by Si Robertson
I’m not exactly sure when I was diagnosed with achluophobia—the fear of darkness—but I’ve always been afraid to be left alone in the dark. Growing up in the Robertson house, my older brothers always teased me about being scared of the dark. I spent many nights in bed with the covers pulled over my head while Tommy and Phil tapped on the walls or made scary noises to frighten me. I don’t like to watch horror movies and didn’t even like to go trick-or-treating when I was a kid, unless we were back at our house before the sun went down! I always checked to make sure the doors and windows were locked—and the closets were clear—before I went to bed, and I even slept with a nightlight until I left for Vietnam. Now I sleep with the TV on in our bedroom. I still don’t like the dark!
Whenever we went fishing or frog gigging at night when we were kids, Tommy and Phil liked to run off and leave me alone in the woods. I always feared that a grizzly bear, Sasquatch, or a fifty-pound squirrel was going to eat me. Hey, you probably didn’t know squirrels could grow that big, but I’ve seen them! They have razor-sharp teeth and don’t look anything like the cute squirrels that eat nuts. They’re man-eaters and like to gnaw on human bones! They’d probably like nothing more than to eat the hunters who are trying to shoot them, including me!
I’ve been afraid of the dark for as long as I can remember. One night, Momma asked me to go outside to get her shoes, which she’d left on the front steps of our log cabin.
“Momma, I don’t want to go outside,” I told her. “It’s dark out there.”
Momma smiled and said, “Silas, you don’t have to be afraid of the dark, son. Jesus is out there. He’ll watch over you and protect you.”
“Are you sure he’s out there?” I asked her.
“Yes, Silas, he’s always with you,” she said.
So I mustered up the courage to crack open the front door. I stuck my head outside. It was pitch-black, and I could hear the grizzly bears and fifty-pound squirrels stirring in the woods around our house.
“Jesus?” I asked, while praying he would respond to my plea. “If you’re out there, can you hand me Momma’s shoes?”
Well, Jesus never handed me her shoes, so I’m still afraid of the dark.
Momma always told me my fear of darkness would go away once I got older, but it only seemed to get worse over the years. When I was in the fourth grade, Tommy, Phil, and I went frog gigging one night. After we’d gigged a bagful of bullfrogs, we started to make our way through the dark woods back to our house to clean them. We were walking in a straight line, like we always did, with Tommy in the front and Phil in front of me.
As we were walking through the woods, I kept hearing something walking behind me. Tommy had the flashlight, so I was trying to make sure that I kept Phil in sight. I didn’t want to be left alone out there! No matter how fast I walked, I kept hearing footsteps behind me. After I heard the footsteps once more, I turned around and looked but didn’t see anything. I figured I was only imagining the sounds because it was so dark in the woods and, hey, I was scared.
The next time I turned around, though, I saw a pair of yellow eyes looking right at me! The eyes were glowing in the dark!
I tried to muster up enough courage to scream, but my mouth was as dry as the Sahara Desert. I sat there in the woods, shaking and trembling in my boots, wondering what was about to eat me for dinner. Suddenly, I remembered a Bible verse Momma read to me. It was Isaiah 41:10:
So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
I reached out for God’s right hand but couldn’t find it. So I looked for the next-best thing: Phil’s shoulders! I took off running and ran right into Phil’s back, and then he fell into Tommy. We fell into a clump on the ground.
“Hey, hey!” Tommy yelled. “Si, what’s going on?”
“There’s something behind me!” I screamed. “It’s Sasquatch!”
Tommy shined the flashlight back to where I’d seen the unidentified walking object. We didn’t see anything.
“You’re imagining things,” Phil told me. “You’re such a sissy.”
But when Tommy shined the light back to the spot again, we saw a big blur run past us. It jumped into a large culvert to our left.
“I told you there was something back there!” I said.
We slowly tippytoed toward the culvert and shined the light down into it. We didn’t see anything, but we were suddenly overcome by the putrid scent of a skunk. It smelled awful.
