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EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 51 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Sumter County, Alabama. April 18, 1989.

A woman’s voice.

“Hello. Hello in there.”

I am standing, as they say in this part of the country, buck naked in the middle of the truck after taking a sink bath to relieve myself of this sticky Alabama heat.

“Hello. Hello-oo. Anybody in there?”

It is a young woman’s voice.

“Hold on,” I say, crouching behind the stove while I speak through the screen door. “I am just getting dressed.”

It is early evening, and I am glad I haven’t yet turned on the lights.

I pull on fresh shorts, T-shirt and trousers, and they wilt when they hit the sweat of my body.

I go to the door and there meet Nannette Steedley, a true flower of the South – mid-20s, a slender 5-foot-7, maybe 135 pounds, light brown hair, blue-hazel eyes, skin like peach brandy in cream.

She is quite startling in her full camouflage outfit.

“I was out in the fields doing some turkey hunting when I saw your truck parked here,” she says, standing with her weight on one boot and her hands on her hips. “I was just curious . . . nosy, I guess you’d say.”

“Well, you have found a turkey,” I say. She seems puzzled by the comment.

“Say, do you have time for me to show you something?” she says with new animation. “I want to show you the hunting club where I hang out.”

She leads me to her car, a gun-metal gray Datsun loaded with a .20-gauge Browning shotgun, cartridges of birdshot and other hunting gear, and we tool off north and west on Route 28.

Somewhere on the way to Livingston, we pull off onto a long wooded road that leads to an oversized stone-and-timber building. It is the headquarters of Southern Sportsman, a hunting club whose 312 members come from as far away as Pennsylvania to roam over 23,000 acres. That’s roughly the same area – about 36 square miles – that the king of England would grant to one of his friends to establish a town in colonial America.

Inside the lodge are stone floors, hewn wooden walls and ceilings, a huge copper hood over a huge open fireplace. Plain, rustic, but sort of corporate, too. Like some architect had been commissioned to design an office building in the woods using only available materials.

The lodge manager, a pleasant, plaid-encased man named George, takes me on a tour with Nannette. I admire one of the club’s two bunkhouses. Plain wood floors, uncluttered, but I notice that all the wooden dressers, despite natural variances in grain, are matched in their detailing right down to the same brass drawer pulls. The club also has its own trailer park, two stocked lakes, a hanging shed, a skinning shed, a cutting and processing room and a walk-in freezer 24 feet square. A regular Auschwitz for game animals.

The tour continues. She drives a short distance to her apartment, a two-room suite in a building that is a cross between a dormitory and a motel. As I walk in, the first thing I see is a hardwood tree limb. Not a potted tree but a medium-size limb, broken off at the bottom, leaning into a corner. On one of the branches, something moves.

“Oh, that’s BS,” she says, retrieving a tiny gray squirrel from the branch. She gives him a peanut, and, although hardly a month old, he tears expertly at the shell.

“I got him last month at a veterinary clinic after he fell out of a tree. He was like 10 days old, and he had his eyes all shut like a little nasty rat. I had to feed him from a bottle every two to four hours. BS stands for Baby Squirrel, and I’m Mother Squirrel.”

The peanut is part of the weaning process. The limb is vocational training for BS before he goes back into the wild.

Nannette, too, is at home in the wild:

“It is sacred holy ground,” she says. “I feel like I’m more in God’s house when I’m out in the woods than when I’m in church. The church has its doctrine, but I have my beliefs. Being outside in nature, seeing how things stay in balance, you know there’s a God out there, and it all works.”

The new South. A synthesis of the good old boys and the new-age woman.

– Sid Leavitt