a weak beam of light through the reflector which grew stronger and reached its most intense at about the time he plunged from the clearing into the thicket, his rifle held chest high.
“Hold onto what you got, and let’s go,” he yelled back at the two lights bobbing behind him. “We want to get there before they tree him.”
Heading as best they could toward the sound of Uncle Putt’s pack of hounds, the three men moved through the pine thicket, stumbling over fallen logs and underbrush, catching their rifles and pieces of clothing on saw vines and creepers, stepping into rotted-out stump holes with brackish water in the bottoms, and trusting to the pale white light of the carbide.
At one point B. J. came to a brief open space and called back over his shoulder to Mr. Hall and Norman, twenty or thirty yards behind, making thrashing sounds as they tore through a clump of saw briers and scrambled in turn over the trunk of a fallen sweetgum nearly four feet in diameter.
“Lord,” he said, “don’t you love this? I can just sense the eternal presence of God in this thicket.”
But the cat hunters from Beaumont seemed to be too busy to answer, so B. J. spoke a couple of words in his heart to the Master and turned back toward the sounds of Elvis and Johnny Cash, louder and more impatient now as they got closer to what they were after.
In another ten minutes, B. J. reached the crest of a small hill covered with a stand of virgin pine and looked back at the two lights bobbing behind him, working their way slowly up the rise against a tide of huckleberry and yaupon bushes. Mr. Hall was saying something to Norman in a ragged voice, but was having a hard time making himself understood because of his need to pause for a deep quavery breath after every word he uttered.
“Come on,” said B. J. to the carbide beams, “they’re just across this next little creek. I can see Uncle Putt’s light, and I can hear the dogs real good.”
The sound from the cat pack was now a storm of howls, bays and yips, compounded by the noises of the dogs crashing through the underbrush lining the bed of the creek as they worked the scent of the bobcat not a hundred yards ahead. Now and then came a faint yip from Uncle Putt himself as he urged the dogs on by name, calling out encouragement to Goddamn Son-of-a-Bitch and Johnny Ray mainly, trusting Elvis to take care of business by himself at the head of the pack.
B. J. launched himself down the hill full-tilt, crashing through brambles and sliding on pine straw, the light from his carbide light jerking from earth to sky to water as he struggled to catch up to the action. By the time he splashed through the knee-deep creek and reached the other bank, the voices of the cat-pack reached a new tone, one deeply touched with urgency and hysteria, and the progress of the dogs slowed, sped up for a few yards and then stopped altogether.
“He’s treed,” B. J. yelled back toward the men following him, just now reaching the creek and beginning to slow down for the crossing. “Look up yonder at the light on the sweetgum.”
When B. J. arrived at Uncle Putt’s side and tilted his head back to allow the carbide beam of his lamp to shine up into the limbs of the tree which the bobcat had been forced to climb, the pack of dogs at its base was swarming around the trunk like a school of gar fish. Of the two men behind, Norman came up first, just in time to see Goddamn Son-of-a-Bitch run up the bole of a fallen sycamore leaning toward the trunk of the sweetgum with no hesitation as though he expected to be able to sink his claws into the bark and scramble up the tree after the bobcat.
At this maneuver, Johnny Cash and Johnny Ray went beyond madness to a new state, baying with every breath, and beginning alternately to dig at the ground at the foot of the sweetgum and to claw at its bark as high up as they could reach. Elvis moved away three or four steps and sat back upon his haunches, peering up into the clusters of leaves and branches where the carbide lights jerked in little starts and twitches as the four hunters looked for the red eyes of the bobcat.
Every few seconds the head dog barked in a low regular tune to keep the cat notified he was indeed treed, his dancing front legs moving in a quick measure, fairly close in rhythm to the beat of “That’s All Right, Mama.”
“Yonder he is,” said Uncle Putt as a beam of light picked up two blood-red fiery points about halfway up the sweetgum just above where a large limb intersected with the trunk. “He’s grinning at us.”
“Where? Where?” said Mr. Hall, the light from his carbide lamp wobbling from one side of the mass of leaves and branches to the other as his head shook with his heavy breathing.
“Yonder,” said Uncle Putt and held his light steady on the face of the bobcat. “See them tushes? That thing’d eat a feller up.”
“What do we do now?” asked Norman, staring up at the animal and stroking the basketball-shaped belly under the front of his plaid shirt gently with one hand.
“I’m half a mind to climb up in there and punch him out in among these here dogs.”
Elvis groaned deep in his throat at Uncle Putt’s words and increased the time of his jitterbug step close to that of “Jailhouse Rock.”
“But he’s a big un,” the old man continued, “and I’m scared he might cut one of them boosters up pretty bad.” Uncle Putt directed his light down at the pouch on the front of his bib overalls and drew out a cut of Cotton Boll tobacco. He bit off a good-sized chunk and threw his light back up into the bobcat’s eyes. “Yeah, I reckon one of y’all’s gonna have to shoot him on out of there.”
“Which one of us gets to shoot him?” asked Mr. Hall in an eager voice, spinning around to look at Uncle Putt so that the carbide beam of his lamp shone on the old man’s face.
“Y’all got to settle that for yourselves,” said Uncle Putt and held up a hand to keep the light out of his eyes. “It ain’t nothing to me. Just aim for one of them eyes.”
The bobcat in the fork of the sweetgum had just made a spitting sound at the three dogs clamoring at the base of the trunk and B. J. had cleared his throat to enter the negotiations about who was to get to shoot when the first voice came from across the creek:
“You palefaces leave that bobcat where he is.”
“Yeah,” said somebody a little further down the creek bed from the first, “don’t any of you fuckers shoot up in that tree.”
“Lord,” said B. J. and dropped his rifle into the darkness at his feet as though it had become suddenly red-hot, “who is that? Niggers?”
“I don’t know,” said Uncle Putt, aiming the beam of his lamp toward the trees and brush across the stream and beginning to lift his .22 to his shoulder. “But I’m gonna see.”
The light picked up nothing but a mass of leaves and sawvines and hardwood trunks, and the first voice spoke again. “Old man,” it said in deep tones which sounded definitely foreign to B. J., “you better lay that rifle down if you don’t want your dogs shot full of arrows.”
Clear on the opposite side of the sweetgum where the bobcat was treed somebody laughed in a high cackle which cut off abruptly in the middle.
“Oh, Jesus,” said Mr. Hall and moved up a step closer to Uncle Putt, “I knew it was a mistake to come out here in these woods. Yvonne tried to get me to stay home.”
“What?” said Norman. “What?”
Uncle Putt moved up between Johnny Cash and Johnny Ray