“Si, it was only a skunk,” Phil said.
To this day, Tommy and Phil still contend I only saw a very large skunk.
Hey, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a skunk that walks upright and is four feet tall! Even now, I still have no idea what the unidentified walking object really was. It had eyes that glowed in the dark and walked just like we do. It fell in line right behind us as we walked through the woods!
Maybe it was a four-foot skunk. We grow them pretty big down in Louisiana. Or maybe it really was Sasquatch and he badly needed a bath!
“He’s like a snake in the grass. Hey, if you chop its head off, It’ll still bite ya!”
Snake Bit
ONE OF THE BIGGEST hazards of living in Louisiana is that nearly forty different species of snakes are here. Where I live, snakes hide under rocks, logs, floor mats, and pillows. Hey, they even sleep in your boots! If you’re not careful, they’ll crawl into your pocket when you’re walking to the duck blind and back. Heck, I have to check my gun barrel every time I shoot to make sure a snake didn’t crawl into it. As you may can guess, I don’t like snakes. The only good snake is a dead snake! If anyone tries to mess with me when it comes to snakes, they’re going to have a fight on their hands.
Given as much time as I’ve spent in the woods hunting squirrels, birds, deer, and other game, along with being on the water fishing and shooting ducks, the odds were pretty good I was going to be bitten by a snake. In fact, I’ve been bitten by a snake twenty-seven times in my life, to be exact. Over the years, water snakes, pine snakes, blind snakes, brown snakes, garter snakes, ribbon snakes, rat snakes, racers, and king snakes have bitten me. Hey, I don’t blame the snakes. That’s what a snake does—they’re snakes!
Looking back, it’s amazing that a poisonous snake never bit my brothers or me. I guess Momma was right; someone was always watching over us. Northwest Louisiana, where we grew up, is one of the few places in the United States that is home to all four of the venomous snakes of North America: the copperhead, cottonmouth, coral snake, and rattlesnake. We’re even blessed to have two kinds of rattlesnakes: the canebrake and the eastern diamondback. Boy, aren’t we lucky?
You always have to be on the lookout for snakes. You never know when one is going to be lying in the path of your next step as you’re walking through the woods or swamp. Fortunately, Phil detests snakes as much as I do, so there are always two sets of eyes scanning the ground for them.
My brothers and I had plenty of close calls when we were kids. One day, while we were running on a sandbar on the Red River, Tommy stopped dead in his tracks. What followed next was like something out of a cartoon. Phil bumped into Tommy, and I ran into Phil’s back. It was like dominoes falling over. We landed about six inches from a big snake.
“Whoa, whoa!” Tommy screamed. “It’s a king cobra!”
We looked down and saw a big black snake on the ground. It was standing on its tail with its head flared up. The king cobra was staring straight at us and looked ready to strike and send us to our graves.
We stepped back and the snake backed down. It coiled up on the ground, and its head returned to normal.
“Nah, I’ve seen a picture of one of these snakes in a book at school,” Tommy said. “It’s not a king cobra snake. It’s a hognose snake.”
Since it wasn’t a king cobra that could kill us with one strike, Tommy caught the snake with his bare hands. It kept flaring its head at us while we p
layed with it. It was a bad-looking thing! When it calmed down, its head looked like it had a pig’s nose with big nostrils. But when it flared up, it was wicked-looking!
One summer, we learned we could sell dewberries for about five dollars per gallon bucket, so we went into high gear gathering them. We went anywhere to find them. Dewberries are closely related to blackberries and raspberries, but they’re bigger and grow on trailing vines that look like weeds. We sold them to women who used them to make cobblers, jams, or pies. We always saved enough for Momma to jar or turn into a Sunday cobbler. Five dollars a bucket was a lot of money for boys who never had much money in their pockets, so we searched for them day and night. We kicked it into high gear, Jack, and we went to picking dewberries fast and furious.
