claim they can walk barefoot over a bed of red-hot coals.”
“Can they?”
“Some say that’s true.”
“I never heard of such stuff,” I said.
“The trouble with voodoo,” Poudlum said, “is it makes you do what you might not do unless you believe in it.”
Now I was really confused. Poudlum sensed my confusion, and said, “If you believe in it and have yourself a fire rock, then you’ll probably take chances you wouldn’t normally take, and if nothing bad happens, then you would give the credit to voodoo. If you don’t believe in it and don’t have yourself a fire rock and something bad happens to you, then they will claim it happened on account of that.”
“What do they say if you have a fire rock and something bad happens to you anyway?”
“They’ll claim yours had lost its power and it’s time to pay or trade the priestess for a new one.”
“Sounds like a way to trick people out of things,” I said.
“Uh huh, but they got lots of tricks, and scare some folks into believing in ’em.”
“You don’t believe in it, do you?”
“Shoot no!” Poudlum said, emphasizing the words. “But, like I said, they got lots of tricks, and I’m scared of ’em.”
“Are there more of them around besides Miss Lucretia?”
“She the only one I ever heared about around here. We’ll just do like Mister Autrey said, and we won’t have nothing to worry about. Now, let’s try to get us some shuteye.”
When Poudlum said that I knew the conversation was over, but I wasn’t reassured at all. In fact, I was more concerned about Miss Lucretia than before.
I finally fell into a fitful sleep and dreamed of hearing voodoo drums echoing through the forest.
When morning came, I was the first to awaken, and when I poked my head out of the tent flaps, I knew something was wrong.
The dogs were gone!
Chapter 3
Mojo
“Maybe the dogs just off chasing a fox or some other varmint,” Poudlum said as we were having our breakfast of biscuits and ham. They were Poudlum’s momma’s biscuits, and one of them was a plenty for anybody. We had several more wrapped up in wax paper.
“No, they would have been back by now and it ain’t like Old Bill to run off early in the morning, if that’s when they left. I think something other than a fox has enticed them away.”
I had been calling and whistling for my dog since way before breakfast and he always came when I whistled for him.
“What we gonna do?” Poudlum asked.
“I don’t know, but we got to find our dogs. You don’t think that voodoo priestess took ’em, do you?”
“I wouldn’t put nothing out of mind when it comes to voodoo.”
“But how could she have got the dogs to go with her, Poudlum?”
“A dog will go with ’bout anybody if they offer ’em a tasty bone. Who knows. She might have put a spell on ’em, or something.”
“She can do that, Poudlum? You didn’t tell me she could do stuff like that!”
“I don’t know that for a fact. I’ve just heard stuff like that about voodoo. Some folks say they can put a curse on you and make bad things happen to a person.”
“What does your momma say about that?”
“She say if you don’t believe in it, their mojo won’t have no affect on you.”
“Their what?”
“Mojo.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s voodoo for spells, curses and such.”
We decided to leave our camp intact taking only our rifles with us, and search the forest for the dogs. After we had gone in ever-widening circles with no sign of them, we returned to our camp about noon, knowing we had to make some kind of decision.
“Rip been right at my feet ever since he was a puppy,” Poudlum said.
“The way I see it, we got two choices,” I told him.
“What are they?”
“We can strike camp and go back to Mister Autrey’s, or we can go straight through this forest to Miss Lucretia’s and see if she’s got our dogs.”
“We can’t leave our dogs,” Poudlum said. “As much as I hate the thought of it, we got to see if she might have took ’em.”
“You know how to get there?” I asked.
“Lord, no! I ain’t never been back there!”
“Well, let’s see, Mister Autrey said she lived at the back of his property just before you got to an old fence that was his property line. I figure if we head straight north eventually we’ll come to that fence and then we could just follow it one way or the other until we find her cabin.”
“But when we get to the fence, which way do we go?”
“We’ll figure that out when we get to the fence. How long you think it’ll take us?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Poudlum said.
“I guess we need to think about what to take with us. We need to be prepared if we can’t get back to our camp before nightfall.”
“We need to think about hiding stuff on us, too,” Poudlum said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“You got a short memory. Don’t you remember how Dudley trapped us in that room on the back of Silas’s cabin on the Tombigbee River, and the only thing that saved us was that we had our pocket knives hid in our boots?”
Once again, we both hid our pocket knives in our boots, and we stuffed extra .22 bullets in every pocket, and, lucky for us, Poudlum dug a four-inch piece from a broken hacksaw blade out of the bottom of his of his pack and slid it into his back hip pocket. It was a thin blade and wouldn’t be detectable in his pocket.
It was a little after noon when we departed our camp with only our rifles and canteens. About four hours later we realized we had made a mistake.
The forest had grown thicker, choked with vines and rotting fallen trees and limbs, which made our progress a lot slower. We still hadn’t come to the fence line, and it was too late to get back to our camp before dark.
“Should’ve packed up and brought everything with us,” Poudlum moaned. “Now it looks like we gonna be stuck way out here in the woods overnight.”
“We could make us some torches and probably find our way back to camp,” I told him. “But then we would have to get up and start all over again.”
“We didn’t even bring nothing to eat with us.”
“Shssss,” I whispered. “There’s our supper sitting over next to that big cottonwood tree.”
It was a big jackrabbit, sniffing around, but he hadn’t spotted us. I took careful aim on the rabbit with my rifle and squeezed the trigger. The stillness of the forest was shattered by the sound of the shot, but it was a true one that provided our supper.
We set up camp right there, making do with what water we had in our canteens. We dressed out the rabbit and skewered him on a straight hickory stick. Then after we got a good fire going, we raked out some hot coals between two forked sticks we had driven into the ground and rested each end of the