October 22

Last night, after I had finished the above, things were quiet, just a few cars passing by, until sunset, when traffic increased. I wondered what was going on, but didn't think too much about it and drifted off to sleep. About an hour later, when it was good and dark, I was awakened by the sound of a ½ ton truck, or maybe an ATV driving slowly past my road, and then slowly accelerating. Anticipating visitors, I laid awake for an hour or so, listening to every vehicle that passed by, and there were still quite a few, waiting for one to slow down and stop. None did, and I finally relaxed and went back to sleep. For less than an hour, when about ten or fifteen dogs started howling and barking. That went on for a long time, and then suddenly stopped. Then vehicles started moving on the highway again, and a conversation I'd heard in a convenience store that afternoon came back to me: today was the last day you can hunt deer with dogs, this year. Which also explained the cages I'd been seeing on the backs of pick-up trucks. I remembered reading about hunting with dogs when I was a kid. A group of hunters would get together with their hounds, and then release them, and listen for their baying. Each could tell his own dog's voice, and could tell when a dog, or group of dogs, had game at bay, and they followed the sound into the woods and shot whatever animal the dogs had cornered. I didn't hear anything like that. No baying, no shooting. Maybe they do it differently, now that they use trucks.

Yamassee, SC, population about 900. That figure should have warned me. I counted on the place having an adequate grocery. By that I mean stocked with my staples: oranges, bananas, Spam, trail mix, tuna salad, bagels, milk and beer. I asked a fellow unloading a truck outside an auto parts store if there was a supermarket nearby. He was reluctant to talk to a weird-looking stranger at first, but with some coaxing he suggested I either go back 12 miles to Walterboro, or take the next left, cross the tracks, turn right, and there would be a small store on the left.

I started going the way he said to, but then just to make sure I asked a guy coming away from a house under construction. A big, bearded guy in his late twenties, with a hairlip. "Is there a grocery store near here?" I asked.

"Whatch you huntin?"

"Just some stuff for supper"

"Yeah there's a store down this way. Cross the tracks, turn right, and it's on the left."
The "tracks" was a freight yard with two railways running through it. Across them, on a street that ran parallel to them for 50 yards before recrossing them, was a shack surrounded by a heap of rusting bicycles, and next to the shack a store and a small abandoned warehouse. The store didn't look promising, and lived up to it. I ended up with six slices of salami and a can of chili, which I heated in a microwave at the Best Western in Point South.