“Jes’ showin’ off. He ain’t smelt nothin’.” Overhead the stars swam vaguely in the hazy sky; the air was not yet chill, the earth still warm to the touch. They stood in a steady oasis of lantern light in a world of but one dimension, a vague cistern of darkness filled with meager light and topped with an edgeless canopy of ragged stars.
The lantern was smoking and emanating a faint odor of heat. Caspey raised it and turned the wick down and set it at his feet again. Then from the darkness there came a single note, resonant and low and grave.
“Dar he,” Isom said.
“Hit’s Ruby,” Caspey agreed, picking up the lantern. “She got ’im.” The young dog yapped again, with fierce hysteria; then the single low cry chimed. Narcissa slid her arm through Bayard’s. “’Tain’t no rush,” Caspey told her. “Dey ain’t treed yit. Whooy. H’mawn, dawg.” The young dog had ceased its yapping, but still at intervals the other one bayed her single timbrous note, and they followed it. “H’mawn, dawg!”
They stumbled a little over fading plow scars, after Caspey’s bobbing lantern, and the darkness went suddenly crescendo with short, steady cries in four keys. “Dey got ’im,” Isom said.
“Dat’s right,” Caspey agreed. “Le’s go. Hold ’im, dawg!” They trotted now, Narcissa clinging to Bayard’s arm, and plunged through rank grass and over another fence and so among trees. Eyes gleamed fleetingly from the darkness ahead; another gust of barking interspersed with tense, eager whimperings, and among stumbling half-lit shadows dogs surged about them. “He up dar,” Caspey said. “Ole Blue sees ’im.”
“Dar Unc’ Henry’s dawg, too,” Isom said.
Caspey grunted. “I knowed he’d be here. He can’t keep up wid a ’possum no mo’, but jes let a dawg tree whar he kin hear ’im . . .” He set the lantern on his head and peered up into the vine-matted sapling, and Bayard drew a flash light from his pocket and turned its beam into the tree. The three older hounds and Uncle Henry’s ancient, moth-eaten beast sat in a tense circle about the tree, whimpering or barking in short spaced gusts, but the young one yapped steadily in mad, hysterical rushes. “Kick dat puppy still,” Caspey commanded.
“You, Ginger, hush yo’ mouf,” Isom shouted. He laid his ax and sack down and caught the puppy and held it between his knees. Caspey and Bayard moved slowly about the tree, among the eager dogs. Narcissa followed them.
“Dem vines is so thick up dar . . .” Caspey said.
“Here he is,” Bayard said suddenly. “I’ve got ’im.” He steadied his light and Caspey moved behind him and looked over his shoulder.
“Where?” Narcissa asked. “Can you see it?”
“Dat’s right,” Caspey agreed. “Dar he is. Ruby don’t lie. When she say he dar, he dar.”
“Where is he, Bayard?” Narcissa repeated. He drew her before him and trained the light over her head, into the tree, and presently from the massed vines two reddish points of fire not a match-breadth apart gleamed at her, winked out, then shone again.
“He movin’,” Caspey said, “Young ’possum. Git up dar and shake ’im out, Isom.” Bayard held his light on the creature’s eyes and Caspey set his lantern down and herded the dogs together at his knees. Isom scrambled up into the tree and vanished in the mass of vine, but they could follow his progress by the shaking branches and his panting ejaculations as he threatened the animal with a mixture of cajolery and adjuration.
“Hah,” he grunted, “ain’t gwine hurt you. Ain’t gwine do nothin’ ter you but th’ow you inde cook-pot. Look out, mister, I’se comin’ up dar.” More commotion; it ceased, they could hear him moving the branches cautiously. “Here he,” he called suddenly. “Hole dem dawgs, now.”
“Little ’un, ain’t he?” Caspey asked.
“Can’t tell. Can’t see nothin’ but his face. Watch dem dawgs.” The upper part of the sapling burst into violent and sustained fury; Isom whooped louder and louder as he shook the branches. “Whooy, here he comes,” he shouted, and something dropped sluggishly and reluctantly from branch to invisible branch, stopped; and the dogs set up a straining clamor. The thing fell again, and Bayard’s light followed a lumpy object that plumped with a resounding thud to the ground and vanished immediately beneath a swirl of hounds.
Caspey and Bayard leaped among them with shouts and at last succeeded in dragging them clear, and Narcissa saw the creature in the pool of the flash light, lying on its side in a grinning curve, its eyes closed and its pink, babylike hands doubled against its breast.