After a few weeks, we tapped out our sweet holes, so we went searching for more brambles of dewberries. We walked down the levee at the Red River, looking for dewberries along the bank. At the bottom of the incline, Tommy spotted some dewberries.
“Hey, we have to get down there,” Tommy told us. “If there are dewberries down there, they’re going to be big because they’re close to the water.”
Sure enough, we found some dewberries. We were on one knee wading through the water, picking dewberries at the edge of the river. They were as big as fifty-cent pieces! I was counting the money we were going to make in my head. Phil and I filled our buckets in about three minutes.
When Phil and I were finished, we walked back to the top of the levee, which was about six feet above the water at a forty-five-degree incline. Phil looked down at Tommy, who was still on one knee. Right above him on the bank were two big black rings with a white spot in the middle of them. The rings were four inches from Tommy’s leg. It was two cottonmouth water moccasins, which are some of the meanest and deadliest snakes you’ll come across. The snakes were about as big as my arm, about four inches in diameter. They looked like they could kill an eight-hundred-pound bull!
“Tommy, look down at your right knee!” Phil yelled.
I heard Tommy scream, and then the next thing I knew, Tommy was standing between Phil and me! Both of our mouths just dropped open. He jumped six feet from the water to the top of the hill!
I never saw Tommy run up the hill. He was at the bottom of the hill and then he wasn’t!
After catching our breath, we found big sticks and killed the two snakes.
“Hey, I’ve got to figure this out,” Tommy said.
Tommy is smart and always has to have a logical reason for why something happens. He went back into the water where he was kneeling, jumped up, and ran up the hill. It took him about six seconds. He tried to jump out of the water, but he could only jump about three feet. Then he went to the top of the hill, ran down, and jumped, but it wasn’t much farther. No matter how much Tommy tried, he couldn’t duplicate the feat.
Now, I’ve read several stories about hysterical strength and how adrenaline allows humans to do things they normally couldn’t do. In 2011, a University of South Florida football player named Danous Estenor lifted a 3,500-pound Cadillac Seville off a tow-truck driver who was pinned under its rear tire. In 2006, an Eskimo woman named Lydia Angiyou distracted a 705-pound polar bear long enough for hunters to arrive and rescue her seven-year-old son and two other children. And in 1982, a Georgia woman named Angela Cavallo lifted a 1964 Chevrolet Impala off her son after two jacks fell. Now, that’s a muscle car!
I don’t know what the Olympic record is for the standing broad jump, but my older brother broke it that day. Those two cottonmouth water moccasins put springs in his knees!
“You put camouflage on anything and it automatically becomes cool.”
Floating Log
HEY, REMEMBER WHAT I said about snakes being everywhere in Louisiana? News flash: snakes aren’t even the state reptiles of Louisiana! It’s the alligator. If you’re walking through a swamp, lake, or river and don’t step on a snake, chances are you’ll step on an alligator. Bad news, Jack! The alligator is one mean sucker and, hey, it’s a cold-blooded animal. I’ve seen alligators that are twenty feet long and weigh more than one thousand pounds. They’ll eat fish, rats, crabs, birds, beavers, muskrats, raccoons, ducks, deer, and Milo the family dog. In Vietnam, I once saw an alligator wipe out an entire village on the Dong Nai River. It wasn’t a pretty sight. A snake’s bite might kill you, but it sure beats getting locked in the jaws of death!
Alligators live to be about fifty years old in the wild, and there’s a reason they’ve survived for so long. They’re the baddest predators in the swamp! They’ll go through nearly three thousand teeth killing their prey before they die. When one tooth falls out, another one grows in its place. Nothing else has the courage to mess with them. Hey, how many arms does an alligator have? It depends what it ate for dinner, Jack! There are nearly two million alligators living in Louisiana, and I suspect more than half of them reside in our duck holes.
