In the quiet of the morning only meat and smoke and friendship really matter.

Sleep? Hardly at all. A fire won't watch itself. A 140-pound pig won't cook on its own.

This is the world of competitive barbecue cooking, where a person's best friend is his secret spice mix, but old acquaintances are an awfully close second.

"The biggest part of it is good people and good friends," Macon's Douglas Pyron confirms, in excellent humor for a man who's been up for 18 hours and still has stretches of night and day before he can sleep.

He mans a refrigerator-sized smoker with friends, where an entire pig seems to sleep above a bed of charcoal and hickory wood. It's almost midnight Friday, but it'll be far into Saturday before this pig is picked apart and judged in full.

The Moonlight Smokers cooking team is living up to its name, or would be if the moon would make an appearance over Central City Park. Here 13 teams are working toward a common goal at the Georgia State Fair's barbecue cooking contest.

But that will be later Saturday, and Pyron's team will not taste victory. Sure, they'll go home with trophies, but the top honor is to fall to the Boggy Pond BBQ Brigade, a family team from Moultrie that's as much a part of this tight-knit group of competitors as Pyron's.

For now Pyron is tired and dirty, sweat and pork and smoke showing on his shirt. David Sherrell drinks canned beer and tells stories as Pyron gently rubs an orange mix of spices into racks of ribs. Casey Greene keeps the fire steady.

Night is turning to day and a smoky haze hangs sweetly across the sky. This is the quiet time, where contests are won or lost. Nearby Boggy Pond's head cook is all alone, watching sports network reruns fed in on a satellite dish. This, Buster Dunn says, is what he does instead of fishing.

Pyron's team competes in about half a dozen of these contests a year and has been together for six or seven years, Pyron says. That makes them near novices, considering more seasoned veterans hit upward of 30 cookoffs a year, towing tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment behind their full-size pickup trucks.

With just more than a dozen teams, this is one of the year's smaller contests and most everyone knows most everyone else. They compete in three categories: whole hog (just like it sounds, split up the belly), pork shoulders and ribs, with cash prizes going to the winner in each category, as well as a $1,000 check for the overall champion.

Good money, but not nearly enough to recoup what a team actually spends on meat and equipment.

"If you'd done it for the money," Pyron says, "you'd never do it."

Most team's hogs went on midafternoon Friday, the shoulders a few hours later. By 11 p.m. the crowd had died down and the diehards are left to man the smokers. By 2 a.m. all is calm. People speak softly, but sometimes there's a peal of laughter.

It's much cooler away from the fires and tents, and the dew has settled over well-worn grass. Some people are asleep. Others are settling in and stoking the flames.

"You just concentrate on cooking," says Scott Huggins, working the late shift for the local Exchange Club team, which has set up just next to Pyron. "Everything just sort of slows down."

By 4 a.m. more than one person has wondered what they're still doing here. By 8 in the morning the answer is clear.

The judges will be here in two hours.

Over in Pyron's camp, the grill is decorated and a Food Network camera crew has arrived, filming a segment for a festival special that will air in the spring. A boom microphone hovers over Sherrell's head as he injects some sort of brown liquid into the still-cooking pork shoulders.

By 9:30 a.m. Pyron has changed into long pants and a fresh shirt. During the next six hours he'll hobnob with the judges, adding the personal touches that translate to points in a tight competition.

The decorating crew earns its keep, setting out plates and glassware, picking up stray cigarette butts from the night before. People wear serious faces.

"It's nothing but panic now," says Pyron.

The hog is a sweet brown color - Sherrell says it's the best color the crew has ever had. Pyron pulls bacon from the center, a bit of ham from the rump and meat from the shoulder to go into the "blind box." In addition to the tent-by-tent judging, tasters will sample each team's meat without knowing who cooked it.

In other tents, the scene is similar, albeit without the added pressure of television. Pyron gets wired for sound and his friends make jokes. Something about a redneck on TV.

It's 10 a.m. and the first judge of the day has arrived.

"Alright, showtime," Pyron says, and it's as if 28 sleepless hours have fallen from his eyes as he smiles and extends his hand.

"Doug Pyron," he introduces. "Moonlight Smokers."