Last week I spent a little time on these pages trying to help newly arriving Northern Yankee persons deal with a few things common to the South in the springtime. Helping such ignorant folks always gives me a good feeling inside and it made me feel so good last week thought I'd try it again this week.

So here are a few more helpful instructions to Yankees and other uneducated people.

In today's lesson, we begin with love in the woods. Love runs rampant in the woods in the springtime when it turns into a kind of lover's lane for varmints. Beasts, birds, and toads of all stripes start to crawling, flapping, and hopping all over creation, mostly in the middle of the night, and all of them are looking for a date.

The problems for us humans is since these things can't go trolling at the mall, or a joint, and God forbid can't go online and find some other creature in a chat room, what they do most of the time is go out in woods and scream. Now since all of these suburbs most of us now live in are surrounded by a least a little bit of woods, these animals going bump in the night can be rather disconcerting to the uninformed.

This past Sunday I, myself, southern outdoorsman that I am, was rather quite rattled by a woodland creature whilst sitting by the campfire at my redneck encampment at the edge of the woods. It was at just about midnight and I had gotten so comfortable that I had almost fallen asleep, when all of a sudden the large barred owl who had slipped up in a tree behind me let go with the loudest blast of hoot-hoot-hooting you've ever heard in all your life. Directly, two more owls on the other side of the yard joined in and hooted back.

These three romantically challenged scoundrels almost caused me to do something awful in the Rubbermaid chair I was sitting in.

And frogs go at it all night long, too. You' d think nine million frogs live in the creek behind my house by all the screaming and hollering they are doing right now. For ignorant uncultured folk the toads are mostly only a noisy pest that keeps them awake at night. For the rest us they are music to our ears.

The most frightening of the animals aroused by far is one we don't see too much anymore, but it's screams of romance can even scare the tarnasion out of most southerners. This thing has caused all sorts of problems over the years, and I distinctly remember on occasion when it did.

It happened almost 17 years ago when I was a young patrolman with the Mecklenburg County Police. I was assigned to patrol a rural portion of Mecklenburg County (there were rural parts of Mecklenburg County in those days) and I got an emergency 911 call at about 1:30 in the morning. The dispatcher said I was to meet a man who was hearing a woman screaming in the woods behind his house.

When I got to the man's home, I found him to be so terror stricken at what he was hearing that he was white as a ghost. The poor man said to me in a trembling voice, "Officer, you have got to hurry. Some woman is down there in those woods and she needs help bad. Every few minutes she'll let out a scream that'll send chills up and down your spine."

I listened for a few minutes and then I heard it too. It came from deep in the woods and that Yankee was right, that shriek would've raised hair on a bald headed man. It was undoubtedly the most ungodly scream I've ever heard and that Yankee hollered out, "That's it officer! Hurry and find that woman and help her quick before she dies!"

"Hold on there pardner," I said, "just calm down. It'll be all right. That ain't no woman screaming at all."

The poor bewildered man just stared at me in utter disbelief and said, "Well, what in the world is it then?"

"It's a bobcat."

"What's wrong with it?"

"It's in love".

I think that Yankee thought I was greening him, but I'll guarantee you that thing's screaming took ten years off the man's life. Love in the forest can be a terribly frightening experience.

Y'all stay tuned for next week's southern lesson entitled, "Possums and the Women Who Wear Them."

(W. S. "Bill" Melton is a Southern humorist, writer, motivational speaker and good ol' boy. He lives at Mt. Holly.)