Saving an Innocent Man

by Robert E B Wright

  "...fifty-two, fifty-three." Malcolm thought he heard something. He looked up at the lagoon. He saw nothing unusual or threatening. He lowered his head to continue counting. "Let's see, that's fifty-three, fifty-...."

  Then! In an explosion of fury, the alligator gave a tremendous slap of its tail and lunged up onto the mound behind Malcolm. The huge gator’s mouth was wide open.

  Malcolm was pinned between the gator and the lagoon.

  From the gator’s throat came a thunderous jet engine roar. Water and green slime sputtered from its teeth. Its long muscular tail whipped behind it.

  Malcolm leaped up stiffly. Looking down the cavernous death trap was paralyzing. Malcolm stepped backwards squishing the eggs. He groped for the large stick he had used to chase the raccoons. He picked it up in a flash. His face was total panic. He held the stick between himself and the gator. He wound up and batted hard at the gator's head, but he wasn't close enough to hit it. The big stick swung around the left side of Malcolm's neck like a golf club. Malcolm swung back the other way and hit the creature solidly on the nose, but just as it hit, Malcolm lost his footing and the stick flipped end-over-end into the middle of the lagoon. Just after the stick splashed into the water, the gator hissed loudly. Now the gator was even more determined to rip him to shreds.

  The enormous reptile never stopped moving, although getting all five hundred pounds up onto the mound gave Malcolm the second or two that he needed to move his legs.

  Now the gator came at Malcolm for the kill, head twisting and moving side-to-side to grab his legs. Malcolm had no choice in the world except to dive into the water.

  Malcolm never swam better in his life. The water boiled with his straining effort to escape an unbelievably horrible death. The huge gator, standing on its four short legs at the top of the mound paused for an instant, as if exalting itself as the sinister ruler of this primeval place. From its battlement it seemed to relish the fact that it was about to administer the coup de grace to the large struggling mammal in the water.

  It slid off the mound without a splash.

  Malcolm's eyes, wide open in the churning, splashing water, were wild with terror. The opposite side of the lagoon seemed to recede farther and farther away with each clumsy stroke of his heavy arms. Malcolm was yelling, bellowing in heart-stopping fear.

  Seen from the black silence below him, Malcolm's body was that of a panic-stricken polar bear trying to escape an unavoidable attack from a killer whale. Sunlight filtered down through a haze of protozoa. Tendrils hung eerily from the floating plants.

  Malcolm was gasping through the bubbling, sloshing water. His strenuous kicking and stroking had taken him to the middle of the lagoon. He had lifted his heavy arms through the water more times than he could count. He was wearing out fast. His efforts became labored as his struggling increased. Left, right, left…

  The lagoon was silent except for his splashing. Left, right, left. The stick he had used to defend himself against the gator was floating before him. He grabbed it with his left hand. As Malcolm raised his right arm to stroke through the water, a gaping mouth that looked bigger than his body rose up in front of him. The white dagger teeth stabbed past Malcolm's face in a blur as he jerked his head away. The alligator's immense jaws slammed shut over Malcolm's fat forearm. It was impossible to jerk his arm free from the hellish hydraulic press locked onto him. The foaming, roiling water looked almost like steam. A fine vaporous spray snorted from the gator's dragon-like nostrils. The gator's immense tail slapped the surface with an ear-splitting crack. Malcolm let out a hair-raising scream, horror stricken.

  As the gator submerged, large whirling eddies formed on the surface. It looked like a toilet bowl had just been flushed. Malcolm was going down. His chilling scream turned to gurgling bubbles as he disappeared in the swill. The last thing on the surface was Malcolm's left hand, holding the club.

  The silhouette of the gator against the bright surface was remarkably sleek. It held its legs close to its body as its serpentine tail propelled it to the bottom with its prey.

  Malcolm's body was that of a fish on land. He was flopping around tugging to free himself, willing to lose his arm to save his life.

  Even with Malcolm's massive size and weight, his struggling was futile. He went to the bottom, towed by the prehistoric beast.

