Burned land should smell sad, I thought, but the scent of these flatwoods was pungent and exciting. Homo pyro we might have called ourselves. McCranie took up his iron and selected a couple of stobs from the back of his truck. He generally carries fifteen to twenty stobs into the field. A few of these are new, and being tested.
Some stobs prove to be duds, resonating at an ineffectual frequency.
If some stobs are duds, then others are Stradivariuses, causing the entire audience of worms to rise thrilled from their burrows. The effectiveness of any given stob varies, too, with the firmness and wetness of the soil. For all these reasons McCranie likes to have a wide selection. He took up a flashlight, a bait can, and his iron. On finding a spot he liked, McCranie drove the first stob in and then knocked in the second alongside it.