said Uncle Putt, getting the last rope tied and beginning to fiddle with the carbide light attached to his hat by an elastic strap, “get your pants stuck down inside your boots. They’re crawling tonight, and I don’t want to have to call off my dogs to take one of y’all to the hospital for snake-bite.”
He let the four dogs pull him toward the thicket at the edge of the clearing and called back over his shoulder. “I’m fixing to cast these here dogs now, and when y’all hear Elvis sing out, come a running with your lights on.”
“How’ll we know it’s Elvis and not one of the other ones?” asked Mr. Hall in an anxious voice and zipped something.
“Don’t come for the other ones. They just background for Elvis. He got a pure sweet voice. Starts up high and then comes way down low.”
The pack of hounds reached the thicket, whining, and the darkness closed around Uncle Putt two steps behind them. The beam of his carbide light bobbed for a few seconds through the dense brush and was gone.
“What kind of snakes?”
“Well, up on the ridges it’s rattlers,” B. J. said to Mr. Hall. “Timber rattlers mainly, but I have seen a diamond-back now and then. And if the bobcat takes the dogs down into the river bottoms, why you can run into water-moccasins along in there.”
“I sure hope not,” said Mr. Hall and turned toward the glow of his friend’s cigarette end. “Where is that Old Granddad?”
B. J. walked away from the Nomad toward the far edge of the clearing. “I’m just going to step over here and listen to the woods. See if I can hear the Master at work.”
When he came back from taking a leak and perusing the night sky for signs of order and regularity, the two men from the Gulf Coast were squatting in front of the headlights of the pickup making sure their boots were firmly fastened. Those poor fellows are depending on the courage that comes from a bottle, B. J. said to himself, and are afraid of the natural creatures God put in these woods. And one of them a declared Baptist. He ought to be ashamed of himself.
“I tell you what scares me,” he said loudly, and the book-reader jumped. “It’s not the serpent that crawls on his belly in God’s forest.” B. J. paused, and both men straightened up in his direction, blinking in the beams from the headlights. Mr. Hall had tied the ear flaps of his cap under his chin tight enough to cut into the soft flesh of his throat, and when he turned to look at B. J., the material of the cap strained under the pressure.
“No,” said B. J., “it’s not the rattler who warns you with the sound of his tail before he strikes or the moccasin who hisses before he bites. What I fear is the serpent who stands on two feet and comes in the night with no announcement to take your goods and the lives of you and your family.
“Oh,” said Mr. Hall’s friend. “You’re talking about sin.”
“Not exactly,” answered B. J. “I’m talking about communists and hippies and doped-up colored people.” He clicked the safety on and off the .22 rifle and reached in his pants pocket for the box of hollow-point cartridges. “What you might call the physical presence of sin. That’s what I mean.”
“You get many of them up here in these woods?” asked Mr. Hall and coughed because of the tightness of the strap fastening his hat to his throat.
“Well, not yet,” B. J. admitted. “But, you see, I live in Corpus Christi. I’m just up here up to preach at the Big Caney graveyard working on Sunday. Where I’m talking about the communists and dope-fiends being is down in the cities. That’s where they do all their crimes.”
Mr. Hall switched off the pickup’s headlights and the clearing plunged into darkness again, so total this time that it was a half a minute until B. J. could make out the difference between the tree line and the night sky. He could hear Mr. Hall’s book-reading friend pull the cork from the bottle of Old Granddad in the silence and then make a swallowing sound.
“Was that a dog bark?” the man asked.
“No,” said B. J. “You’ll know when they start up.” He paused for a minute. “But speaking of dogs, you fellows ever hear of Christian Guard Dogs, Incorporated?”
“What did he say?” the book-reader asked Mr. Hall. “Christian dogs?”
Before Mr. Hall could say anything, from the direction in which Uncle Putt had plunged into the thicket came a drawn-out high pitched howl, softened by distance but definitely touched by a good measure of hysteria. It hung in the air above for a few seconds and then was joined by another sound, lower in tone and divided into a series of chopping notes.
“Goddamn,” said one of the Gulf Coast citizens. “Excuse me preacher. What’s that?”
“That first one’s Johnny Ray,”