Chapter 5

I wished it had of, though I'm not sure what I could have done about anything.

I woke just at sunrise and a look at my watch let me know it was a little after five AM. After a quick piss I went to the kitchen, fried some bacon, some eggs, and warmed up four of the biscuits I had left from my practice session last night. Coffee was ready when the food was and I sat at my table and took care of business. After I'd eaten, I dutifully poured the grease into the can Ethel had brought for it.

I dressed to got out to the barn and walked out the front door, and what a fucking surprise.

Everything was normal, out to where Chuck and Dave had mowed. It looked just like it had the day before, but it now appeared to be the edge of a clearing in a deep forest, and the trees in this forest were massive.

They were yellow pines, which were native to East Texas, but they were bigger than any I'd ever seen, one of them looked like it was over five feet in diameter, and I can't even guess how tall it was because I couldn't crane my neck back far enough to see the top.

I couldn't believe it but I knew what I saw, and I walked around the house then to the barn. I didn't stop, just kept walking all the way around the barn and house. It was the same all the way around.

My house was now sitting in a clearing in a pine forest that had bigger trees than I'd ever heard of, bigger pine trees anyway. Maybe there'd been some this big in the "Big Thicket" a few hundred years ago, but I had no way of knowing and it didn't really matter anyway. I was so shocked that I couldn't even concentrate on what I was thinking from one minute to the next.

I went back to the barn to feed and tend to Joe Bob, Jasper, and Jeffry, hoping things would get better, or at least that I could get a grip.

The stock seemed happy to see me, and they were even happier when I coughed up their oats. Then, being in the barn made me remember the strange little late night delivery last night and the impromptu seeming biscuit cooking lesson, and suddenly I got suspicious, but that couldn't mean anything.

I went back into the house to do my wondering sitting down. It was clear to me that something had happened that couldn't possibly have happened. I needed to decide what I thought it was as a first step.

I pulled out the cell phone to call George and though everything seemed fine, it wouldn't work. All it said was "no signal" and that couldn't be right either. One of those towers wasn't more than half a mile from me; maybe all the new trees were blocking it somehow or had knocked it down.

That made me wonder about my electricity. It was still working fine and the underground line now had at least dozens of trees poking their roots down where George had said it ran. The lights were still on though. There couldn't be much wrong with the phone.

There was nothing else for it, I'd have to saddle up Joe Bob and try to find my way to George's house through all these trees. I wondered what the hell he'd think about all this. You can't raise cows in the woods. Maybe the trees didn't spring up everywhere.

Jasper and Jeffry weren't happy when they realized that Joe Bob was going somewhere and they weren't. I gave them each another couple of handfuls of oats to keep them from pouting and finished saddling Joe Bob. I nearly rode off without retrieving my rifles, but then thought better of it. Hell, the wolves and coyotes might be confused too and I might get a shot at one or maybe more.

That thought changed my plans. I tied the saddle scabbards on and then put the camera/binocular setup in one saddle bag and went back to the barn for Jasper and Jeffry, putting on their packsaddles and harness and mounting Joe Bob to lead my mule team to George's house.

I fished the camera rig out of the saddlebag and took a few pictures of my new forest before we started. After two hours of riding and looking and snapping pictures, I decided that Geroge's house wasn't there anymore. It couldn't be because there wasn't enough room between the damned trees.

My ride had let me know that yellow pines weren't all that were giant now. They were in the majority, for sure, but I'd come across small groups of hardwoods too. I say small, but that was only relatively speaking. The first small group of them I rode through was probably occupying a hundred acres, and there were all kinds of trees. I even saw twelve to fifteen native pecan trees, and that was odd.

Another thing that bothered me was the wildlife. There'd been dozens of squirrels in the hardwoods, working away at gathering acorns, hickory nuts, and pecans - and they were just the start. I saw ten or more javelina pigging out among the squirrels and more birds than I could count, and they weren't bothered by my presence in the least.

Once I even thought I saw some passenger pigeons but that couldn't be right. They'd been extinct for nearly a hundred years. I think I remembered that the last known passenger pigeon died in a zoo in 1914 so the ones I saw this morning must have been some other type of pigeon. Still it was funny.