She looked at the motionless thing with pity and distinct loathing-such a paradox, its vulpine, skull-like grin and those tiny, human-looking hands, and the long ratlike tail of it. Isom dropped from the tree and Caspey turned the three straining clamorous dogs he held over to his nephew and picked up the ax, and while Narcissa watched in shrinking curiosity, he laid the ax across the thing’s neck and put his foot on either end of the helve, and grasped the animal’s tail. . . . She turned and fled, her hand to her mouth.
But the wall of darkness stopped her and she stood trembling and a little sick, watching them as they moved about the lantern. Then Caspey drove the dogs away, giving Uncle Henry’s octogenarian a hearty and resounding kick that sent him homeward with blood-curdling and astonished walls, and Isom swung the lumpy sack to his shoulder and Bayard turned and looked for her. “Narcissa?”
“Here,” she answered. He came to her.
“That’s one. We ought to get a dozen, tonight.”
“Oh, no,” she shuddered. “No.” He peered at her; then he snapped his flash light full on her face. She lifted her hand and put it aside.
“What’s the matter? Not tired already, are you?”
“No.” She went on, “I just . . . Come on: they’re leaving us.”
Caspey led them on into the woods. They walked now in a dry sibilance of leaves and crackling undergrowth. Trees loomed into the lantern light; above them, among the thinning branches, stars swam in the hushed, vague sky. The dogs were on ahead, and they went on among the looming tree trunks, sliding down into ditches where sand gleamed in the lantern’s pool and where the scissoring shadow of Caspey’s legs was enormous, struggled through snatching briers and up the other bank.
“We better head away fum de creek bottom,” Caspey suggested. “Dey mought strike a ’coon, and den dey won’t git home ’fo’ day.” He bore away toward the open again; they emerged from the woods and crossed a field of sedge, odorous of sun and dust, in which the lantern was lightly nimbused. “H’mawn, dawg.”
They entered the woods again. Narcissa was beginning to tire, but Bayard strode on with a fine obliviousness of that possibility, and she followed without complaint. At last, from some distance away, came that single ringing cry, Caspey stopped. “Le’s see which way he gwine.” They stood in the darkness, in the sad, faintly chill decline of the year, among the dying trees, listening. “Whooy,” Caspey shouted mellowly. “Go git ’im.”
The dog replied, and they moved again, slowly, pausing at intervals to listen again. The hound bayed; there were two voices now, and they seemed to be moving in a circle across their path. “Whooy,” Caspey called, his voice ebbing in falling echoes among the trees.
They went on. Again the dogs gave tongue, half the circle away from where the first cry had come. “He ca’yin’ ’um right back whar he come fum,” Caspey said. “We better wait twell dey gits ’im straightened out.” He set the lantern down and squatted beside it, and Isom sloughed his burden and squatted also, and Bayard sat against a tree trunk and drew Narcissa down beside him again, nearer. Caspey stared off into the darkness toward the sound.
“I believe hit’s a ’coon dey got,” Isom said.
“Mought be. Hill ’coon.”
“Headin’ fer dat holler tree, ain’t he?”
“Soun’ like it,” They listened, motionless. “We have a job, den,” Caspey added. “Whooy.” There was a faint chill in the air now, as the day’s sunlight cooled from the ground, and Narcissa moved closer to Bayard. He took a packet of cigarettes from his jacket and gave Caspey one and lit one for himself. Isom squatted on his heels, his eyes rolling whitely in the lantern light.
“Gimme one, please, suh,” he said.
“You ‘ain’t got no business smokin’, boy,” Caspey told him. But Bayard gave him one, and he squatted leanly on his haunches, holding the white tube in his black diffident hand. There was a scurrying noise in the leaves behind them and a tense whimpering, and the young dog came into the light and slid with squeaking whimpers, and the diffident, fleeting phosphorus of its eyes against Caspey’s leg. “Whut you want?” Caspey said, dropping his hand on its head. “Some thin’ skeer you out dar?” The puppy genuflected its gawky young body and nuzzled whimpering at Caspey’s hand. “He mus’ ’a’ faun’ a bear down yonder,” Caspey said. “Wouldn’t dern other dawgs he’p you ketch ’im?”
“Poor little fellow,” Narcissa said. “Did he really get scared, Caspey? Come here, puppy.”
“De other dawgs jes’ went off and lef’ ’im,” Caspey answered. The puppy moiled diffidently about Caspey’s knees; then it scrambled up and licked his face.
“Git down fum here!” Caspey exclaimed, and he flung the puppy away. It flopped awkwardly in the dry leaves and scrambled to its feet, and at that moment the hounds bayed
