We hadn’t heard a sound from up at the top of the pit for what I figured was about an hour. So we concluded Cudjoe was long gone, along with Miss Lucretia’s valuable skins.
We had been sitting there staring at that rattlesnake while he stared at us. We could see its red eyes through the dim light. It didn’t have its head up in the air, but it was coiled up with his head lying on top of its coil, looking straight at us.
“I do believe that snake is watching us, Poudlum.”
“Course it is. But the good news is, that we watching him too, and got four eyes to his two. Plus, we human beings with sticks and knives, and he’s just a snake.”
“I know all that. The question is, what we gonna do about it?”
“Why, we are going to destroy that old snake, get out of this hole and go on about our business.”
“We are?” I said, thinking he had come up with a new plan. “How we gonna do that?”
“I ain’t figured that part out yet, but I know in my heart and my mind that it’s true.”
Poudlum’s words and his attitude lifted my spirits and my hopes. They also inspired me to think. “I know one thing, Poudlum.”
“What’s that?”
“That snake ain’t hungry, ’cause if you remember, Miss Lucretia fed him before we even knew he was behind the curtain.”
“That don’t mean it won’t strike at us if we provoke it, and it could probably reach us all the way ’cross this pit if he take a notion to. That’s why we got to keep a constant watch on it. We can’t dig as fast now ’cause one of us has to watch while the other one digs. We’ll just take turns. I’ll dig first. Here, you take my stick and if it moves you got to tell me quick.”
So Poudlum took to digging with his knife and I kept watching the snake. Its red eyes reminded me of two hot embers peeking out of a bed of ashes, except they didn’t fade away like a hot coal would. They just kept staring with unblinking intensity directly at me.
After a while I got an eerie feeling that those eyes were hypnotizing me, were going to render me motionless, then it was going to strike.
“Hey, Poudlum,” I said.
“What! Is it moving?” Poudlum said as he ceased digging and turned to face Mister Red Eyes.
“No, but I can’t stand it no longer. We got to do something about that snake.”
“Well, listen,” he said. “I’m ready to cave in a big pile of dirt here. It’ll extend our ramp and we’ll be able to move a little farther away from it. Move to your left a little while I do it.”
I kept my eyes on the serpent, but out of the corner of one I watched as Poudlum stabbed his knife into the dirt above the small cave he had dug, and the dirt came tumbling down. We both backed up and pushed the dirt down with the heels of our boots.
“All right,” Poudlum said. “I’ll take over the snake-watching and you take over the digging.”
I gladly accepted the invitation and began stabbing my knife into the soft dirt, but I hadn’t been at it for five minutes before Poudlum said, “Hey, Ted.”
“What? It ain’t moving, is it?”
“No, it ain’t moved, but I see what you mean about them eyes. Just staring at ’em almost makes me lose my concentration.”
“What we gonna do?” I asked with my knife still stuck in the dirt.
“You need to stop digging.”
I extracted my knife and eased myself down next to Poudlum on the soft dirt that formed our ramp, knowing he had made an important decision about our dire predicament, and asked him again what we were gonna do.
He didn’t hesitate. “What we gonna do is to destroy that snake. I got nothing against it, ’cept maybe them spooky red eyes, but down here it’s us or it, and I choose us.”
I began having vision of attacking the snake with a stick, my boots and my knife, and wondering if I would be swift enough to avoid its lightning-like strike.
But then I was much relieved to hear from Poudlum that we weren’t going to use any of these methods I had imagined. No, he said we were going to destroy the snake in a biblical way. I was glad to hear that, but I still had no idea of what Poudlum had in mind about our visitor, so I asked him, “Poudlum, what way is that?”
“We gonna stone it to death,” he replied.
It took me a moment, but then I asked, “Uh, where we gonna get the rocks?”
“We sitting on ’em,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Well, not exactly rocks, but this is real soft and clayey dirt we digging in, and I figure we can sit right here and ball us up about fifty of ’em.”
