CHEROKEE MYSTERIES: Oakman Writers Trilogy Set in Bankhead Wilderness

By Dale Short Some of Wheeler Pounds best memories of his time at Cordova High School are of its library: The library was kind of under the stairs, there, he recalls, and I was always a serious reader. I probably read every book they had. Each one would take you on a different journey. I was raised out in the sticks and we didnt have much, and stories could take you to places youd never have seen, otherwise. But after college, Pounds found himself in a job that required a very different type of reading. In the process he would see hundreds of real-life stories that rarely had happy endings. Beginning in the 1960s he worked 33 years for the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, and his courthouse office was a figurative window on the darker side of human nature. The rewarding part is the people I still run into today, who bring me up to date on how their families are doing, he says. And some of them tell me they appreciate what I did to help them get their lives back on the right track. The disturbing part is seeing so many others names in the obituaries,

from bad choices theyve made. Everything from cirrhosis of the liver to drug overdoses, car accidents, shootings. It completely runs the gamut. When you go into a job like that, you know youre not going to change the world. But you hope you can make some difference, and that society will be somewhat better for it. Once Pounds retired, he was free to pursue his favorite pastimes: reading Alabama history, and taking long hikes to explore some off-thebeaten-path areas of the nearby Bankhead National Forest. And it was the combination of those two activities that has led his path full circle to literary concerns again: hes written two historical mystery novels set in the forest, and is halfway through the third part of the trilogy. The first volume is The Garden of Eve: Mystery of the Cherokee Hideaway, and the second is The Cellar Vault: Secret of the Cherokee Hideaway. Both are available online from Amazon. He originally envisioned the books as being set in the Smokies, he says, but the more time he spent in Bankhead, the more possibilities he saw there. And his own Cherokee ancestryhes a member of the Alabama Echota Tribe--became the impetus for several of the story threads. In one, a couple by the name of Eve and Fox are hiding out in the canyon to avoid capture by federal troops during the forced migration of the Trail of Tears. At another point, a family discovers a journal kept by a Cherokee woman during her journey on the trail. Pounds also credits some Alabama authors for helping him navigate the deep woods, especially the Sipsey Canyon, without mishap. Jim Manascos guide book Walking Sipsey is a particular favorite, and Pounds has his novels hero, Raleigh Walker, reading from the Manasco book in the opening chapter of The Garden of Eve: The vista will quiet an appetite for natural beauty, but from the little falls on downstream, its a different story, Manasco writes. Take heed; there are no trails in this canyon, and it is no place for the tenderfoot. The bluffs are high, and the ledges are slick and narrow. It is dangerousone slip and youve had it. But as it turns out, that part is the GOOD news. The paragraph that follows is the clincher: To bushwhack this type of terrain, you have to watch every step and never drop your guard. Old-timers shunned this part of the area. The rocky crags and the thickets are the home of numerous canebrake rattlesnakes, some of record size. In keeping with the theme, a sizeable rattlesnake occupies the lower left corner of the cover illustration for The Garden of Eve.

Feedback from readers on the snake portions of the story has fallen pretty clearly along gender lines, Pounds says: Some men have told me that Raleighs backpacking adventure is their favorite part, but several ladies comments are along the lines of, I enjoyed the book once we got out of the rattlesnakes; I just cant stand snakes. The two most frequent questions he gets from readers are (a) how he came to find the Trail of Tears journal quoted in the book, and (b) the specific location of the hidden cove where Eve and Fox hide out from the troops. People actually want directions, Pounds says, and I have to tell them its all a work of fiction. The journal is imaginary, and so is the cove. There are several places in the forest with rock shelters similar to it, but the storys not set in any specific one. I also had a gentleman tell me he had been to the location in the book where the characters Raleigh and Jenny are married, a resort area in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia, and how pretty it was. I thought I had made the location up. Pounds writing desk faces a picture window that appears to look out on a wilderness as deep as the one he writes about. In reality, with the leaves starting to fall in Oakman, Highway 69 is clearly visible from the back deck. But in other respects the room gives the illusion of a remote aerie especially with the odor of cooking spices in the air, and an old woodburning stove in the corner. Pounds scrolls down through the Word document currently on his laptop and clicks on the word count feature. Right now, he says, Ive got 53,242 words, which is 122 pages. So Ive got a ways to go. The third volume, he says, moves ahead from the 1830s Trail of Tears events to the beginning of the Civil War, and focuses on a family of Tories who are against the South entering the war, and the intersection of their lives with some Union Army spies. One of the most encouraging comments hes gotten on the first two Cherokee Hideaway volumes, he says, was from a reader who wrote, I enjoyed the books, even though I have a dislike for history. And last week, Pounds checked his Amazon account and found that he had sold his first copy of the book in the United Kingdom. Its amazing to me how small the world has become, he says, and how these communications and exchanges can be done in an instant. Its like a mysteryit makes me wonder whatll happen next. # # #

(Dale Short's e-mail address is dale.short@gmail.com)