Next day I went to the village of Caney Fork. It was against me and Floyd’s policy to visit a village where I’d been roaring, but I needed supplies. Besides that, I just couldn’t keep myself away, I was so hot to hear what the villagers had to say about my magnificent roaring. The sun was barely up when I got to the village, but folks was already talking theirselves blue about the coon hunt the night before.

The dogs had yelped all the way back to the village and woken everybody up in the middle of the night. From what I could piece together, when the four coon hunters got home, puffing and blowing and still wild-eyed from the scare, everybody in the whole village was waiting for them in the High Street, most of them still wearing their nightgowns and nightcaps. Some of the villagers—the ones that hadn’t blowed out their candles yet—had heard the roaring of the swamp monster. The looks on the hunters’ faces showed them that their worst fears were true.

The mayor suggested that they put together a hunting party right there on the spot to hunt down the swamp monster or the feechie or whatever it was and stop it from terrorizing the village. The mayor was a peg-legged feller and so fat he couldn’t even get on a hunting horse much less hunt a monster. The able-bodied villagers—the ones that would actually do any monster hunting that might get done that night—wasn’t quite as hot to go. After all, them four coon hunters was as tough and as fearless as any of the men in that village, and they was just about ruint by their meet-up with the swamp monster.

The hunters stood out in front of the general store telling their story again when I arrived. I was interested to get a look at the old boys—Merle, Lester, Dannal, and Creeter was their names—after knowing them only by their voices. They looked about like you’d expect four village men to look after a night’s hunting, what with their buckskin clothes and their stubbly faces, except they was still shaking.

I give them a nod as I went into the store, and they nodded back, but they was absorbed with the hunters’ story and didn’t pay me much mind.

In the store I bought a hundred-stride coil of finger-thick rope, three pulleys, a mallet, and a handful of nails. It took most of the money Floyd had give me, but I figured this was a good use of it—if it worked anyway.

As I said, nobody paid me much attention in Caney Fork that morning. They was covered up with their own concerns; they didn’t have any idea that I played a pretty big part in them concerns. Nobody noticed when I sauntered back into the forest to pick up the nail keg where I had left it.

I decided not to install the roaring machine near the spot where the dogs had treed me. The locals might come back in the daylight to see what scared the coon hunters so bad in the dark. What I really wanted was a stand of swamp pines—straight, tall trees with no limbs for the first fifty feet or more. Half a league or less from where I left the nail keg—but still in earshot of Caney Fork—there was a little rise that was just dry enough for loblolly pine. It was just what I was looking for.

If you never seen a wind-powered roaring machine, it might be a little hard to imagine. Start by picturing a big triangle made out of rope pulled taut. The top corner of the triangle is fifty feet off the ground, where the rope angles over a pine branch. At the bottom of the triangle, the rope runs through two pulleys attached to two other trees. Them pulleys are the bottom corners of the triangle. They’re pretty high theirselves—twenty feet or more off the ground. They have to be high enough that a feller walking through the forest won’t notice them. So then, three trees, three corners to the triangle. Now picture one more thing: right at the middle of the bottom of the triangle—nailed firm to the middle tree—is the nail keg I’d been using to scare villagers all along. The rope running between the two side trees runs right through the hole in the barrel bottom.

When the breeze blows—even a lightish breeze—the top of the middle tree sways back and forth. When the tree sways in either direction, it pulls the rope through the pulleys, which pulls it through the nail keg. When it straightens up again, it pulls the rope back through. The keg moans and roars both ways.

You ever seen one of them big stand-up fiddles? The kind where a feller drags a bow from left to right across the strings to make it sing? If you can picture that, you can probably understand my roaring machine. The pulleys is just the fiddler’s elbows, pulling the bow back and forth.

I must have climbed them loblolly pines a dozen times that morning, adjusting the ropes and the pulleys so the whole thing would be taut enough to do the job. Finally the rope was tight like a lute string, and the pulleys was secure and the nail keg was stable, so I went off a few paces to see how things was going to go when a breeze come along.

I didn’t have to wait long. A light wind—a wind I couldn’t even feel on the ground—stirred in the canopy and whispered through the pine tops—whissss-iss-iss-iss. That was the first sound I heard. But when that middle pine begun to sway, the rope pulled through the barrel bottom, just a hands-breadth or so, and my heart went to pounding in my chest as that nail keg begun to talk—mur-mur-murr-murrr—and then to moan—mwawwwwaonnnn.

Then it stopped, but only for a second, because when the breeze took a break, the tree straightened up again and run the rope back through in one long and continuous roar—rrrraaooowwwwoorrraaawww. It would have scared the britches right off me if I hadn’t knowed it was just a nail keg and a rope.

I don’t reckon I’ve been prouder before or since. My contraption worked, and it worked just fine. With the wind-powered roaring machine, Floyd and me could keep working a feechie scare in a village long after we’d left. And more than that, now the villagers could hear the swamp monster any time, day or night, not just when I could hide in the dark.