  One of the gator's teeth had pierced Malcolm's forearm clear through, right next to the bone. Some other teeth had penetrated the skin but had not sunk too deeply into his flesh. None of the teeth severed any major blood vessels. It was fortunate for Malcolm that his arm was locked in the gator's mouth more than halfway back along the reptile's long jaw line. Here, the teeth were blunter and further apart. The fact that this was a particularly large alligator meant that there was proportionately more space between the huge teeth at the back of the mouth, and Malcolm's fat arm needed as much room as it could get. So far, the bone had not shattered. Malcolm probably would not bleed to death before he drowned.

  On the bottom, Malcolm yanked and strained to get free. He felt no pain at all. He was numb with shock.

  Malcolm's struggling slowed. And then, he hardly moved at all.

  The gator just waited for the inevitable.

  Five minutes passed. Perhaps ten.

  A school of small fish swam by in front of them.

  • • •

  The six fish changed direction suddenly, as if all of the same mind. They swam, alarmed, straight toward a stream of quickly rising silver bubbles. The Neon Tetras diverted. A human hand descended in front of the noisy bubbles and pulled a small clump of green plants from the gravel bottom of the twenty-gallon aquarium.

  "Bill Zebhardt?" a voice questioned.

  The bearded man in the short-sleeve shirt pulled his hand out of the fish tank. "You found him. What can I do for you?"

  "Detective Diaz. Miami Police Department." He flashed his badge.

  "Listen, I'm innocent. And I can prove it," he wiped his hands on a towel, "I took pictures of the street and the sign not ten feet from where I parked and..."

  "Hold it, hold it, wait a second. If you're talking about a parking ticket, you got the wrong judge. I'm not here about a parking ticket, Mr. Zebhardt."

  "Oh. Well, in that case call me Bill."

  "How do you do, Bill? Armando." They shook hands in the middle of a room filled with aquariums and small cages containing all kinds of animals.

  "I do just fine, except for a parking ticket that I don't deserve."

  "Well, I can't help you with that, but maybe you can help us with a case we're working on."

  "I'm happy to help all I can. But how can the Director of the Miami Zoo help the police? Pet gorilla escape or something?"

  "Well, yes, something like that,” Diaz said with a chuckle. “We're looking for a man, a drug runner, who survived a plane crash and escaped into the Everglades."

  "Oh, sure. I remember reading something about that."

  "We'd like to know what's out there, animals I mean, that could get in his way of surviving. What are his chances of making it out of there alive? Making it back to civilization?"

  "Depends a great deal on where he crashed."

  "Oh, of course." Diaz pulled a map from the pocket of his guayabera. "Right about here."

  "God! Impossible!"

  "Impossible?"

  "Well, I mean, from what I know about that area, it's impossible. Nearly impossible. You'd have to talk to an expert familiar, very familiar, with that area to get a real good opinion on that."

  "Like who?"

  "Like an Indian."

  "An Indian?"

  "Yeah, a Seminole Indian, an old one, might have some knowledge of what it's like to get through the terrain out there. It’s one thing looking at it from the air, but what it's really like is another question. But I can tell you about the animals he's likely to run into there and in the rest of the Glades."

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  "OK, let's start right where you’re
standing. Take a look in the cage you've got your hand on. Pygmy rattlesnake." Diaz jerked his hand away. "He won't run into this one or the other three poisonous snakes in Florida until he gets farther away from the salty water. But as he gets more and more into the drier areas, he'll run into a lot of them."

  "Can they kill a man? A big man?"

  "The pygmy, probably not. It would make him awful sick though. Now the diamondback rattler..." they went to the next large glass cage, "gets to be eight feet. It could easily kill you and me both. This one is a small one. Would kill just one of us." Zebhardt smiled and moved to a small cage. "This little red, yellow and black beauty is the most-deadly poisonous snake down here. The coral snake. Drop-for-drop as deadly as the cobra. And it only grows to a maximum of eighteen inches. Doesn't even have fangs. Has grooved teeth. He has to chew on you a little bit to get the venom in." The snake looked up at Diaz. “What about the reports I’ve seen on TV about those eighteen-foot pythons taking over in the Glades?” Diaz questioned.

