There is another funny story about Triste the Bassett Hound during this trip. The mosquitoes were pretty bad. This section of North Florida is very hilly, with very non-porous red clay. So it seemed that every bottomland was a Cypress slough filled with water. I won’t call them swamps. You might. They bred mosquitoes. To combat them we would light a little green felt coil on a little metal stand in our tents, impregnated with Citronella. This helped.

One night I awoke choking and realized the coil had fallen over (it had been knocked over actually by a dog), and had lit the canvas floor of the tent. It was just smoldering as everything was so wet it was not easy for it to burst into flames but it would have. I leaped out of my cot and started to throw the dogs asses out of the tent. Lady left by herself, Daisy (the Bassett Hound who found herself hanging in the Kudzu vines halfway up the hill above the railroad tracks) followed. Triste didn’t budge. When I nudged him to wake him up he growled at me! The hell with you, I said and dragged him out by the collar whereupon I grabbed some water and in a moment had the fire out. Let’s just say the other guys found this quite hilarious!