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Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades
by Rebecca Renner
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But what did leaving mean, really? Sometimes it felt like escape, other times, like abandonment. The Everglades and the swamps around them were more than a place to Jeff. They were part of him. Sometimes it seemed he knew them better than he knew himself. He could identify every type of grass in a glade, every species of tree, every paw print in the mud, every plaintive hoot punctuating the usual music of the night. He saw himself as doing good for the people, too. He was quick to let folks off with a warning. He preferred educating them to slapping them with fines or worse. As much as he felt a strong connection to his job at FWC, Jeff knew not everyone at the agency felt the same way. When he left, they might replace him with someone who held the law in higher regard than he held humanity. That kind of thinking didn't help anybody, and it certainly didn't stop wildlife crime.
Could he leave that life? Even if he did, would it ever leave him? For that matter, did he want it to?
Though outwardly gregarious, Jeff was a big reader and a contemplative man. Waiting for the call from dispatch, he sank into thought, brooding about the fate of this wilderness, or what remained of it, after he left. This grove was wild no more. The rows of orange trees, taller than his truck and heavy with round, ripe fruit, were so long and straight—controlled—that they shrank into the distance, met the horizon, and kept going on into the dark. The cities surrounding Tampa Bay gave a faint, sallow glow to the lower edge of the sky. Jeff listened, hoping to hear a lonesome croak or yowl.
Nothing.
There had once been a time, twenty years ago when Jeff was a game warden, when more panthers prowled up to this latitude rather than remaining in their paltry preserve just north of the Fakahatchee Strand. While on patrol, he could cruise for miles without seeing any hint of human presence except the highway, his only company the ephemeral flash of orbs on the roadside, the spooked eyes of white-tailed deer raising their timid heads before they fled past the tree line, or, if Jeff was lucky, the lumbering boulder of a black bear or a glimpse of a tawny Florida panther tail as it slunk into the scrub. Such sightings were brief and rare, even then, like the glimmer of a comet seen through a telescope, there and gone. When Jeff looked into his rearview mirror, these atavistic figures would invariably have vanished, leaving him to wonder if he had seen the creatures at all or if they had been will-o'-the-wisps, tricks that swamp gas had played on his tired eyes.
Such was the state of this disappearing wilderness, even more so now than it was then: Sightings of some animals were becoming so scant that they had risen to the level of the supernatural, the extraordinary. Jeff knew there was a time before, when the swamps and humanity had lived with each other, before swamp had become a cursed word, before developers and vacationers and miners and factory farmers pushed the things that had crawled and dug and swum and flown there since time immemorial to the margins so they could take larger bites of a place they said they loved and would ultimately destroy. But Jeff hadn't seen that time. No one alive had, not really. Only the oaks and cypresses had been there that long, and their numbers had shriveled, too.
Yet still, within his own memory, the night had once writhed with wildness, with songs and chirps and croaks and growls. That was why Jeff could recognize a bull gator's guttural bellow. He knew, too, that a panther's roar sounded almost human, close to a scream but more sharp-toothed and primal. These days, folks thought the woods were haunted if they heard such a fiendish noise out there in the dark. They had all become interlopers there, hiding along the coasts, disconnected from the shrinking wilderness just beyond their backyards, its dwindling night music fading to an echo of a vanishing chthonic past. Jeff admitted he had become one of them, living in a safe world of manicured yards and trappers capturing the wild things to keep them where they supposedly belonged.
Excerpted from Gator Country by Rebecca Renner. Copyright © 2023 by Rebecca Renner. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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