We drove in before daylight and noticed that a big house that nobody had been around at all last year had lights on inside. It's a great big thing with glass doors the size of walls all around it. A huge porch, what these Florida people call a deck, ran around the outside, separating the house from the bushes and the woods. It sat above the road about a hundred yards, but we could see the furniture, some woman standing on the deck looking out.

     We really couldn't see much about her. She was standing just inside the halo of light from the inside of the house. If she took a step further out and, we wouldn't have seen her at all. We drove on, and I looked back to try to get a better look, but we were around a turn before I could see any more than I'd already seen.

     Dedrick drove us on being real careful. This time of day bears and hogs can be on the road off a bank or up from the creek in just a thought. But we finally made it to the place we always hid the Jeep. We got out and stretched, then looked around to see if anything else had changed over the winter.

     Dedrick looked up and down this old mule trail we used to hide the truck.

     "Cousin, can you believe our grandfathers used to drag timber out of here by mule? That'd have to terrible hard work."

     "Yeah, Dedrick and them mules most likely didn't think it was no picnic neither."

     "Spud, I was talking about them mules. The old guys just walked along while the mules did all the work."

     When Dedrick gets a point on his mind he can go on about it for a bit and I wasn't of a mind to listen, we had work to do.

     "Come on, Cousin, let's get up the hill here and get camp set up."

     We gathered our backpacks and extra bundles and started walking up the ridge. We walked over downed trees, being careful not to step on a rattlesnake or copperhead. We crossed at least three small streams and climbed up the mountain, going up at an angle. Going straight up is shorter but takes longer cause there's lots more stopping to get your breath. We'd walked these ridges or ones just like them since we was babies.

     After three or four hours we got to the ridge above the rhododendron patch we'd hollowed out to hide our tent and main camp.

     We never went directly down to the camp. First, we laid down on the ridge top, looking down at the campsite, and just listened. Birds calling, tree frogs chirping, a hootie owl in the distance, all good signs we were the only people around. Then I got my binoculars out and slowly looked everything over. These was U.S. Navy surplus from the Korean War. I could see nearly forever with them.

     "Dedrick, I reckon we're good to get on down there. I don't see anything out of order."

     "OK, Cousin, let's go."

     Years ago, I learned that we had to plant our crop a good way away from our camp. That way, if the law found the crop, they most likely wouldn't come looking further than the plants. If they did and found the camp, we could deny everything, and that would be that. Nothing they could do to us. I also learned to hide the camp from prying eyes and airplanes looking for pot. Nothing could be seen from the sky. Least ways I don't think anybody could see the camp from a plane. I never been in one. The only thing that might be a problem was the campfire. We had to have one to cook and keep most of the four-legged varmints away. But we always kept it low and used dry seasoned wood as much as we could to keep the smoke and smell down.

     We hiked on down and pretty quickly had the camp set up. Over the next week, we set out seedlings we'd brought with us and planted seeds. Then it was wait for sun and rain. If no rain came, we'd set into carrying water till it did.

     Part of growing crops like we do is keeping up with what's going on in our area. Nothing going on is damn near spot on perfect! But we had to take turns walking about the woods to keep tabs on things.

     On one of my hikes checking on crops and the general area, I just happened to be on a little ridge just across from that house with all the windows we'd passed coming in. There was some kind of singing going on, and it sounded like opera I'd heard over at Western Carolina College a couple of years ago. All that did was give me a headache. Anyway, I sat down and focused my binoculars on the house. There was that same woman we'd seen before. She had a door open, and this big gray bird was sitting on a trapeze or something next to her. The woman was singing, dancing around those decks, and the damn bird was singing back. I couldn't stop watching. After a half hour or so, the woman moved the bird back inside and went in herself. I watched for a bit more, but the bird went into a cage, and the woman started reading a book or a magazine. It got boring, so I left.

     The next morning, I told Dedrick to stay in camp.

     "I'll take your walkabout. My legs have got the budgets this morning." I didn't look at him cause he might've gotten suspicious I was up to something. Well, I was.

     Once up on my little outpost looking at the house, I watched that woman singing to the bird. She wasn't young but acted like she was. She wore a long green and yellow robe-looking thing, and her blonde hair just fell about. She'd sway, and dance, and move her arms like the wind was blowing them as she sang. That bird swayed like the same wind was moving him around. When the woman stopped singing, the bird began to go where she'd left off. As the bird sang, the woman danced around the deck and in and out of the house. I swear she looked like she'd been smoking some of our crop.

     Day after day, for a week, I watched the woman. It was a different song some of the time but always a slow sad sound. I never could make out the words. It must have been a foreign language or something she made up. Then one morning, as I was getting ready to leave camp, Dedrick walked over to me and whispered.

