Oil and natural gas prices continue to impact drilling activity.

http://energyscout.ning.com/forum/topics/drilling-activity-hits-6year

Eric’s Website

The first day of spring occurred last week.  It also marks the vernal equinox, the day when the hours of darkness roughly equal the hours of light.  One of the biggest pagan holidays transpires during the vernal equinox and this is the situation in a chapter from Bones of Skeleton Creek, my unedited novel in progress.

       Buck McDivit, the central character in my first novel Ghost of a Chance, returns to Logan County, Oklahoma to confront cattle thieves, a black panther and a commune populated with green-minded female pagans.  Here is a short excerpt from the pagan revel that Buck unwittingly participates in during the Commune’s celebration of the spring Equinox:

       Only feathers and animal pelts clothed the mass of chanting women.  Like Buck, colorful paints decorated their faces and exposed skin.  Kristy escorted him to a small group of women, their extra feathers and adornments marking them as leaders.  The most ornate female, he quickly saw, was Lana, looking nothing like the corporate executive of their last meeting.  She didn’t speak when he stood before her, simply nodding a command for him to take a seat on a colorful serape on the ground beside her.

       Waves of frenzied dancers moved into the circle as Buck watched.  When offered, he drank from a cup passed around the circle, almost instantly feeling the intoxicating effects of the warm liquid.  The drink numbed him, but did little to prepare him for the double whammy of drugs he was about to endure.

       As the tom tom drummed and the half-naked women danced in and out of the circle, Bucks lips and eyelids also numbed.  When Lana handed him a ceremonial pipe, he took a puff without thinking, psychedelic smoke rushing straight to his brain.

       As the drumming grew louder, the dancing became ever more frenetic and sensual.  Even in his impaired state Buck realized that he was witnessing a pagan revel that had some intense meaning to the women dancing in and out of the circle lighted only by the center bonfire and the moon and stars.

       An absolutely stunning woman soon joined the other dancers.  She was tall, and had long black hair that extended to the crack of her well-turned derrierre.  She wore a breechcloth, much like Buck’s, and nothing else except paint and feathers.

       Even in his extreme state of drug-induced numbness, Buck’s mind took a double-take.  The woman was carrying a large rattlesnake.  Despite his mental condition, Buck’s eyes riveted on the gorgeous young woman, and her snake.  Like Buck, every eye in the pulsating circle of women soon focused on the nubile dancer.

       The woman stopped her gyrations directly in front of Buck and held the writhing snake high into the air.  Slowly, she lowered it, until its head resided directly in front of him.  Zoned almost totally out, he stared into the viperian eyes of the reptile as it jutted its pointed tongue a few inches from his face in the flickering fire light.

       Whatever drug that had invaded his brain had also removed any fear or anxiety about the reptile’s danger.  Like star-crossed lovers, they exchanged a kiss that would have curdled his blood, were he cognizant.  He wasn’t.

       Prompted by some primieval urge, Buck stood from the serape and waded into the circle crowded with chanting pagans.  There he danced with arms stretched to the sky, reveling in the proximity to so many half-naked females, his senses flooded by sound and the musky odor of burning wood and sweating bodies.

Eric’s Website