Listening to the nail keg moan, I knew our feechie scare had started working in a whole new way.

It was about midday when I finished building that first wind-powered roaring machine. The rest of the day it made noises every time the wind blew. It didn’t make a constant roar. Most of the breezes that come through made a little chucking, grumbling sound that put me in mind of a monster with a bellyache. Then, when a stronger, steadier breeze come through, the monster give a louder roar that carried beyond the swamp and to the farms nearby.

I set for a couple of hours listening to my roaring machine and chipping new feechie arrowheads out of flint. Then I strung my bow and hid in the bushes by the road leading into Caney Fork, waiting for a wagon I could shoot at. A few farmhands walked by my hiding place, and a couple of men rode by on horseback. I thought I could probably shoot close enough to them to give them a good scare, but I didn’t want to hurt anybody on accident. I knew a wagon would come along soon enough.

And one did. A farmer come clop-clopping by in a wagon pulled by a slow mule. It made a perfect target. I drew down on the wagon’s side panel and let fly. It was a dead-on hit: the arrow slapped right into the wood, stuck solid, and quavered there. But the old farmer didn’t seem to notice; whether he was hard of hearing or just mistook the noise for a bump in the road, I didn’t know.

I picked up and run through the brush, passing the slow mule and setting up again in another bush. The farmer heard me racketing through the brush and glanced over, probably thinking I was a deer or some other critter. So when a arrow come flying out of the bush and into the side of his wagon, he noticed that time. His eyes was as big as walnuts when he whipped around and seen them two arrows wagging out of his side panel. He whipped back around and whapped the reins down on the haunches of that old mule, who bolted forward as much out of surprise as anything.

As they tore off down the road, I give them a few “Oooolie oooolies” to think about on their way into Caney Fork.

I wanted to go back into Caney Fork something fierce. After the Caney Forkers had spent the whole day speculating on them infernal noises coming out of the swamp, I was dying to know how things would shake out when that farmer thundered into town with two feechie arrows sticking out of his wagon. I hated like everything to miss the fun, but I didn’t figure it would be wise to let myself be seen anymore in Caney Fork that day.

Having been up the whole of the night before, and having worked hard most of the day building the roaring machine and making arrowheads and shooting at farm wagons, I was pretty well spent by late afternoon. So I went back into the woods to rest.

I was scheduled to operate the roaring machine outside Sweetgum that night and meet up with Floyd the next day in Greasy Cave, where we was to resupply. But with the roaring machine working itself—and attached to a tree—I couldn’t very well take it to Sweetgum. So I climbed a tree and found a fork where I could lay up and rest myself, just like feechiefolks are said to do. I was maybe a hundred strides from the roaring machine. The grunts and the roars put me to sleep in no time.

It was still daylight when I was wokened up by the sound of hound dogs in full bay. They run directly underneath me, right by my tree, just pelting it through the bottomlands in the direction of the roaring machine. And not too far behind them come a whole passel of farmers and farmhands on horseback, waving spears and swords and axes and pitchforks and mattocks. It must have been two dozen of them trompling through the mud and the leaves and hollering.

I could see all our work in the feechie scare unraveling right there in front of me. Them fellers was going straight toward my roaring machine. I didn’t see any way they could miss it when they got to it, and that would be the end of the feechie scare. It would be back to turkey dancing and the ugly boy routine for Floyd and me. I hoped the wind would lay completely and they’d run right past it. But even if they missed it this time, it appeared to me they was going to find it eventually.

The baying of the hounds mostly drowned out the growling up in the treetops. Maybe, I hoped, maybe they’ll sail right past it. But they didn’t. A good stiff breeze come along and set the machinery to roaring like all nation, right about the time the lead dog got to within ten feet of the roaring tree. It sounded like a whole tribe of swamp monsters blowing their worst all at the same time.

In one shake of a sheep’s tail, that string of baying hound dogs become a squirming pile of yelpers climbing all over one another to be the first one headed in the other direction. They shot right past the horses, which was trying their hardest to pull up. The dogs run all between and amongst the horses’ legs, and how they kept from getting trompled to a pulp is a mystery to me.

Meanwhile the roaring tree swung back in the other direction and dragged that rosined rope back through the nail keg, and it sounded for all the world like the swamp monsters was finally getting serious for the first time and was ready to eat somebody whole. The horses went to raring and bucking and flinging farmers into the mud in every direction.

The horses headed back toward the village at a full gallop, and them farmers and farmhands that was able to, they held on like grim death, and them that couldn’t hold on—which was most of them—picked theirselves up off the ground and pounded for the village, screaming like wildcats all the way.

I understood then that there wasn’t anybody gonna discover my roaring machine. Wasn’t anybody gonna get close enough to see it.