“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