The scream was absolutely blood curdling. I know this because it was my blood and curdled blood moves slower and as it uncurdles. The curdle comes out through the goose bumps on your skin. This was the most curdled my blood had ever been, and the goose bumps were the size of peas. I nearly passed out from the lack of oxygen. Curdled blood also causes a huge in rush of air sometimes called a gasp followed by the inability to breathe out directly related to how curdled the blood has become.

The uncurdling of my blood wasn’t helped by the fact that it was maybe 5 degrees above zero, and this huge inrush of air had practically frozen my lungs as well as dropping my core temperature 3 degrees. (I had my own personal Handy Dandy Anal Pocket Thermometer (sold on late nite TV) with me.) This uncurdling process also wasn’t helped by the situation I was in. It was maybe 9:00 PM in North Alabama in mid January, so it was pitch black. I was on the side of Jacobs Mountain on an old logging road that tried to run down into Pole Branch Hollow. Too many cliffs for any road or trail to go far. Where I was standing the hollow was maybe a quarter mile deep but only a hundred yards across.

This was actually a little side shoot off the main hollow but was too small to merit its own name. I have run all over these mountains since I was a kid, and this is the most inhospitable terrain in these parts. This hollow still has virgin timber in the bottom, due to boulders in every size from couch to house strewed across the bottom with their sides touching, and making log retrieval impossible whether by mule or skidder. You might use one of them big Russian helicopters if you cut the logs short enough.

The old logging road was fairly steep (This steep thing runs in grades 1. a little steep 5% grade 2. sorta steep 6 to 15% grade 3. pretty steep 15 to 23% 4. fairly steep 23 to 27% 5. damn steep 27 to 33% 6. STEEP 34% all the way up to cliff. Above 34% you try to pull yourself from sapling to sapling so when your feet slip you don’t fall so far.) The old logging road was also covered in a sheet of ice as there had been an ice storm two days earlier. The ice storm was the backhanded reason we were there, in the dark, in the cold on this steep road covered with ice listening to some insane woman scream at the top of her lungs.