scratching like that?” said one of the other men standing in Uncle Putt’s front yard. “Is he killing fleas?” The man was called Mr. Hall, he was up on the weekend from Beaumont for one of Putt Barlow’s cat hunts, and he was wearing brand new clothes of a camouflage design: boots, trouser, jacket, and hat. The jacket had zippers, pockets, and openings arranged in symmetrical patterns all over it. Each piece of metal on the clothing was tinted dull gray to avoid giving any kind of reflection. Mr. Hall’s boots had left perfect impressions of their tread wherever he had stepped in the skinned-off yard in front of Uncle Putt’s double-log house.
“Naw,” said Uncle Putt and leaned over to spit a big wad of Cotton Boll tobacco juice into the center of one of the boot-tracks Mr. Hall had made. “He ain’t scratching no fleas. Nor ticks neither.”
He rolled the cud of tobacco from one jaw to the other and looked over at the black and tan.
“Name’s Elvis,” he said. “I’ll show you why.”
At the sound of the words the hound flopped his tail in the dust once and looked up at Uncle Putt from under the ridges of tan markings over his eyes. He took a deep breath, expelled it with a sigh and advanced three steps away from his spot under the edge of the porch, ending up standing about eight or ten feet in front of and facing Uncle Putt. Although the dog had come to a standstill, the front half of his body continued to bob up and down at a rhythmical pace, first to the left and then the right, his forelegs flexing and working, now and then one foot or the other leaving the ground briefly to paw gently at the dusty yard.
“Why, I swear he looks like he’s dancing,” said Mr. Hall’s friend in a Gulf Coast voice.
“Can’t help but do it,” Uncle Putt said. “He’s jitterbugging. That’s why he’s named what he is. Elvis.”
The circle of cat hunters watched for a while without saying anything, until finally Elvis sat back on his haunches to scratch at an ear. Even during this operation, though, he kept up a steady movement, holding to his established rhythm and not missing a beat.
“How’d you teach him that?” asked Mr. Hall, fumbling at one of the zippers in his jacket.
“Didn’t,” said Uncle Putt. “Distemper when he was a pup left him with that movement. It’s a natural dance, that thing is. You can’t learn a dog nor a human being neither to do nothing like that. You got to be give something like that. Just like Elvis Presley had a natural gift.”
Uncle Putt spit again and then lifted a carved cow horn hung around his neck with a rawhide string to his lips and blew two notes on it. Elvis got to all four feet and increased the tempo of his beat by about a quarter, and three other spotted dogs came surging into the front yard from under the house, two yipping in high voices and one baying in a low mournful tone.
“That blue tick there,” B. J. said to Mr. Hall, pointing to the last dog out from under the porch, “him with that low voice, you know what Uncle Putt calls him?”
“No,” said Mr. Hall. “This is my first time to hunt up here with the old gentleman. Isn’t he a character?” He smiled and pulled a hand away from one zipper on his jacket and made for another. “What is that speckled one named?”
“Johnny Cash,” said B. J. “He talks so low on trail. The other one there is Johnny Ray because he sounds like he’s crying when he’s got something treed. And that one yonder, well . . .” B. J. paused and studied the fourth dog in the pack, a small blue tick with one ear gone and long scars running all the way from the tip of its nose halfway down its back. “Uncle Putt calls him a curse word which I can’t repeat. I’m a Baptist minister, you understand.”
“Why me and my wife are members of First Baptist in Port Neches,” said Mr. Hall and stuck out his hand. “Pleased to be hunting with you, Reverend.”
“Just call me B. J.,” said B. J. “I’m just one of the boys when I get out in the woods.”
“I hope you don’t mind us taking a drink now and then tonight, preacher,” said the other man, overhearing.
“No, no,” B. J. answered him, looking over at the little man who seemed to have a basketball badly hidden under the front of his red plaid shirt. “It’s not for me to judge the weakness of other folks.”
“You fellers,” called Uncle Putt from over by Mr. Hall’s pickup truck-house trailer combination, “we got to get into the woods.”
The vehicle was a Nomad Home-on-Wheels, and as Mr. Hall watched, Uncle Putt spit a load onto the rear hubcap and opened the door to the housing compartment for the dogs. The hounds swarmed the little set of steps that had flopped down as the door opened, Elvis jiving in the lead, and surged aboard in one big clot of black and tan and blue-tick spots, giving voice all the way in.
“I believe that’s the first time they ever been in a house afore,” said Uncle Putt and clicked the door shut, the pickup rocking back and forth on its springs as the pack tumbled from one side to the other of the living compartment. “I was kinda afraid Goddamn Son-of-a-Bitch wouldn’t take to a place with beds and a stove in it.”
“That’s the name of the other blue-tick,” B. J. said to Mr. Hall who stood with the corners of his mouth turned down and his eyes popped, watching the dogs fighting to get their muzzles up against each window in turn in the Nomad camper.
“You ain’t got nothing in that little room to ruin their noses, have you?” Uncle Putt asked Mr. Hall.
“No, I . . .”
“’Cause if you have they ain’t gonna be able to scent no bobcat.” He paused to shift his cud of Cotton Boil and spit. “Hell, they couldn’t smell skunk piss if you got something like loose cigarettes to eat or a opened sardine can for them to get into in yonder.”
“No, I don’t think so. I hope the dogs won’t . . .” Mr. Hall paused for a minute. “Do nothing in my Nomad.”
“They ain’t gonna hurt theyselves if they ain’t nothing loose,” said Uncle Putt. “Let’s get in the woods.”
Uncle Putt directed and Mr. Hall drove, taking the Nomad down a series of logging roads, each one fainter than the one before. The last one looked as though it had not been used in a year. Pulpwooders had cut it long before, and except for occasional hunters and lost berrypickers, the last real traffic had stopped a decade ago. Pine saplings up two and three feet grew in the space between the ruts, and three or four times B. J. and the man in the red plaid shirt had to dismount and pull fallen timber out of the roadway before the pickup could go on. Each time they did, the pack of cat hounds in the living compartment broke into a storm of baying, the deep bass of Johnny Cash setting the tune and the high clamor of Johnny Ray picking out the melody.
Whenever it happened, Uncle Putt would spin around where he was sitting crammed up against Mr. Hall and hammer on the rear of the truck cab, cussing the dogs by name and spraying Cotton Boll fumes over the side of Mr. Hall’s head. Mr. Hall had broken a good sweat under his camouflage suit and was beginning to feel increasingly nervous about the cat-hunting pack swarming in among all the portable beds, canned goods and kitchen utensils in the Nomad living compartment.
“They certainly are lively,” he remarked at one point to Uncle Putt just after the old hunter had called Goddamn Son-of-a-Bitch every kind of a goddamn son-of-a-bitch for causing a major collapse of several objects just behind the heads of the people riding in the pickup cab.
“Yeah,”