     "They's a woman up above camp just staring down at us."

     I slowly turned and saw it was the woman I'd been watching. This time, she was wearing hiking clothes. Not blue jeans and such, she had on nice store-bought stuff, and she wore a small pack. When she saw me looking, she turned and walked away toward her house.

     Well, I looked at Dedrick and just shrugged. Neither of us had any idea what, if anything, that meant. Maybe she was just hiking; then a troubling comment from Dedrick.

     "You don't suppose this is all her land, do you?"

     "Dedrick, nobody has been out here for the last several years while we've been doing what we do. I don't reckon this land belongs to anybody around here. Never has seemed like it anyway.

     I didn't say no more about it, but it was worrying me some. The next morning, I told Dedrick I was going to watch that woman's house for a bit. When I got to my place on the ridge top, I saw her on the deck pointing toward our camp. She was talking on the phone but was acting like the person was right there. She pointed and talked and pointed some more. Finally, she hung up and went inside. The sliding door was still open, and that bird started up singing. The woman came back on the deck. She started dancing around to that bird's singing. I watched for a bit and finally just slipped off and back to camp.

     The next morning, right after daylight, all matters of Ned broke loose around our camp. First, a helicopter came low over the woods, and then there must have been ten men wearing camouflage and carrying machetes coming through the woods. We high-tailed it out of camp to a ridge above. With my binoculars, I could see some of them had badges on their belts, and all of them were wearing pistols of one kind or another.

     Dedrick looked at me and whispered, "That woman you been so interested in did this Spud. She must've smelled the campfire and I bet she went out after dark, looking. She found one of our patches and called the dang law."

     I looked at him and realized we were screwed. They wouldn't catch us, but they were going to take our crop. We were going to be without any money real soon. I motioned for him to follow, and we hiked further away from the cops and that damn helicopter. I needed to think.

     After we'd hiked through some laurel and a white pine forest, we came to a small waterfall. Dedrick said he'd been here before and walked in front and around the waterfall to a stand of Poplar trees.

     I looked around and noticed the size of those trees. "Son, them tulip poplars is darn near old growth. Wonder how those old timers missed these boys."

     "Don't know." Dedrick answered as he looked up to the top of the trees. "My granddad showed me this when I was close to five or six years old. Been comin' up here in the winter for a while now. Spud, you got us a plan? These trees is nice and all but they ain't gonna pay us a dime."

     "Yeah, I got us a plan. Think this out with me. We were up here minding our own business like we've been doing about four years now." I looked at Dedrick, and he nodded.

     "That damn woman had to be what's caused this, and from where I stand, she should make it right."

     "Yeah, but how? If we rob her, she'll know who we are, and then what? Even Barney Fife could solve that mystery."

     I stood up and squinted my eyes like I seen them smart bad guys do in the movies.

     "Kidnapping." I say.

     Dedrick didn't say anything right away. He broke off a branch from a small Hickory tree and began worrying it with his pocketknife. I hate when he goes quiet like that because that means he's trying to think. From my position, I don't believe he's all that good at thinking. It's my job. Finally, he looked up at me.

     "Spud, you better have a real good plan. If we get caught growing pot, we might go to prison for a year or so. If we get caught in a kidnapping, we'll never get out of prison. You better have a real good plan."

     "Oh, I got one alright. I need to do some watching and sneaking around just a bit, but it'll be a nice'n."

     I told Dedrick to let me get some of the details put together and then we'd get started with getting our money that them cops took when they chopped our gardens. He left to go a mile or so up a ridge to set up a new camp. I went back to the place where I'd watched that woman and her dang bird.

     Every time I watched she was singing to the woods and that bird. She'd flit around the decks like a two-legged gooney bird. Each time she had on a bright colored something or other kind of dress or robe. I really don't know what to call it. When she quit singing, that bird would take up doing the same. It sounded darn near, just like her. Sometimes she was in the house and the bird was next to one of the screens and sang on its own. It'd drown out the blue jays and the woodpeckers and they's some loud birds.

     After an hour, I saw the woman come into the room where the bird was. She looked like she was talking to it and then put something in the cage. The bird was preening itself and paying no attention to her. She covered the cage and moved away out of sight. Pretty soon, I heard a car start up and saw her leave down the drive to the gravel road. She turned toward Robbinsville and was gone.

     I went back two more days and each time at about 11:30 in the morning she left and didn't return until around 2:00. I knew what we was going to do. I went back to the new camp Dedrick and me had set up. I got me a beer from the cooler Dedrick had carried up from our truck. I popped the top and sat with my back against a dogwood.

