Five pages filled now, and Amos went back to a weeknight instead of a Sunday, cause a poor man’s religion lives in the woods as much as it ever lived in a pew. This page has a splatter of something dark and brown in one corner that dried there years ago, and the writing slants uphill like it was set down by a man too excited to keep the lines even, the way a boy writes the day he learns his name means something.
Saturday, November 14, 1903
First hard freeze come through Tuesday and left the persimmons soft and the whole world turned loose to the dogs, so I fed old Blue a extra handful of cornmeal and oiled the lantern and told the boys we was coon huntin after dark. A coon aint worth feedin a gun to, so a man takes dogs and a club and a lantern that’s got more rust than glass, and he takes his boys so they learn the sound of a strike fore they ever learn the price of one. I got two good dogs now, Blue and a young one the wife named Bess cause she said Blue needed a woman in the family to run him some, and I aint argued it.
Amos, mid page, the letters pushed together hard: “a coon dog dont quit cause the creek’s cold or the briars is mean. a coon dog quits cause the man behind him quit first, and a coon knows the difference quick as you do.”
We walked the bottomland down by Sycamore Creek where the big sycamores hang over the water, and about nine o’clock Blue throwed his head up and give a strike that would of woke the dead if the dead cared much for coons. Bess lit out after him, and they run that coon up a sycamore a good sixty foot, and there it set with its eyes lit up like two coals and it seen a lantern and three sets of teeth and knowed the whole arithmetic of the night gone wrong on it. The boys hollered like they’d treed a bear, and I let em, cause a boy that’s treed his first coon aint never forgot how tall he stood.
Amos, scratched up the side margin crooked: “you aint huntin the coon, the dogs is. you just carry the light and the club and the lie you’ll tell about it later, and the dogs let you cause they got no use for a good story.”
I sent the youngest up the tree cause a boy climbs a sycamore like a squirrel and a man climbs one like a sack of wet corn, and he shook it out and it come down and the dogs done their work and it was over quick and clean as a man wants it over when the night’s a hard one. We skinned it right there by the creek and give the carcass to the dogs and the hide to the boy to stretch on a board, and walked home in the dark with the lantern sputterin and the boys quiet now like a thing had been settled. Martha had a pan of cornbread set back warm, and she looked at the hide and said it’d make a fine hat some day, and I said the boy done the climbin so the hat’s his, and she give me a look that said she’d of liked that hat herself, and I told her I’d climb the next tree myself and she could have the whole coon for a muff.
