Secret of the Satilfa. Ted Dunagan

built their fire.

      The sound of the water was the best part. It swept gurgling and churning over the flat rocks of the shoals before dropping into the pool below. That pool was where the fish were.

      Poudlum noticed, too. “Dat water spilling over dem rocks shore do sound fine. It soothes you kind of like when my momma sings a hymn at night.”

      “Yeah, I like the way it sounds too. We’ll sleep real fine tonight listening to it. But first we have some work to do. Let’s set our sacks down and start gathering firewood. We’ll need a big stack of it so we can keep the fire going all night. It’ll get cold soon as the sun goes down.”

      We stashed our stuff next to the fire bed and began dragging and carrying limbs and sticks out of the surrounding woods. Soon we had enough to last us through the night and into the cold morning.

      We even found a long-dead loblolly pine, which had rotted away except for the heart that had turned into lighter wood. We broke it into pieces knowing all we had to do was stick a lit match to it and it would blaze up because of the turpentine in it.

      There was also an abundant supply of lighter knots, the remnants of where the branches had been attached to the trunk. They looked like an elbow and were handy to throw on a bed of coals that had died down, to get a quick blaze going again.

      The next item on our agenda was to gather some fish bait. Poudlum had that covered. “I passed a big dead pine tree over yonder that’s about half rotten and I could hear dem sawyers inside it.”

      Sawyers were fat, round, white grub worms with two little red pincers on their head, which they used to eat dead pine trees. And Poudlum was correct, you could hear them inside of a dead tree if you listened real close. They made a kind of steady smacking sound. I supposed it was them eating wood that made the sound. I never knew why they were called what they were, but figured it was because they were actually sawing the dead log up with those little pincers on their head. What I did know was that catfish loved them, and so did perch.

      When we got to the tree we pulled the loose bark off the trunk in hunks and dug the fat grubs out of the rotten wood until we had our jar almost full.

      “How many you think we got, Poudlum?”

      “I ’spect about fifty. You think dat’s enough?”

      “Yeah, that’s plenty for tonight. Crumble up a handful of rotten wood and put in the jar so they’ll have something to eat.”

      After Poudlum screwed the cap on the jar I took the small blade of my knife and jabbed a few air holes into it.

      It was still warm, but I knew the air would take on a chill as soon as the sun went behind the trees. It was time to set up our trot line. Poudlum held the ball of cord on the bank, and after I had slipped off my shoes and socks, I rolled up my pants legs and waded through the swift running water toward the other side of the creek with my end of the cord. Then I pulled out a little extra slack so I would have enough cord to tie it to a tree. Now that I had measured the length of cord we would need, I returned to where Poudlum was holding the other end.

      “What do we do next?” Poudlum asked.

      “Unravel about six more feet so it’ll have enough slack to go past the shoal and drop into the pool below it.”

      We stretched our measured cord out across the clearing on the ground. Then we cut a bunch of two-foot pieces of cord and got down on our knees and tied the short cords every few feet along the length of our trot line. Then we went back and attached a fish hook and a small lead sinker on the end of each short piece of cord. It was tedious work, but it was a good way to catch a lot of fish.

      We stood back and admired our work. “Nothing left to do except bait the hooks,” I told Poudlum. “Then we’ll stretch it out across the creek, tie both ends to trees and drop it over into the deep water.”

      The fat worms wiggled and attempted to bite us with their tiny pincers when we stuck them with the fish hooks.

      “You ’spect dat hurts ’em when we sticks ’em?” Poudlum asked.

      “Naw, they just worms.”

      “Den how come dey twists around and wiggles so?”

      “I don’t know. Probably it’s just a reflex or something like that. Come on, let’s get ’em in the water while they’re still wiggling so they’ll attract the fish.”

      We tied one end of the trot line to a stump near the creek bank on our side, and once again, I crossed over, but this time I secured the end to a tree and watched as the water washed the line over into the deep pool.

      “How you tells when a fish gets on it?”

      “You can’t,” I said while I was getting my shoes and socks back on. “We’ll just have to run it ever so often. We’ll do it just before dark so if any fish are on it we’ll have time to clean them. After that we’ll put more bait on if we need to and run it again in the morning.”

      We rigged up our cane poles with hooks, lines, and sinkers, baited the hooks and settled down on the side of the creek to fish in the fading light of the day.

      The gurgle of the water coupled with the surrounding solitude created the exact atmosphere we had been yearning for, and we knew then that all our planning, cajoling, walking, and work had been worth it.

      The trees had lost most of their leaves and the fading light filtered through the branches and played light games on the water’s surface as our corks bobbed listlessly on the ever-changing silver liquid of the dark pool we gazed into.

      Something was not as it should be.

      I shook off the hypnotic feeling and realized that Poudlum’s cork was what was missing. It had disappeared beneath the surface and the only thing visible was the straight line going into the water.

      “Poudlum!” I cried out. “You got one! Hold on tight to your pole!”

      “Good Lawd!” Poudlum exclaimed as he stood up and got a good grip on his pole. “It feels like a big one, too!”

      We threw several back, but when we quit just before dark we had four fat catfish and three perch as wide as your hand. I began cleaning them and had them ready to fry by the time Poudlum got a fire going.

      “It’s just about dark,” Poudlum said. “Don’t you think it’s about time we run dat trot line?”

      While I was removing my shoes in preparation to check the trot line, I glanced across the creek, lowered my head, then jerked it back up.

      Had something moved over there? I strained my eyes, but the light was beginning to fade.

      A peculiar feeling swept over me. I put my feet back in my shoes and told Poudlum we would wait until the morning to check the trot line.

      I also asked him to put some more wood on the fire.

Chapter Five

       The Visitors

      I put some hickory on after I got the fire going real good. It makes the hottest coals,” Poudlum said as he used a stick to rake a pile of red-hot, glowing coals from beneath the flames. “Put de skillet on dem and I guarantee they’ll fry up our fish.”

      I spooned some lard into the black skillet and placed it on the hot embers. The cleaned fish were all wet and glistening on a big flat rock I had fetched from the creek. By the time I got them coated with a mixture of cornmeal, salt, and pepper Momma had mixed up for me, the grease was spitting and popping.

      The aroma of the fresh fish frying made Poudlum and me lick our lips in anticipation. “Um-mmm,” he moaned while he spread a big brown paper bag out for the cooked fish to be placed on.

      When I finished there were eight catfish filets and three big bream, all browned with a crusty coating of cornmeal.

      “Now