156 Next to the Ground 



also late or early when the moon does not 

 shine. 



Still, it is bad luck to start out by torchlight. 

 After the hunt is a hundred yards away, it 

 does not so much matter. Dan commonly 

 lit his torch, even if there was a moon, when 

 they came to the fence around the old field. 

 If it had not been for the hedgerow you might 

 have walked through the rotting rails anywhere. 

 The old fields made part of the land that had 

 been in chancery. It was all of twenty years 

 since a plough had run in them. Still there 

 were many acres clear of everything but sedge, 

 yet thickets were plenty, and very tall, as were 

 also persimmon trees. Grape vines overran 

 the thickets, and not one persimmon tree in 

 a dozen was unfruitful. Persimmon trees 

 are male and female, but, luckily for Brer Pos- 

 sum and his congeners, the proportion of un- 

 fruitful staminate trees to fruitful pistillate 

 ones is less than one to twenty. Hedgerow 

 thorns made it well to go in through the gap, 

 unless you coveted rents, tatters, and scratches. 

 The White Oaks possum-hunters did not 

 covet them still sometimes they struggled 

 through the wall of tangled stems, so as to 

 make a short cut and get ahead of impertinent 

 earlier comers, whom they heard whooping in- 

 side. Whoever came first to the big swale, 

 about the middle of the old fields, always got 



