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National Geographic : 1974 Oct
Contents
The night was black and full of stars. On both sides of the road the trees pressed in, dark against the sky. In the swamps beyond, frogs chirped and ratcheted. The night air was damp, heavily scented with spring. What was that there, among the trees?; Couldn't be a light, I told myself. Eyes play ing tricks. Gone now, anyway. Again. And it was a light. Dim, a tiny point. But suddenly it grew brighter, a hot point of light, for all the world like a flashlight back among the trees just to the left of the road. It moved. It grew brighter still (page 528). Then abruptly it dimmed and went out. "That's fantastic." I said the words aloud, I know, because I had a tape recorder with me, turned on. Later, when I played the tape back, I found that I said "That's fantastic" or "I can't believe it" over and over again through the next half hour, for the light ap peared several more times. Now it was a point source of light, like a flashlight beam; then it appeared as a dull glow, the color of a pumpkin. I tried to convince myself that it must be the headlights of automobiles on a blacktop highway eight miles down the Ghost Road, their beams contracted by distance and fil tered by the branches of the overarching trees. I promised myself that I'd return to make a proper experiment, to determine once and for all the nature of the mysterious light. Yet at that moment my rational approach seemed a bit like whistling in a graveyard. "Now that's something, ain't it?" Archer Fullingim said when the light appeared again. I am given neither to superstition nor mysticism, but the spirit of the Holy Ghost Thicket laid its cold hands upon me then, and I shivered. THE HOLY GHOST THICKET-yes. One night I sat by an oak-log campfire and ate file gumbo with my hog-hunting companions, Raymond and Birt; a wry old timer named Emmett Hobbs; and Bill Brett, whose job is postmaster of the Thicket town of Hull, but whose true calling is historian and conservator of Thicket lore. Before long the stories began, old stories burnished from the years and the telling around a hundred campfires. The young men grew quiet. Bill and Emmett batted the yarns soft as shuttlecocks back and forth across the fire.... The time old John got caught in the Thicket and made it out with his hands torn raw, and " 39 Physicals "UTS Kirby Says 27 Weigh It Goofed 150 nr Less In Dozine Opinions and mayhaw jelly too: Archer Fullingim makes them both tart. He ran the Kountze News for 24 years, adopting as his motto a saying of Chief Crazy Horse: "One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk." Sighting with his good eye, he has blasted timber firms and politicians alike in his column "Both Barrels." Big Thicket of Texas 525
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