A friend of mine, I’ll call Clay, owns 2,800 acres of South Carolina gold, the kind of land a man doesn’t really own so much as borrow for a while. Mature oaks, hickories, and pines intermingled to form an overhead highway of branches, mixed with briar thickets and running creeks. The tract was surrounded by large landowners with long stretches of timber, so the whole place stayed wild, quiet, and full of game. We live about an hour and a half from each other and get to hunt a half a dozen times a year out at his place. When Clay calls and says he needs a 4th for a hunt, I rarely turn down the invitation.
Places like this are the last honest corners of America, and every time I set foot on Clay’s ground, I’m reminded how fast the rest of the world is forgetting what freedom feels like.
Clay had called early one Friday afternoon and told me he and two other buddies would be turning loose around 7:30pm if I wanted to join them. His friend Mark would be coming from about 30 minutes away and his other buddy, Benny, was about the same in the opposite direction. We all knew each other, but only bumped into one another when a hunt threw us together.
Each of us brought one hound. Clay had a big redbone that moved with slow confidence, like he’d seen a thousand hunts and didn’t need to prove anything. Mark’s bluetick, Bell, was all legs and lungs, almost always the first to strike, and accurate. Benny’s walker wasn’t big, but he was wound tight as a snare, that charge running straight up the leash into your hand. And then there was Rebel at my side, a broad-headed, hard-charging walker with a voice that could roll over a ridge and make the hair rise on your arms. Four men, four dogs, one quiet stretch of land that still felt like it belonged to the old world.
Clay eased us down an old trail that cut through the pines. The side-by-side lighting up the path ahead, catching needles, palmetto fans, and animal tracks of all kinds. The air had that damp chill you only get when the heat finally lets go. It smelled like wet bark, leaf mold and freedom.
We stopped where the trail split, one arm dropping toward a low bottom and the other skirting a ridge. Clay told us we’d start out in some water but try to end the night high and dry along the ridge. ‘I haven’t been to this tract in about three months, but we haven’t had much rain, so it should be manageable,’ he said as we eased toward one of the more remote corners of his property.
We reached our first turnout a little after eight, and it was nothing but a wall of briar thickets. Clay pointed past it and said the woods opened up on the other side, leading to a creek and a couple acres of swamp land. He told us the coons fed on blueberries and dewberries in the briars, then moved under the oaks and hickories for acorns and nuts, and finally worked the creek for crawdads, frogs, and whatever fish they could grab. ‘It’s paradise for a coon,’ he said as we walked back to the side-by-side.
Mark’s bluetick Bell struck first like she always did, but she was only joined by Benny’s walker, Dave. My dog Rebel and Clay’s dog Dan still hadn’t struck after 5 minutes of Bell and Dave working their track. Eventually Dan and Rebel found their own track, and fell treed within about 2 minutes. Bell and Dave treed shortly thereafter and the four of us set-off in different directions: Mark and Benny headed east while Clay and I headed west. ‘We’ll meet you back here. If they have one, go ahead and take him’ Clay said as he double-checked his Ruger 10/22.
“Sounds like it’s water for you and me” Clay said as we made our way to the maze of briars in front of us. I stepped ahead and began hacking away with the machete Clay kept on the side-by-side. We made it through, and Clay was right, just beyond the briars the woods opened up, covered by a canopy woven so tight it blocked out most of the moon and every star behind it. We dropped into the creek bottom and crossed on an old bridge Clay put up twenty years ago. We were in luck, the dogs were treed along the swamp’s edge; we would stay dry after all.
Mark and Benny were already back at the side-by-side when Clay and I returned. I threw the dead coon in the back next to theirs and congratulated the two men before we loaded up and headed off to our next turnout. Clay and I liked the idea of avoiding the briars, so he drove in the direction Mark and Benny had just left.
Clay finally picked a spot and we turned the dogs loose. We were a good thirty feet higher than the creek bed we’d just left, tucked into thick pines where the night felt still and close. Every now and then we caught a faint rustle from the dogs way in the distance, but otherwise the woods were quiet.
The quiet didn’t last. Within five minutes we were headed to the tree, all four dogs letting every coon in the county know they meant business. The pines opened up as we closed in, the canopy thinning enough that we could see the dogs from fifty yards out. We hit the tree with our lights already shining and caught those yellow-green eyes immediately. This was our group’s third tree of the night, and third coon, and it had only just turned 9:30.
We decided not to take the coon and started to make our way back to the side-by-side. On the walk in we were so focused on shining the tree that we hadn’t noticed it, and the dogs were loud enough to drown out anything. But now, in the quiet, there it was. Off in the distance, there were lights. Big ones, punching through the trees from what looked like a half mile away. There was also, noise. Faint “booms” that would grow and weaken with the wind.
I’ve learned to trust my surroundings when I’m out in the woods, and the woods were telling us the world on the other side of those trees wasn’t the same one we’d walked in from.
“Is that coming from your property” Benny asked, as we all stared in the direction of the lights as if somehow if we looked hard enough we’d know the truth. “That’s a neighbors land but there most certainly shouldn’t be any lights out there. They have a house on the property but it’s 5 miles away from us. Nobody is supposed to be out here.”
We knew the lights were farther off than they looked, so we headed back to the side-by-side. On the walk in we tossed around every theory we could think of about what those lights might be. I was half-joking about a UFO, mostly because Clay looked rattled. He told us his neighbors were in their late seventies and owned about a thousand acres. They didn’t sell timber and didn’t lease to hunters, just lived in a small house on the far side. There was no reason in the world for anyone to be out there.
Clay parked the side-by-side near where the dogs had treed, and we continued in on foot. With each step, that glow ahead of us grew brighter and wider. It wasn’t a single point; it was a smear, a pale wash against the dark backdrop of thick, tall pines.
The woods around us got quieter as we approached. You could still hear our footsteps in the leaves, but somehow the natural sounds felt thinner. There was a low, constant hum riding under everything else. It wasn’t loud yet, just present, barely noticeable above our footsteps at first.
As we approached the hum became a mix of tones — a throbbing vibration you could feel in your boots, a faint metallic clatter, something that might have been engines turning over in the distance. Every so often, there’d be a sharper sound that carried farther: a bang, a clank, the short bark of machinery being pushed harder than it wanted to go.
We hit a tangle of brush that rose up like a wall — saplings, vines, and scrub all knotted together. The glow was coming from just beyond it, leaking through the gaps and painting the undersides of the branches with a strange, flat light that didn’t belong to the moon or any star.
The hum on the other side had grown into a steady, layered noise. We stopped there in the shadows, the light now bright enough that we shut off our headlamps. Nobody had to say a word. We traded the kind of quick looks men share when they know the nights about to take an unexpected turn.
We eased around the edge of the brush pile, and the glow shifted from out ahead to almost right above us. It felt like we were walking up to the edge of a stadium lit up for a Friday night football game in the country.
Whatever I thought I was prepared for, it wasn’t what we saw.
The land dropped away in front of us, lit up with overhead lights on all four sides of what could only be described as, a city.