     "Here's what we're going to do, Cousin," I told him all I'd seen and how the woman had a regular routine. Then I told him how we'd sneak up and get in the house from the deck. We'd put a cover over that bird cage and get out of there right dang quick. We'd take that bird back to our camp. I'd leave her a note saying she needed to put six, no, eight thousand dollars in a sack and leave it at a place next to the road. Once we was satisfied nobody was watching we'd take the money and leave the bird, cage, and all. It was a nice plan. Dedrick looked at me with no expression on his face at all. Good, that means he agrees, and we'll get this kidnapping underway. But I was wrong.

     "We can't lug that cage through the woods, Spud. I saw it with the binocs and it's really big. Heck that dang bird is bigger than a turkey buzzard. You're plan isn't going to work. Think of another way, Cousin."

     I sat down and dug around in the dirt with a stick. He was most likely correct. I knew the sign of a good leader was to agree with Dedrick and so I did.

     "Let me think on this a bit." I lit up a pretty good-sized doobie and rested my back against a log. I relaxed cause I knew my best ideas came after a few minutes of thinking with the help of some good weed.

     Don't know how long I thought but it came to me. I filled Dedrick in and he sort of agreed. We'd wait till the next afternoon and do the deed. We were going to grab that bird and stick him in a gunny sack. He'd be so daggone scared he wouldn't make a peep.

     We ate a cold supper of beans and white bread. Drank some cold stream water and I had another doobie. Dedrick just went to his bedroll, and I could hear him snoring.

     The next morning, we got up and hiked back to the Jeep. We drove down that gravel road to where her driveway came out. I backed the Jeep up a fire road the Forest Service had put in years ago. We waited. At about 11:30, she came and drove away from us.

     As I'd planned, we took the Jeep up the driveway and climbed the stairs to the top of the deck. Just like always, the glass door was partially open. We looked in. I nudged Dedrick and pointed with my chin. There was the cage, and it had that cover on it.

     We snuck up to it, and as I touched the bottom of the cover, I heard a kind of laugh.

     "Heh. Heh. Heh."

     I looked at Dedrick, and he shrugged his shoulders. I started to lift it again and heard the same thing.

     "heh. Heh. Heh."

     I slowly started pulling the cover up and peeked underneath. That dang bird was standing on the cage floor, bent over, peeking out at me. Dedrick started backing up out of the doorway.

     I pulled the cover up a bit more, and the bird stood straight up and stretched his neck.

     Now, I'd watched that woman and that bird on and off for over a week. The only thing that bird ever done was sing opera. Never heard it do anything else.

     When that bird got its neck stretched way up, it started screaming like we were killing it. It sounded like a siren and fingernails scratching down a blackboard at the same time. I hadn't touched the thing. Never laid a finger on it. It screamed and screamed and screamed. I backed out of the room and made for the steps. It was still screaming.

     We got in the Jeep and left. Went back to camp and got the rest of our beer from the cooler in the truck. It was sitting in water by then, but I didn't care. At camp, I drank a couple of beers and lit up a big joint. I ain't never been so rattled. Dedrick was just staring at me. I couldn't think of nothing to say.

     We both went to sleep without eating and the next morning, when I got up, Dedrick was already up and ready to go.

     He looked at me and said, "Reckon we need to go on back home and get us some jobs, Cousin. We pretty good at growing pot and all but they's no more time this year."

     I thought a bit and agreed with him, but I told him I wanted to do one more thing. I was going to get that bird out of its cage and shoo it into the woods. Dedrick listened and said he'd come along just to see.

     We went to that ridge overlooking the woman's house and sure enough there they was the woman in one of them funny looking outfits and the bird in his cage on his little trapeze. She was dancing all around the deck singing and bird started up just as soon and she let up.

     At around 11:30 she got in her car and left. Dedrick and I snuck up just a bit closer to the house. We was eye level with the deck and didn't need the binoculars we was near enough to see everything. Dedrick nudged me with his elbow and pointed at the deck rail.

     "She left that bird out of the cage." He whispered.

     Damn if he wasn't right. I blinked my eyes a couple of times because that big bird jumped up on the railing and, I swear, was looking right at us.

     It walked like a strut up and down that railing for a minute or so and stopped to look over at where we was hiding. I heard it clear as day.

     That bird started the "Heh. Heh. Heh." stuff, then god almighty, that damn screaming started. It scared us so bad we fell down the bank and landed near the bottom of the woman's house. We scrambled up the ridge on all fours like crabs sometimes, but run we did! We got to the Jeep and left. I don't ever want no part of any kind of bird no more. I don't even trust chickens now.

     Dedrick got him a job with a subcontractor working on train tracks and such. I been thinking about a job and thinking's what I do best. Well, thinking and doing jumbo doobies. I'll need to get a money-making job soon enough. Heck maybe I could get work at a chicken plant.