do, but I decided to prolong it by giving Toby his head.
We pushed in the direction he wanted to go, and pretty soon we were racing over a narrow trail littered with pine needles, and Toby was barking like crazy. Eventually we run the wheelbarrow up against a hickory tree.
Up there in the high branches two big fat squirrels played around as if taunting us. I shot both of them and tossed them into the wheelbarrow with Toby, and darned if he didn’t signal and start barking again.
It was rough pushing that wheelbarrow over all that bumpy wood debris and leaf and needle-littered ground, but we did it, forgetting all about what we were supposed to do for Toby.
By the time Toby quit hitting on squirrel scent, it was near nightfall and we were down deep in the woods with six squirrels — a bumper crop — and we were tuckered out.
There Toby was, a dadburn cripple, and I’d never seen him work the trees better. It was like Toby knew what was coming and was trying to prolong things by treeing squirrels.
We sat down under a big, old sweetgum and left Toby in the wheelbarrow with the squirrels. The sun was falling through the trees like a big, fat plum coming to pieces. Shadows were rising up like dark men all around us. We didn’t have a hunting lamp. There was just the moon and it wasn’t up good yet.
“Harry,” Tom said. “What about Toby?”
I had been considering on that.
“He don’t seem to be in pain none,” I said. “And he treed six dadburn squirrels.”
“Yeah,” Tom said, “but his back’s still broke.”
“Reckon so,” I said.
“Maybe we could hide him down here, come every day, feed and water him.”
“I don’t think so. He’d be at the mercy of anything came along. Darn chiggers and ticks would eat him alive.” I’d thought of that because I could feel bites all over me and knew tonight I’d be spending some time with a lamp, some tweezers and such myself, getting them off all kinds of places, bathing myself later in kerosene, then rinsing. During the summer me and Tom ended up doing that darn near every evening.
“It’s gettin’ dark,” Tom said.
“I know.”
“I don’t think Toby’s in all that much pain now.”
“He does seem better,” I said. “But that don’t mean his back ain’t broke.”
“Daddy wanted us to shoot him to put him out of his misery. He don’t look so miserable to me. It ain’t right to shoot him he ain’t miserable, is it?”
I looked at Toby. There was mostly just a lump to see, lying there in the wheelbarrow covered by the dark. While I was looking he raised his head and his tail beat on the wooden bottom of the wheelbarrow a couple of times.
“Don’t reckon I can do it,” I said. “I think we ought to take him back to Daddy, show how he’s improved. He may have a broke back, but he ain’t in pain like he was. He can move his head and even his tail now, so his whole body ain’t dead. He don’t need killin’.”
“Daddy may not see it that way, though.”
“Reckon not, but I can’t just shoot him without trying to give him a chance. Heck, he treed six dadburn squirrels. Mama’ll be glad to see them squirrels. We’ll just take him back.”
We got up to go. It was then that it settled on us. We were lost. We had been so busy chasing those squirrels, following Toby’s lead, we had gotten down deep in the woods and we didn’t recognize anything. We weren’t scared, of course, least not right away. We roamed these woods all the time, but it had grown dark, and this immediate place wasn’t familiar.
The moon was up some more, and I used that for my bearings. “We need to go that way,” I said. “Eventually that’ll lead back to the house or the road.”
We set out, pushing the wheelbarrow, stumbling over roots and ruts and fallen limbs, banging up against trees with the wheelbarrow and ourselves. Near us we could hear wildlife moving around, and I thought about what Mr. Chambers had said about panthers, and I thought about wild hogs and wondered if we might come up on one rootin’ for acorns, and I remembered that Mr. Chambers had also said this was a bad year for the hydrophobia, and lots of animals were coming down with it, and the thought of all that made me nervous enough to feel around in my pocket for shotgun shells. I had three left.
As we went along, there was more movement around us, and after a while I began to think whatever it was was keeping stride with us. When we slowed, it slowed. We sped up, it sped up. And not the way an animal will do, or even the way a coach whip snake will sometimes follow and run you. This was something bigger than a snake. It was stalking us, like a panther. Or a man.
Toby was growling as we went along, his head lifted, the hair on the back of his neck raised.
I looked over at Tom, and the moon was just able to split through the trees and show me her face and how scared she was. I knew she had come to the same conclusion I had.
I wanted to say something, shout out at whatever it was in the bushes, but I was afraid that might be like some kind of bugle call that set it off, causing it to come down on us.
I had broken open the shotgun earlier for safety’s sake, laid it in the wheelbarrow and was pushing it, Toby, the shovel, and the squirrels along. Now I stopped, got the shotgun out, made sure a shell was in it, snapped it shut and put my thumb on the hammer.
Toby had really started to make noise, had gone from growling to barking.
I looked at Tom, and she took hold of the wheelbarrow and started pushing.
I could tell she was having trouble with it, working it over the soft ground, but I didn’t have any choice but to hold on to the gun, and we couldn’t leave Toby behind, not after what he’d been through.
Whatever was in those bushes paced us for a while, then went silent. We picked up speed, and didn’t hear it anymore. And we didn’t feel its presence no more neither. Earlier it was like we was walking along with the Devil beside us.
I finally got brave enough to break open the shotgun and lay it in the wheelbarrow and take over the pushing again.
“What was that?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It sounded big.”
“Yeah.”
“The Goat Man?”
“Daddy says there ain’t any Goat Man.”
“Yeah, but he’s sometimes wrong, ain’t he?”
“Hardly ever,” I said.
We went along some more, and found a narrow place in the river, and crossed, struggling with the wheelbarrow. We shouldn’t have crossed, but there was a spot, and someone or something following us had spooked me, and I had just wanted to put some space between us and it.
We walked along a longer time, and eventually came up against a wad of brambles that twisted in amongst the trees and scrubs and vines and made a wall of thorns. It was a wall of wild rosebushes. Some of the vines on them were thick as well ropes, the thorns like nails, and the flowers smelled strong and sweet in the night wind, almost sweet as sorghum syrup cooking.
The bramble patch ran some distance in either direction, and encased us on all sides. We had wandered into a maze of thorns too wide and thick to go around, and too high and sharp to climb over, and besides they had wound together with low hanging limbs, and it was like a ceiling above. I thought of Brer Rabbit and the briar patch, but unlike Brer Rabbit, I had not been born and raised in a briar patch, and unlike Brer Rabbit, it wasn’t what I wanted.
I dug in my pocket and got a match I had left over from when me and Tom tried to smoke some corn silk cigarettes and grapevines, and I struck the match with my thumb and waved it around, saw there was a wide space in the brambles, and it didn’t take a lot of know-how to see the path had been cut in them. I bent down and poked the match forward, and I could see the brambles were a kind of tunnel, about six feet high and six feet wide. I couldn’t tell how far it went, but it was a goodly distance.
I shook the match out before it burned my hand, said to Tom, “We can go back, or we can take this tunnel.”