So were the deer. Of course I knew there were plenty of white tail deer in East Texas, but I must have seen a hundred today and they barely took notice when I knew they could see me. It was true that none of them got within a couple of hundred yards, but they didn't seem to care if I didn't head right toward them. So what in the fuck was going on?

"Sixteen twenty."

What was that? It seemed almost like a voice in my head had said sixteen twenty. The rest of this morning was bad enough but now I was imagining that I heard things. I found my way back to my little rock-house and tried not to think about anything.

When I was back to the barn I unloaded the stock and put them back in their stalls, with some oats to settle their nerves, as if they were nervous. I was the one who was hearing voices and seeing trees, birds, and animals that couldn't possibly be there.

With my two rifles and the saddlebags back in the house, and all the little chores I could think of tended to, I sat at my kitchen table. I couldn't decide if I should shit, or go blind. Nothing outside the boundaries of my lawn made one fucking bit of sense. I decided to try to forget it and just make some cornbread.

I did one hell of a job if you ask me. The cornbread wasn't the best I'd ever tasted but it was good, and when I thought about it, it was cheap. I liked biscuits and cornbread a lot better than the light bread you buy at a store and I knew that the time spent baking the biscuits and cornbread was a hell of a lot cheaper than what bread cost now. Besides, I didn't have but half a loaf and I had one hell of a lot of cornmeal and flour.

After my cornbread and Ranch Style Beans lunch, I decided that I should get some more pictures of my new timberland. Actually, I guess it was really George's new timberland, because not one fucking tree had made a showing in the lawn Chuck and Dave had mowed for me.

I hadn't used the Nikon's regular lens yet so I poked around in the package and found two. One was what I'd call a normal lens and there was a longer one, what I'd call a zoom lens, in there too. I put it on and looked around and by twisting the adjustment it would go back to not much stronger than the normal lens. I read the little sheet of instructions that came with it and it told me it was a one hundred twenty millimeter telephoto lens. Like I said the first time, a zoom lens.

I took it out the front and only door and started looking around for something that would make a good picture. Let me tell you, those giant yellow pines didn't take much zooming. I was twisting on the adjustment ring and pointing around at everything, and then. Wait a minute!

That's a god damned Indian, right inside the tree line. A loincloth wearing, spear carrying Indian. He didn't have a feather in his headband, in fact he didn't even have a headband, but there was no doubt he was an Indian.

Looking closer at the Indian that was looking right back at me, I saw that he didn't look so good, it seemed like he was having trouble standing up, and then there was a smaller one, a female I think, helping steady him.

What could I do? I let the Nikon hang from its strap and started walking toward them slowly. I held my hand out, palm forward, and said, "How," just like in the movies.

The female - were they really called squaws? - started talking to me, but I didn't understand one fucking thing she said. The male, a brave I guess, said a few things too, but that didn't help either. I decided to keep walking with my palm up until he waved the spear at me.

He never did, and when I got closer, I saw he was wounded. His right arm was swollen and slightly discolored around the bicep. We all talked words that none of us understood, except maybe they understood what they were saying. I made motions toward his arm and finally they decided that I could have a closer look after all.

It looked like a bullet entry wound at the back of his upper arm but there was no exit wound and the hole was damned near three quarters of an inch in diameter. Pus was dripping out of it, but I could tell that it had been cleaned off, externally at least. The weird part was a pretty big bulge under the skin on the front side of his arm, right where I'd have expected the exit wound. Something was still in there.

By now we all knew that we couldn't understand anything the other said. I managed to get them to follow me into my house and finally he was sitting at my kitchen table.

They both drank the coffee I offered, even though I could tell it was their first taste of anything that nasty and they probably thought it was medicine or something.

As soon as he'd finished his coffee I knew I'd fucked up. I could already tell he had some fever but now it would be ten or fifteen minutes before I could get a good reading with a thermometer because of the hot coffee. It didn't really make a shit, I knew he had fever and knowing how much wouldn't actually do me any good.

I felt around on his arm a little more and he did his best not to wince much. Finally I pointed to the bulge, which I'd decided couldn't be anything but a musket ball under his skin, and said that it had to come out. Of course he didn't understand the words, but when I took a small sharp knife from the drawer and pantomimed cutting on his arm he got the general idea.

The squaw wasn't for it at all, I didn't know what she was saying, but I knew she wasn't happy about finding a rock house in the woods and having the occupant offer to start cutting parts off her companion.

