Who would you Pledge? (Part 1)

When i was a boy, I used to go witch hunting in the woods across the road from my house. It was one of my favorite activities, witch hunting. I would go with my neighir, Ryan. Together we'd head out into the woods with a polaroid camera (mine), and two bats with nails in them(his), in search of witches hiding out there.
This all happened in the small City of Whitevale. I was a city kid, but when i was about six, my parents - worries about raising kids in the city - managed to buy a small weekend house in southern Whitevale. The house wa rustic, bult in the 1940s - more like an expanded cabin, tucked deep in the woods, on a small lake. We'd go there every weekend possible, and spend long weeks there in the summer.
Our neighbors had a boy my age, Ryan, and we became fast friends. I'd cross the woods to his house and we'd play PolyStation, DnD (Derps in Distress), We'd Trade comics...we were both geeks, imaginative kids. It was around age eleven that we statred going monster hunting in the woods.
The woods were thick and deep and we concocted all sorts of stories for ourselves about the creatures that lived out there. But, having both recently read Roals Dahl's The Witches, we were both particularly intrested in the notion of wiche sliving in the woods. Men and women who worshipped Satan! Sacrificing animals and worse, deep in the trees across the road! Other monsters fell away and we became all about witches and warlocks. they were out there and we would find them.
To be fair, these woods were pretty rich with things we could cite as witch "evidence." Once we found an old graveyard - seriously, a graveyard. We found a box of false teeth another time. And on one trip, deeper in the woods, we found an old car, a meat truck from the 1940s. From then on, the truck became our base, and we would walk outto it with lunch, and then explore the woods in various directions. we put piece of string across paths, to detect witch crossings. Any old bone was a sign of witchcraft.
One windy dat, we were hanging out by the car, eating and joking around and all of a sudden, ryan jumped to his feet. "who the hell are you?" I remember him saying, literally reaching for his bat. Terrified, I turned and looked and didn't see anything. i asked him what was the matter and he said he saw someon,e or something, peeking out from behind a tree. But the person was bgi, he said, like taller than a normal man or woman. Way taller than we'd thought a witch would be. "it was huge," he said, " just watching us."
Nervously, we explored the area but of course found nothing. The witch must  have been a tree, swaying in the wind, and we alughed about it afterwards, on the way out of the woods, how he'd nearly shit himself over nothing, what a pussy, and so on, but i think both of us walked a little faster than normal that day.

[To be Continued]