Nighthound Mountain

An unlikely tale for the fearful child in us all

By: Bill Ed Scruggs

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Jesse Jones' 45 years of life ended in two seconds when the side of a limestone sinkhole caved in and his tractor rolled over on him. He was dead in the back of a pickup racing for the hospital just on principle before his children even heard of the accident. Now 19-year-old Charlie Joe is a high school drop-out, dependent on his mother's advice for running the farm, afraid of everything he can imagine in the present and the future, and unable to bear the silent weeping of his younger siblings that comes without warning or need to explain. He'd like to have a girl in his life, but the haughty high school girls intimidated him and he is angrily rejected by a white trash sharecropper girl on whom he thinks to hone his conversational skills without fear of embarrassment—she knows what traditionally follows friendly chit-chat from young men of a higher class. Then something unspeakable enters her life from the wild land of predators and prey under Nighthound Mountain, and she turns to Charlie Joe for help without realizing that he may be to blame. NIGHTHOUND MOUNTAIN is a fast-moving tale of class prejudice and territorial hostility, deprivation and survival, suspicion and affection, mystifying threat and paralyzing fear, and the fierce struggles of people who are ordinary human beings and therefore very special. Love and fear predominate.