Apparently the damned thing hurt him more than he was letting on, because he didn't seem one bit disturbed about the prospect of getting it out. He finally made a move I understood; he nodded his head.

Now I'm no doctor, and I've never even played one on TV, in fact my only doctoring experience on people was playing doctor with Mary Jane Willis when we were both six years old. On the other hand, anyone that's owned horses long knows the best way to have a small fortune is to have a large one first and then call the vet every time your horse gets a scratch.

I knew that George, Bob, and I had similar respect for veterinarians. You called them if you had to, but you took care of what you could on your own. The basics on a human were the same as with a cut up horse. Make sure everything is as clean as you can get it, keep the patient calm if you can, and then slather on all the antiseptic cream and inject all the antibiotics they can stand and you can afford.

I warmed them up some cornbread, buttered it, and motioned for them to eat while I went to the barn. George had brought a big patch up kit down here for me when I first started riding Joe Bob. I hadn't even looked inside yet but I knew there must be something I could use.

I opened it up on the cabinet once I had it in the house and I'd hit the jackpot, or Tonto had anyway. Everything I would need for this was in there and plenty more besides. I found several scalpels, curved needles, and sutures in the first minute, and things got better from there.

There were plenty of disposable syringes and five one hundred milliliter bottles of Combiotic, a Penicillin and streptomycin combination that cures anything. It's well known among horsemen and cattlemen that have balls enough to use horse or cattle medicine on themselves that it will even cure the common cold.

George also had assorted painkillers in there. I recognized the Talwin, a common last-ditch painkiller to give horses with a bad case of colic; it was as strong as morphine and not nearly as addictive. There was also a spray on local anesthetic which would work to keep a horse from noticing that you were poking a little needle with a string tied on it through its skin. He also had several kinds of spray on antiseptic and four different types of anthelmintics, but of course the Indian didn't wander by to be wormed.

I decided that a Valium from my own medicine chest would be a good first step and he took the ten-milligram blue one like he thought he ought to. I fucked around for an hour to let it do its thing; meanwhile, I cleaned on his wound with alcohol and hydrogen peroxide.

I even took him outside and we jockeyed around until I could pour the tunnel the musket ball had made full of peroxide. I know it had to hurt while I pressed and squeezed to get it to open up enough for the peroxide to flow down in it, but Tonto didn't complain even though it put a hell of a grimace on his face more than once.

Even the squaw was impressed as it came boiling back out. It also made the brave seem much more confident in my abilities. Of course he was feeling no pain now, figuratively speaking. The Valium had him as loopy as a crocheted tea cozy.

The squaw helped me get him back to the kitchen table and we had him lay on it. With the scalpel boiled and the topical local sprayed around I had the musket ball, and that's just what it was, out in seconds. I closed with four stitches and we managed to get him turned over so I could deal with the entrance wound.

I had to debride it a little since it looked like it was three or four days old, but I had it mostly closed in a few minutes. I gave him five ccs of the Combiotic, enough and a little more, for a twelve hundred pound horse. I figured I could get him over diarrhea easier than I could amputate a gangrenous arm.

Even though I was dealing with an Indian and we all know how they were supposed to go wild over firewater, I had him down three ounces of Jack Daniels green label. The whiskey on top of the Valium had him sawing logs in ten minutes.

I dug out some extra blankets so he and the squaw could sleep on the rocky floor. She seemed to think they were the grandest things she'd ever seen and was happy to build a little nest for the two of them to sleep in. I made some more cornbread and cooked the squaw and I a steak each.

The brave was still dead to the world when the sun went down. I didn't even bother to turn on the lights so the squaw and I went to sleep when the sun went down.

I'd forgotten about the other effect of alcohol the day before, and of course the unconscious brave had pissed all over everything in his sleep. The squaw was already up and dismayed by his accident when I got out of bed, but I showed her the wonders of a shower.

She was scared shitless of it and so I did my duty and got in with her. It didn't take her long to catch onto you wash my back, I'll wash yours, and she even gave my dick a thorough sudsing for me. Gratitude for the medical services no doubt.

When the brave finally came to himself he was naked on a different blanket and his loincloth was drying near what I'm sure the squaw thought of as her dress. She was sitting around flashing me Indian beaver shots from under the hem of one of my T-shirts and I thought she looked particularly fetching in it myself.