I’ve been running from alligators since I was a young boy. Momma taught me early that I could become an alligator’s appetizer if I wasn’t careful. We’ve never really hunted alligators, because we don’t like to mess with them, but we’re always mindful that one might be lurking close by when we’re in the duck blind. Some time ago, I decided I wanted a pair of alligator boots. But every time I killed an alligator, it wasn’t wearing any shoes!
Alligators are about the only game we haven’t hunted—unless we had to. We never had much money growing up, but Daddy always made sure we had ammunition and guns for hunting because we wouldn’t have much meat to eat if we didn’t kill game. There were two guns in our house for us to use: Daddy’s Browning semiautomatic sixteen-gauge shotgun and a Remington .22 that belonged to our uncle Al Robertson, which somehow wound up in our house. It was a bolt-action with a seven-shot clip. During duck season, we always managed to find a second shotgun to use.
When duck season opened my sixth-grade year, Daddy went out and bought us a couple of boxes of shotgun shells, like he did at the start of every season. Phil was in the eighth grade and was fourteen years old. On opening day, we jumped in the Ford Falcon, and Phil drove us—without a driver’s license—to the duck hole, which was about fifteen miles from our house at Horseshoe Lake in Gilliam, Louisiana. Horseshoe Lake was one of our favorite holes to hunt mallard ducks. There were a bunch of willow trees growing at one end of the lake, and when the water level was high enough, mallard ducks sat in the hole. Phil knew the river was high, so it was time to go shoot mallard ducks.
“Let’s go whack ’em,” Phil said.
While we always had shotgun shells and guns to use, we were too poor to buy waders, which keep you dry when you’re walking through the swamp to get to the duck hole. Blue jeans and tennis shoes were our waders! That’s what we wore to wade through chilly water, regardless of what time of year it was. Hey, what do you get when you throw blue jeans and tennis shoes into a lake? A wet suit, Jack, and it made for some long days in the water!
When we arrived at Horseshoe Lake, we started to wade through the swamp. The water was about waist-deep, and it was early January, so the water was probably only twenty degrees. It was cold! After a few steps, Phil noticed a log sitting to the left of us.
“Hey, watch out,” he told me. “Don’t trip over that log.”
I walked past the log and didn’t think much of it.
After we found a spot in the duck hole that would conceal us—this was long before we started building duck blinds—we stood shaking in the water and waiting for the ducks. Fortunately, we had to wait only a few minutes before a flock of mallards came into sight. Phil called them over and they sailed right over us.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
We knocked down four mallard ducks, two apiece, on the first pass. Being the youngest brother, I waded through the ice-cold water and retrieved our kill. On my way back to the blind, Phil reminded me not to trip over the log.
“Hey, watch it,” Phil said. “There’s that log again.”
“I see it,” I s
aid. “I’m not blind.”
After a few more minutes, another bunch of mallards came into view. We both had guns, so we had three shots apiece. Phil called the ducks—he was really good at doing it even when he was young—and they flew right over our blind again. We each brought down three more ducks.
“Hey, there’s a cripple over there,” Phil said. “Shoot it again.”
I looked to my left and there was a big mallard drake floating in the water by the log. He was still moving. I was closest to the wounded duck, so I aimed to shoot him again. But then I saw that the duck was facedown in the water, so I figured he was close to dying, so I wasn’t going to waste another shell on him.
“Shoot him!” Phil yelled.
“Hey, he’s dead,” I said.
“No, he’s not,” Phil said. “Shoot him again!”
“Hey, trust me, he’s deader than a lobster in butter sauce,” I said. “I’m five feet from him. He’s not going anywhere!”
That duck was spinning in the lake like water does when you’re draining a bathtub. All of the sudden, the duck started spinning faster and faster. And then the big mallard drake was gone! It popped under the water like a cork does when you hook a two-pound crappie.
Then that twenty-foot log started moving! It sucked the mallard drake about two feet under the water! I looked at Phil and said, “Whoa, that log is an alligator!” We’d been walking around that stupid thing for thirty minutes!
Hey, news flash: we didn’t walk on water that day, but we got out of it!
See ya later, alligator!
