Gator Country, page 20
Then he remembered Robin’s evil eye.
* * *
They didn’t arrive in Fort Drum until 11 PM that night, nearly nineteen hours after Robert’s call plucked Jeff from sleep. What was left outside Fort Drum’s highway oasis amounted to a pioneer graveyard and a scattering of houses under the loblolly pines; it was named after a Seminole War–era battlement that had long since receded into the soil. This was the kind of place where the ground was thick with clay-red pine needles, where the quiet made you think of ghosts and a history long forgotten by all but a few. The town boasted that it was the origin of the St. Johns River, one of the most significant rivers in Florida. That made Fort Drum a kind of belowground juncture, too. Within the cavernous aquifer, living water destined for the glades intermingled with contrarian tides bent on flowing north, a little metaphor for the backwoods attitude if ever there was one.
Millions of years ago, Lake Okeechobee stretched far beyond its current boundaries up the Floridian peninsula, covering the tract that would become Fort Drum and the area that surrounds it with a vast inland sea. While traipsing through the woods here, it’s not uncommon to find remaining clues to that sea. Some in the form of animals whose species evolved in isolation upon islands in the sea, like the Florida scrub-jay, a threatened species of corvid with Caribbean-blue feathers and a knowing look in its eyes. Back underground, there lies another such uncanny artifact of Florida’s bygone past. The limestone deposits that protect the aquifer have also trapped the chalky shells of prehistoric mollusks. It’s not uncommon to stumble upon a trail made chalk white by the pulverized calcium of fossil shells, a sight unusual in the understory’s fecund decomposition, like folk magic crafted by the soil itself. This is the oldest kind of magic, where the land speaks even when no one is around to listen. The shells beneath Fort Drum became jagged while still submerged within that primordial sea: Calcite crystals swirled new skeletons around them like sculptures of shimmering finger bones. The land tells its unique story.
Jeff had spent plenty of time in that area as a game warden, but he was seeing it through new eyes on his first trip with Robert’s crew.
Their pickup truck caravan trundled along the dirt road that led into Fort Drum Wildlife Management Area, headlights throwing a sallow tunnel forward across the grassland. In the clearing before the tree line, they circled their trucks and parked. Beyond the flat patch where they stood, the world opened up into the darkest night. Without intending it, they had ventured into Jeff’s old stomping grounds. The capital of dark sky and the fragile nests of endangered birds. He paused for a moment to look out along the prairie where distant marshland pools reflected the enormity of the cosmos. The result was an optical illusion that made the heavens seem to devour the earth, flooding over its curvature like a dam broken after the rain. It was easy to lose yourself in awe. Not just here, but anywhere in nature that lets you take a breath and notice all the small wonders we usually pass by.
This was why he was here, doing this mission. Any day when things got too grungy, when the job got too hard, when it started to feel like just a job, he would have to remember moments like this. He stored it up in his mental file as a reminder: He was looking for poachers. That much was true. But in that, he was looking to prevent a tipping of the delicate balance. Unlike the story of the sparrows there, who were nearly at the brink of extinction, a place where alligators had been half a decade before, the alligators Jeff was trying to save represented a proactive approach to conservation rather than a reactive one.
There were rumors that, during those trying times for alligators, entire species of plants shifted place in the Everglades. Alligators are ecosystem engineers. But we don’t know the entire extent of their influence. If alligators ever faced extirpation or, worse, extinction, there was no telling what would happen to their habitats—and our planet—without them. Jeff’s grand-scheme purpose there was to make sure that we would never find out. So he carried this thought with him: He was saving the alligators—along with the sparrows, the panthers, the burrowing owls, the bears—and the constellation of this hopeful act stretched out from that little patch of plain and swamp into everywhere the water flowed, all the people who drank it, all the plants that sucked it up through their roots, all the oxygen that they exhaled—a little thing in the grand scheme could mean the entire world. He was saving the darkness, too, the enormity of the sky only possible because people like Jeff guarded the land from destructive human hands, keeping the channels of possibility open for the primordial wonder we feel, our smallness, our place in the universe, when we look into the stars.
