Smokey and the Fouke Monster: A True Story. Smokey Crabtree
only got lies and promises. This was a real problem. He was the kind of snake that Old Sputter could not help me with. I was only a boy, I often told my troubles to Old Sputter. He was always very understanding and showed signs of sympathy for me. He could net advise me as what to do. He had shown me what he did when he got bit. He did not quit and let the snake go free. He tried to watch him closer and kept fighting.
I was faced with a problem that the dog knew nothing about, like rules and laws. I was not big enough to grab the man and shake his teeth loose. I could not kill him or burn his house, that would make me as bad as he was. After giving the situation a lot of thought, I decided, all he really cost us was a terrible lot of work and the thing to do was assign him to hard labor His working for us was ruled out, so him working for himself and not gaining anything for it was the answer
Mother was not in on the plan. She would have been fast to tell us that two wrongs will not make a right.
My older brother and I watched his house until he and every member of his family were away from home. His well of water was something that he used constantly If there was a problem with it he could not put it off. He would have to go right to work on it, so it was our target. We had to use what we had. We didn't have anything but that did not stop us. We used some of what he had. He had some of everything in the country
His well was a large open mouthed tile, thirty-six inches in diameter and sixty or seventy feet deep, with a bucket. He drawed water up with a rope and pulley
First, we threw a bale of hay from his barn into the well. We caught one of his goats. We did not harm the goat, but lowered him down in the well, and cut him loose. He was standing on the bale of hay. He had plenty of food and water. We put a few other items in, then threw the rope in to make things a little more interesting for him. When they returned home his work was cut out for him.
It's like I said earlier in this book, "Sometimes I let the Lord take care of things and if I think he is busy, I take care of them myself."
It is not something that started yesterday.
I have never been able to just stand there after someone has wronged me and watch him crawl free.
I was always willing to kill for food but have saved the lives of many small animals that were in danger.
When I was a young boy I performed a serious operation on some of our chickens and saved their lives.
We raised the chickens for food and food was a scarce item around our house. We had some young chickens not large enough to eat yet. We found them laying all over the back yard, some of them dead. Some of them were still showing signs of life.
They were purple around the head and unconscious, gasping for breath. Their craws were swollen up and their necks were full of something.
We looked them over and discovered they had found the door open to the smoke house where we were storing some dried beans. They had helped themselves to the beans and didn't know when to stop. When the dried beans drew moisture from inside the chickens' craws they swelled up twice their size. This caused a tremendous amount of pressure inside the chickens' craws and necks. This had closed off their windpipes, causing suffocation.
Mother said there was nothing we could do, they would all die.
I told Mother that I would operate on the ones that still had life in them if she would let me.
She said, "You mean cut them open and get the beans out?"
I said, "Yes, that's what I mean."
She told me to go ahead but she thought they were past saving.
I quickly picked out the ones that had signs of life in them. I placed them all side by side on the ground. I sharpened my knife, got the bottle of alcohol from the house, and went to work.
I got the worst one first, figuring the others would make it longer. I was very careful with the first one.
I stripped off the feathers around the craw, put some alcohol on the bare skin. I counted the layers of skin and flesh as I cut through, so I would not miss any of them or get one sewed back to the wrong one. I kept this straight in my mind.
When I reached the beans I removed them, letting the chicken get his breath back. If the chicken didn't start breathing immediately after the beans were removed, I mashed him gently a few times and he would start breathing. I put him to sleep until I had time to sew him up. This was done by folding the chicken's head back under one wing, holding the wing snug against the chicken's head so he could not pull it out. I would swing the chicken in the shape of a zero several times. Then laying him down on his side, with the wing down, that has his head under it, he will lie there for a long time and not move a feather This gave me time to open up the others.
I then went back to the first one, with the needle and thread, dipped in alcohol and started sewing them up. I started with the inside and worked my way out. Each layer was sewed up separately and doctored with methylate. His skin was the last to be stitched up. When the operation was complete, I wrapped them in warm towels, placed them in a warm place to where nothing would bother them.
In a few days the chickens were good as new Every chicken I operated on lived.
Mother called me Dr. Crabtree for a while after that.
Chapter Four
I was eight years old when Mother gave her consent for my brother, Buddy, and I to buy a shotgun. It was a twenty gauge single barrel.
The price of the gun was eight dollars. It was a lot of money and hard to come by
A man by the name of Cutchall owned several large bee ranches and sold honey The places he selected to put his bee ranches were along the river bottoms. Here the bees could work the large locust thorn trees that stand along the Sulphur River Bottoms. They say the honey made from locust trees is the very best.
At times, the bees multiply to a point to where when some of them leave the hive, which is their home. One queen bee will leave and a large amount of the bees will follow her They will look for a new home. When the queen bee first leaves the hive, she will not go far until she lights on a branch of a tree. Then all the bees that are following her will light there with her They will all pile up in a bunch resembling a cluster of grapes. Some swarms have over two gallons of bees in them. The bees would settle on a branch and hang there for several hours. Then, they would swarm again. The sky would be dark with bees. When they were all together like that, they would make an unbelievable amount of noise. They would be leaving for parts unknown.
One of Mr Cutchall's bee ranches was located not too far from our house, at the time I worked for him. He did not want to lose the bees that swarmed. He hired me to capture the bees before they left and give them a new hive to live in.
I would take the new bee hive, sit it up in formation with the old ones, and leave the top of the hive open. I rigged up a long pole with a five gallon bucket tied on the end or it. The long pole would allow me to reach up high in the tree. I would ease the bucket up to the cluster of bees hanging on the limb. I would make sure I had them down in the bucket real good, then I would jab the limb real hard with the pole and bucket. The bees would fall off into the bucket. I then walked to the new hive and poured them into their new home.
Sometimes part of the bees would miss the bucket and fall all over me. I got stung many times paying my four dollars on that shotgun.
We were real proud of our gun. We only used it to kill game we could not get any other way
When our dog ran a rabbit by us in the woods we knew we would be able to get it without firing a shot. We never wasted a shell. When we did find game to shoot we made sure we were going to do some good before we fired. When the shells were gone it meant a lot of trapping, saving, and a fourteen mile walk, on foot, to buy more.
I have walked to Fouke from our house many times with only twenty-five cents to spend. I would talk the store manager into opening a box of twenty gauge shells and selling me a few shells. Sometimes I had an opossum hide I would trade for the shells. When I fired my gun, I would really get serious