“Then what?”
“Then we stone it, hard and fast, taking turns busting it good till it’s covered with dirt, then before it can recover we’ll push all this loose dirt we dug on top of it.”
I must have still had a question on my face because Poudlum added, “Then we’ll stand on it and stomp it down with our boots.”
That was one of the things I loved about Poudlum. He knew how to make a plan. Now it was up to us to make it work.
Poudlum was right about the dirt having clay in it; consequently, the balls we made, about the size of a baseball, were almost as hard as rocks.
“I shore would like to bust Cudjoe upside his head with one of these,” Poudlum said as he stacked another ball on our pile.
“How many you think we got,” I asked.
“I figure thirty or forty. We need to make a few more,” he answered.
We were beginning to get a little more light as the sun moved upward and we could see the snake clearly now.
“Must be close on to ten o’clock by now,” I speculated. “We got to get out of here before it gets dark on us.”
“We got a heap of digging to do if we gonna do that,” Poudlum said. “But if we don’t, we’ll just keep digging.”
“In the dark?” I said in horror.
“A blind person can dig, and pretty soon we can get serious about it ’cause we won’t have to be watching no snake no more.” Poudlum said as he finished another ball.
I figured we had fifty or sixty clay balls when Poudlum declared we were ready. “When I give the signal, you make the first throw. Aim for his head, and throw it like a flaming fastball. I’ll let one fly a split second after you do. It’s important to stun him at first. After that we pick ’em up and throw ’em as fast as we can. It ought to be covered up by the time we hit it with all of ’em.”
That snake must have suspected something was up because he suddenly began to coil up into a tighter ball and raised his head up.
“It’s getting ready to strike!” Poudlum called out. “Make your throw now!”
I caught it square on its nose, driving its head back. Before it could recover, a ball from Poudlum drove its head back against the pit wall.
I almost felt sorry for that snake as we rained missiles on it, pounding it into helplessness. The balls disintegrated on impact, and by the time we had exhausted our supply, it was completely covered with dirt.
“Quick!” Poudlum said. “Start pushing more dirt on it!”
Pretty soon we had about three feet of dirt on the snake and we started packing it down by stomping on it with our boots. Then we began digging like moles, piling more and more dirt on top of the snake. Finally, we figured we had piled enough on it not even a mule could have kicked his way out.
We took a break. Perspiration streamed down my face washing dirt into my eyes, nose and mouth, and I thought I couldn’t remember a time when I was more miserable. That’s why I was so shocked when I heard Poudlum say, “We ought to be real thankful.”
“Poudlum,” I said in astonishment. “We way down in the bottom of a pit, dirty, thirsty, hungry and with no way for sure we gonna get out of it, and you saying we ought to be thankful?”
“Shore we should. A little while ago we was in the same situation except we was sharing it with the biggest timber rattler in Alabama, and it was wanting to bite us. We down here in the summertime. If it was wintertime, besides being dirty, thirsty, and hungry, we would be freezing, too. So you see, no matter how desperate your situation is, there’s always something to thank the Good Lord for!”
I just sat there quietly, marveling at the wisdom of what Poudlum had said, and at the great amount of faith he had. Finally, I told him, “Maybe somebody will come help us and we won’t have to dig out of here. At the rate we’re going, I ’spect it’s gonna take more than two days.”
“Who you think might come?” he asked.
“The last thing I told Miss Lucretia was that we would meet her back at the cabin. When we don’t show up there after a reasonable time maybe she’ll come looking for us.”
“Maybe she will and maybe she won’t,” Poudlum said.
“Well if she don’t, Uncle Curvin and Mister Autrey will come looking for us if we don’t show up tomorrow. We told ’em we would be back around noon on Saturday, and tomorrow is Saturday.”