He needed that stolen bit of hope sooner than he expected. They slept in their trucks. The heat of the day had hardly dissipated. It was nearly a hundred degrees out, the sleeping arrangements uncomfortable, the bugs out in their vast array, and even though Jeff always brought his Thermacell, he could still hear them out there in the dark, going hmmmm hmmmmmm, lusting for his blood. It was a rough night; a perfect way to launch egg-collecting season.
In the morning, they started about their business. By then, Robert had pulled a suspicious 180, suddenly becoming organized. Or perhaps he had been all along.
They ventured along the trails through the hardwood swamp, toting snake hooks and large plastic containers to store the eggs. Jeff had woken up on the wrong side of the driver’s seat, and he remained disgruntled and achy the rest of the day. The sheer weight of the heat didn’t help. He kept on guard for nefarious happenings, but he already knew, after a lifetime of experience, that poaching and legal hunting (or egg collecting) looked exactly the same save for two things. The first was that poachers typically did not have the correct paperwork or legitimate hunting tags. The second and more obvious difference was that legitimate hunters seldom ran when you came upon them in the woods. There’s an old Irish saying that the guilty man flees while no one makes chase.
The one thing that had stood out to him most was Robert’s organization. No matter where they went in field or swamp, Robert always carried an aluminum lockbox, the type used to keep important papers safe. The mystery of what might be inside piqued Jeff’s interest. Robert was hiding something. And you don’t hide things that aren’t incriminating. When no one was looking, Jeff made a note of it on the side of his shoe. Just BOX. He would remember.
Some of them paired off to make more efficient work of the egg hunt. Jeff went with a fellow he’d already met named Tommy. Tommy was in his thirties, perhaps. He wore baggy clothes and small oval glasses, the kind that had been in style when Jeff’s son was a teen in the early 2000s. Behind those, he wore a disdainful expression.
As they walked along the trail, carrying the plastic egg tub between them, a tense and uncompanionable silence drew taut between them as well. Jeff grew increasingly uncomfortable, so he made a joke to cut the tension. Tommy acknowledged that Jeff had spoken, but he didn’t laugh. His expression remained sour. The longer this went on, the more Tommy’s unsociable demeanor got underneath Jeff’s skin. Jeff kept cracking one-liners. He got a laugh or two out of Tommy, but he still hadn’t drawn the fellow all the way out. He told himself this was more than discomfort. He didn’t need Tommy to like him. He needed Tommy to trust him enough to divulge information. He kept pressing.
While this was going on, Jeff and Tommy continued from nest to nest. Jeff tried not to take the lead, just let things flow as they were, because if they were doing something illegal, he had to toe the line between leading the crew into crime and leading them away from it.
They located a nest from the makeshift map they’d made during the helicopter ride. It was a mound of mud and reeds nestled in a copse of water oak saplings and the sharp appendages of saw palms.
“I’m that guy who when Robert says, ‘Hey, I need that eleven-footer caught,’ I’m the one they call in to go catch him,” Tommy boasted as he sifted through the brush to reach the thatched mound of a nest.
“So you’re the brave one, huh?” Jeff asked, trying not to laugh.
“Oh yeah,” Tommy responded.
Oh, so this is who you are, Jeff thought. He was beginning to miss the terse silence. Half an hour later, Jeff had a feeling that if he was going to blow the operation, it would be on account of Tommy’s incessant pontificating, especially in contrast with his results, which were nil. They moved on to the next nest, this time with Jeff glowering silently along the trail as Tommy yakked his ear off.
Good Lord, could Tommy brag. It seemed to be his greatest talent. Worse, he was the king of one-upmanship. If you caught a fish, he caught a bigger one. If you felled five deer that season, he bagged thirty.
They eventually reached the nest. As they approached, a loud hissing noise rose above the rhythmic buzz of the katydids. Jeff paused and cocked his head. He put out his arm to block Tommy from venturing onward.
“What the hell is that?” Jeff asked.
