Chapter 5

My God! I hoped that I never had to find this place on my own! We twisted and turned and seemed to backtrack innumerable times before Henry announced that we had arrived. I was willing to take his word for it, but I sure as hell hoped that he stayed around long enough to lead us out when the time came. I have already seen more alligators than I ever want to see again, but I know that I have not seen the last one in the bunch.

Henry called us together after we had eaten a communal supper and said, “This is a great place for a short stay, but it cannot support this many (10) people for more than a couple of weeks. The water is safe to drink right now, but it goes foul in only a week or so with this many people pissing and shitting into it. I guarantee that if we are still here come a week from Friday, over half of us will be sick from the water. The kids will get sick first, but we could start to die if we have to stay here for as much as four weeks.

“I want Jacob to come with me tomorrow so that we can start scouting for a place for a long term camp, a place that will support us for a year or more. There are places like that in this swamp, but we will have to find the one that suits us best. I trust Jacob’s judgment for what most non-Indians can tolerate, so I want his opinion before I select a place for sure. Indians can get by in places that would kill most other people, so we will have to be careful.

“I think that we should stay within 20 miles of Albany if we can so that we will have access to the stores and markets that are there. This swamp will not support farms, or even a decent size garden, so we will have to trade animal skins for the vegetables that we eat. There is plenty of stuff here for us if we are careful, but we don’t want to attract attention. It may be as much as a year before we can wander around in downtown Albany without the chance of somebody recognizing us, so y’all should get used to making do with the people what we have here.

“Anybody got any questions?”

There were a few questions, but most of them were of the personal sort that didn’t mean anything to anybody else, so I won’t record them here. Mostly, we were so tired out from all of the excitement of the day that we were ready for bed. We were going to sleep under the wagons, and Henry was going to show us how that should be done on an individual basis: it depended on how many were under the same wagon and their ages. It was probably the simplest for Martha, Mary, and me, but those with young children were going to have more difficulties.

The main thing that we had to worry about as far as the local animals were concerned was how to set up your bed so that you did not wake up to find that you were sharing space with a water moccasin or a rattle snake. That was the kind of help we really needed, and nobody slacked off when Henry explained how to avoid the snakes.

Other than that, before going to bed, Henry and Thomas dug a common latrine that we were going to have to share, like it or not. Henry warned us that shitting or pissing anywhere else would foul the water even quicker than in the one or two weeks. Dammit, it was a good thing that none of us were stuck on privacy, but there would be no baths for a while.

We went to bed as free people for the first time in four years, and that made the whole thing worth it. I’ll bet that everybody slept good just for that reason; I know that I did! We didn’t have to put out any guards as long as we were here, but Henry said that might not be true when we moved. Well, I planned to enjoy the situation for as long as I could. I know: they say that responsibility is what makes a person grow to maturity, but I say that it sure is great to laze around for a little while, and I have not been able to do that for too many years.

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This was not a day for lazing around. As soon as we finished breakfast, Henry and I set out to scout for a more permanent place to live. He had five or six places in mind, and the place that he finally selected was going to depend a lot on my say. Shit! Talk about responsibility! If I screwed up, we could all be in a chamber pot full of shit! Well, I would just have to make sure that I did not screw up!

We went a circuitous route when we left the current camp. As we went, Henry began teaching me how to spot danger points, especially quicksand pits and places where snakes liked to hang out. Dammit, I hate snakes, but Henry keeps telling me how good they taste when they are cooked properly. Okay, if he says so, I will give a snake a try, but he is going to have to catch the first one.

We had to travel almost five miles to find the first of the places that Henry had in mind. The place looked good to me, but it was in the midst of a cypress swamp. Henry pointed out that cypress was such a tough wood that any building we did would mean that we had to haul in trees from other places, and that could be a serious problem. There were pine forests around that he would show me, but I shouldn’t make up my mind until I had seen some more places.

I had to agree with that advice, so I tried to keep an open mind as we made our way to the next possibility. The next place he showed me looked even better than the first one, but this was way too close to a busy road. It would be too easy to be discovered if we settled there, so we crossed that one off our list. The road had not been there when last Henry had come through the area.

The third place we visited was already taken by a group of people who had to be outlaws. Hell, we were now outlaws for that matter, but I was not sure how well we would fit into an established group. Some outlaw bands had some real weird ideas, so we decided to avoid this one unless we had to ask them to take us in.

The next place was so nearly perfect that I wanted to call it quits right there. There was a stream running through the meadow, and the water did not taste like the common swamp water. I don’t know how to phrase it, but the water didn’t taste like it had decaying vegetation in it the way swamp water usually did. Henry speculated that this was an artesian spring that originated far under ground, and that accounted for its purer taste.

This meadow was in the middle of a rather extensive pine forest, and we should have an easy time of it when it came time to build cabins. There also seemed to be enough space for several small gardens, and that would make life easier for everybody. The biggest problem was that it had few natural defenses other than being well out of the way of normal traffic. We could expect to see very few hunters come this way, so we would have a lot of privacy. However, if the Army ever came after us, we would have difficulty putting up an effective defense.

The next place was the last on Henry’s list, and he was honest in his appraisal that it was not as good as this place. Nevertheless, he wanted us to take a look at it in case it did have things to offer that the other places did not have. Well, we looked at it, and I had to agree with Henry that the previous spot was the one for us.

The spot we finally selected was close enough to the current camp that we could stay where we were while we started preparations for our new home. It was now late enough in the day that such work would be best put off until tomorrow. We headed home, and Henry spotted a large rattle snake sunning itself on a dead log. Henry cut a small tree limb with a fork in the end shaped very much like the letter “Y.” This he used to hold the snake’s head down pinned against the log while he killed it by cutting off the head. The body of the snake did a lot of jumping around before it finally admitted that it was dead, but it was harmless without those poison fangs that had been cut off with the head.

Henry handed me the snake to carry back to camp. He did so to help me get over my fear of snakes as snakes. I found that my fear vanished when I held the verifiably dead snake in my hands. I have to confess that I did strut into camp with the snake draped around my neck where everyone could see it. When we got home, Henry cleaned the snake, and we had that for supper that night: that’s how big it was. We all agreed that the snake was very tasty, but the consensus was that Henry was our elected snake hunter. He laughed at that, but he did agree to take on the job.