“Yeah, but they won’t be sending out no search party when we don’t show up at noon. They’ll wait on us for several hours, but by the time they decide to come looking it’ll be about dark, and they’ll have to wait till Sunday morning. This is one mighty big forest, and who knows if they would even find us on Sunday.”
After I absorbed what Poudlum had said, I told him, “I can’t stay down here that long, Poudlum.”
“Then we better get to digging,” he replied. “We’ll dig like madmen. We’ll dig till we drop, and then get up and dig some more. If we are relentless we might just dig our way out of this hole by sometime tonight.”
“Then let’s get to digging,” I said.
Just before we got up I noticed Poudlum looking intently up toward the top of the pit, and he said, “Right now, we can be glad we down in this pit.”
“Huh?” I said, as I followed his gaze upward and was astonished to see two golden eyes encased in a satin black and furry face. “It’s a panther!” I said in wonder.
“Shore is,” Poudlum confirmed. “And it’s a big un, too. Let’s be real still and pray he ain’t hungry.”
I could sense the fear in Poudlum at he stared up at this near-mythical creature that folks told so many tales about. I felt it, too. Being trapped in the pit seemed like a small thing at the moment. “You don’t think he’ll jump down here, do you, Poudlum?”
“Naw, he’s too smart for that. But just in case, get a good grip on your knife. If he does, he’ll probably maul us up some, but I figure between the two of us we could destroy him.”
We watched in terror and wonderment as the great beast looked down on us, licking his chops. Then his head jerked up and he looked around like he was alarmed, and suddenly, he was gone as quickly as he had appeared.
“What you think spooked him into running off?” I asked.
“Hard to guess from way down here,” Poudlum said. “Come on. What we got to do is get back to digging.”
We started a new tunnel, stabbing with our knives and scooping with our hands.
While we worked, Poudlum asked, “What you ’spect happened to the dogs?”
“Oh! I forgot to tell you. They followed me out to the chicken pen this morning when Cudjoe sent me to gather the eggs, and I gave Old Bill the command to hit the woods, and Rip took off with him. I thought that was better than letting ’em hang around Cudjoe. No telling what he would have done to ’em.”
“That’s for sure,” Poudlum said. “He might have wanted their skins to go along with the snake ones.”
“Maybe they’ll come back and sniff out our trail and find this pit.”
“Maybe so,” Poudlum said. “I don’t know what they could do to help us out of this pit, but it would be comforting to have ’em hanging around up there.”
“They could bark and attract some help for us.”
“That’s true,” Poudlum said. “I wonder where they could be?”
We dug and dug and dug. The next time we took a break, Poudlum said, “We might not ever get these knives sharp again. Digging in this dirt is sure to make ’em dull.”
We kept making observations like this to each other while we dug just to pass the time. Eventually, we sank down in exhaustion on a soft pile of dirt, and I asked Poudlum how far he thought we had progressed in our endeavor to dig our way out of the pit.
He looked up and studied the wall for a few moment before he stated that he thought we were about one fourth of the way to the top.
His observation brought pain and discouragement to my mind as I realized the impossibility of our task.
He must have felt my state of mind, for he said, “Don’t look at it that way. Look at it like a challenge and have faith that we’ll make it out of here.”
Now I knew for sure that Poudlum had a calling, and I was just glad to have him and his inspiration along beside me, as I plunged my knife into the wall of the pit.
There was nothing else left to do, so we dug and dug, and dug some more. But when we reached our next stage of exhaustion, we heard a rustling sound coming from up above.
“What you think that was?” Poudlum whispered as we froze in order to listen more intently.
There it was again! A rustling sound, and then we almost shouted with joy when we heard what we recognized as the whimpering sound of our dogs.
Suddenly, both their heads appeared up above staring down at us from the edge of the pit.
When we called out to them, they began barking and scratching at the ground in their excitement.
Then, miraculously, another face appeared with them, and with the sun at high noon, shining through her hair, making it appear like a halo, we thought that truly an angel had been sent down from heaven to help us ascend from the panther pit.