They didn’t have much time to ponder before the answer lunged at them. An angry mother alligator darted toward Jeff, putting herself between him and her nest. Her mouth was open, emitting a vitriolic hiss. When people associated alligators with the phrase Fuck around and find out, this situation wasn’t quite what they had in mind, but it should have been. Jeff and Tommy had grown careless. They’d been too preoccupied by their conflicting personalities. It was just another day at the office. How easily they’d forgotten that, no matter the sense of normalcy Jeff’s mind painted over his surroundings, no matter how usual, how tame the swamp had grown in his thoughts, it was the wild, stubborn and unconquerable, both as a reality and as a millennia-old symbol for the forbidding nature of these remote parts of the world, despite human endeavors to bring them to hand.
Jeff and Tommy had fucked around. Now they were going to find out.
They backed off, and the alligator followed at a surprisingly quick gait, undulating her rough-hewn body back and forth, dragging a rapid S-curve across the leaf litter. She closed the gap between them. Jeff was close enough to see the flecks of green and gold reflect from within her piercing reptilian eyes. She stopped. So did they. They paused in a standoff.
While alligators don’t usually attack humans, like any animal, humans included, they will attack when they feel threatened or cornered, especially when they perceive the lives of their offspring to be in danger. Many are willing to die for their young. Will this mother alligator go so far? Jeff wondered. Is it worth the risk to find out?
Tommy must have thought so. As soon as the mother gator began her retreat, he followed. “Cover me,” he said. He levered the nest’s top thatch open with his snake hook.
“She’s already coming back!” Jeff warned, raising his voice.
“Well, swat her with something.” Finding a trove of eggs within the stinking refuge of the nest, Tommy straddled their egg box and began picking eggs out and drawing a line on each shell with a permanent marker to indicate which side had faced up. Jeff would later learn why this step is important. If you put an egg in upside down, the hatchling inside will crush its umbilical cord, and it will die.
The nest was open. Now there was no turning back. If they did, they’d waste yet another tally.
Jeff stood over Tommy, putting himself between him and that narrow clearing’s scrubby edge. Tommy worked quickly. He plucked an egg, rubbed away the caked bark and mulch, wet with hot rainwater and likely piss, and held it up to the sun. Satisfied that it was fertilized and viable, he put the egg into the box. He wasn’t at this for long when the hissing filled Jeff’s ears again.
The mother gator crashed through the brush. Before she could jump from the thicket of saw palms, Jeff swatted her on the nose with his snake hook with a dull whack. She closed her mouth and recoiled. He hadn’t hit her very hard, just enough to startle her. Still, he felt bad. She was defending her babies, after all. He certainly would have squared off against some fucker who was messing with his kid. Sorry, gal, he thought. That’s the food chain for you. Him being there would be better for her—and her future hatchlings—in the long run. Or so he hoped.
He hated having to sacrifice a few animals for the benefit of others, but that’s often what conservation comes down to these days. Whether you are hunting animals from an invasive species that have cast their adopted environment into disarray—such as the Burmese python in the Everglades or the lionfish that had spread from a likely introduction point in South Florida up and down the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the Western Hemisphere—modern conservation is constantly faced with ecological trolley problems: sacrifice the few to save the many. Populations of species that have gotten out of hand, even endemic ones, threaten to destroy their habitats and decimate the other species around them, whether they are predator or prey.
Alligators have proven so resilient since their earlier struggles that their numbers have skyrocketed into the millions. With an excess of predators, prey species decline. It’s impossible to pinpoint just one impact from this. But theoretical dominoes line up to tip into vegetation overgrowth that spurs wildfires, invasive species supplanting native ones, or other species further down the food web either booming or withering. As human influence is usually to blame for such ecological disequilibrium, it’s up to us to set things right, or as right as we can. Humans are just as much a part of the grand scheme of ecological balance as are the alligators, or the deer, or the snakes or rabbits.
