Section 799.2 - EVERYTHING IN THE WOODS WANTS TO EAT A QUAIL (Including Me)

IT IS VERY QUIET HERE on Springhill Plantation, the piece of South Georgia where I have found sanctuary these last few years.

- Jimmy Buffett

Some friends from Nashville had been down here visiting for the weekend, but they're gone now, off to the airport and headed for home with plenty of quail to eat and stories to tell. All of our garrulous good-byes at the end of the driveway have given way to silence, the kind of silence that can be found only ― or so it seems to me - in these pine woods that I have grown to love.

After they left I took a long horseback ride over the grass roads and down to the low bottom where the dogs like to wallow in the cool mud. The black mushrooms will be sprouting there soon. My landlady, Sally Sullivan, showed me the spot when I first rented the place, and I found out that those mushrooms are as good as any morel I have eaten in France. On the way back to the house I let the dogs run out far in front of me, and they flushed two coveys of birds, like kids chasing each other in a game of hide-and-seek.