It’s tempting to say the best way for humans to save the ecosystems we’ve mucked up is to leave. Yes, many parts of the wild are better off without us. But to get really unpoetic here, you can’t un-lick that ice cream cone. You can rewild the wilderness, but you can’t make it untouched. One is conservation. The other is abdication, and it looks a lot more like abandoning a burning mess than it does leave-only-footprints conservation. Since our human species is just as much a part of this biome as everything else, we need to learn to live within it again. As Indigenous peoples all over the world will tell you, from the Sami of Finland to the Dukha of Mongolia and the Māori of New Zealand, we are in and of the Earth, not apart from it. Indigenous farmers don’t clear land, for example. They don’t graze grassland till it’s bare. The wild is not untouched but listened to. What do you need? What have we done wrong? How can we make things right?
As much as Jeff sometimes felt at odds with his mission, he knew that he was already in the thick of things—we all are. To really get something done, you have to break a few eggs, so to speak.
The mother alligator lingered, floating half-submerged in a nearby mire, watching Tommy pick through her nest, but she didn’t approach again. Jeff wondered what she was thinking, if she felt defeated.
Sorry about this, Jeff thought toward the mother alligator. It is what it is.
Meanwhile, indifferent, Tommy sorted through the nest, launching into a long diatribe-slash-explanation about alligator-egg hunting, and alligators, and hunting, and how he knew better than everyone about everything on this green Earth, and—good God. Jeff regretted ever trying to draw the man out of his shell. How could he stuff him back in?
Tommy claimed to have caught two hundred deer, not just an illegal but a horrifying number. He was one of those guys who seemed to live his life to poach and cheat the system, like the world owed him something, like he was being cheated himself, and, in lieu of an easier target, he was taking his due from nature. If he wasn’t bragging, maybe he was just lying to make Jeff feel small, lying to assert dominance. There’s a big difference between this and the river country storytelling tradition of embellishment. The former can be a bit underhanded. The latter, when listeners are accustomed to that particular storytelling device, serves for emphasis.
Having ventured too deeply into the weeds of his own lecture, Tommy paused with an egg in his hand above the tub. He furrowed his brow and looked at the egg again. He held it up to the light. The mother alligator continued to hiss but from a safe distance away. With the sun glowing through the shell like a flashlight through a finger, he ascertained the position of the embryo and marked it with a fat permanent marker, then set the egg into the tub with the rest.
13
ALONE IN THE SWAMP
They moved on to Cecil M. Webb Wildlife Management Area, inconveniently located clear across the girth of the state inland of where Punta Gorda projects into Gasparilla Sound. Once again, the crew didn’t reach the site until well after nightfall. They set up camp in an area of white sand. From there, Jeff could just make out the ghostly spindles of the pines where they shot up above the flatwoods. To the southwest, the purple of the sky faded into a yellow like a half-healed bruise. The cities lay down that way, Fort Myers and Cape Coral straddling the outlet of the Caloosahatchee River. Except for the light pollution, the night whirred with a peaceful buzz dotted with the percussion of ribbits. The distant sea breeze allayed the heat they’d felt in Fort Drum, so as they set up camp, Jeff thought of how much tonight, unlike the night before, felt like a relaxing camping trip.
With his corner of the camp set up, Jeff wandered over to the group where Tommy sat with CW, another member of the crew. They squatted around a pile of sticks and leaves and criticized one another’s bushcraft skills as they tried to start a fire. The crew’s numbers had swelled beyond ten. Robert said he anticipated that this location would prove fertile ground for alligator eggs, so they brought every soul they could muster. The guys’ wives and kids would join them the next day. It made Jeff wish he could bring his family, but he couldn’t, for numerous reasons. For one, he couldn’t blow his cover, but even if that wasn’t a factor, he didn’t want to put them in danger, not that he really thought any of these guys—no matter how annoying or rough one or two of them seemed—posed much of a threat. But getting his family tangled up in this version of his life would put them in unnecessary peril, hypothetical or not. The desire to have them there was moot, though. His superiors would certainly veto the idea. And if all that wasn’t enough, Jeff had begun to establish more characters in his backstory, including the girlfriend he claimed to be texting whenever he had to answer a message from his handlers at the agency. When the crew asked why she never came around, Jeff answered, “She’s not into this wild stuff.” Made a good cover, too, for when he needed to quickly tap out a note or snap a picture for evidence.