  “Like this one?” They walked over to a large cage against the wall. Inside was a huge beige and brown python curled up in a ball.

  “She’s sixteen feet and still growing.”

  “Poisonous?”

  “No, non-poisonous. Kills by constriction. They tighten their bodies around you forcing out all the air until you suffocate. Then they eat you.”

  “They can eat a man?”

  “In one big gulp. Although it might take a while.”

  Diaz folded his arms across his chest.

  “They’re out there for sure and expanding their range every day. They used to be found closer to Miami, but they’ve been spotted recently as far west as Naples and as far north as Jacksonville.”

  Diaz took a real good look at the huge snake in the cage.

  "Then there's the cottonmouth moccasin. Aggressive. Deadly. Even when the victim survives, the bite usually always turns gangrenous and results in amputation of a limb. We don't have any specimens here at the zoo."

  "I can't say I'm disappointed, Bill."

  "But there are lots of them out there in the Glades. Then there's an enormous assortment of spiders, scorpions, poisonous toads and caterpillars, that sort of thing."

  "Not enough to kill him?"

  "Oh, they could, sure. Just because they're small doesn't mean they couldn't kill him. Bees may be the deadliest things he runs into. Bees are responsible for more deaths in America than any other animal. It all depends on his reaction to specific toxins. We all have different tolerances depending on our size, muscle-to-fat ratio, blood pressure, where on the body he's bitten, allergic sensitivities, things like that. But generally speaking, the bigger he is, the better his chances of surviving any of the poisonous bites from smaller animals. Large diamondback or cottonmouth, without treatment, he's probably a dead man."

  "The reports that I've heard say he is big. Huge, in fact. We think the reports are exaggerated though."

  "Well, even if he does survive a poisonous snake bite, just for argument’s sake, there are some other things that he would not survive, no way, if he runs into them." Zebhardt pointed to a glass door with sunlight shining through it. "Come on, I'll show you."

  The canvas-topped, zebra-striped golf cart purred its way along the winding asphalt walks of the beautiful zoo. It threaded its way through curious visitors. It slid past elaborate cage-less landscapes displaying rare white tigers, mountain gorillas and African elephants. Then they stopped, but neither got off the electric cart.

  "Here's one. The Black Bear. There are more of them out there than people realize. The Indians shoot them now and then even though they're not supposed to. They claim they raid their reservations. If the bear has a chance to run, it will unless it's old, diseased or starving. Those claws are like knives. If it decides to attack, I don't care how big a man is, the bear would win."

  Diaz just looked and listened. They pulled away.

  The cart hummed past a prairie of giraffes and hillocks of camels. It stopped in front of a man-made outcropping of white rocks and thick fauna surrounded by a moat.

  "You see it?" Zebhardt was pointing. "There, resting under the small cabbage palm."

  "Oh, yeah."

  "That's one of the few Florida panthers in captivity. Look, there's her mate." Another panther came from behind the rocks and sauntered in front of the panting female.

  "Animal census takers say there are only about two hundred left in the world. Including these two. I think there has to be more than that."

  "It looks just like a mountain lion!"

  "For all intents and purposes, it is a mountain lion. Without mountains. It's only found here in Florida. In fact, mostly in the area where this escaped drug runner will walk through, if he makes it out of there. Very few panthers are ever seen by man. Hence, it's considered one of the rarest animals on earth. I just think it's an incredibly smart, alert animal. A skilled hunter with a wide range. It's very fast. It can easily kill a deer. Or a man. Its front claws pull the prey down, its large teeth bite behind or under the neck and the rear claws rip the prey open. It's all over in seconds. Of course, with small prey one chomp and it's over. And it's so adept at stalking, so quiet, the victims never know what hit them."

  "Oh, that's a comforting thought."

  The cart lurched forward.

  They drove past a herd of antelope. Then a pair of half-submerged hippopotamuses. The cart stopped in front of a chain-link fence with nothing beyond it.

  "We've got to get out for this one. If anything nails him, one of these will." Zebhardt said.

  They looked down into the concrete pool of a dozen alligators. "The American alligator. Years ago hide hunters decimated huge numbers of gators. Today, the alligator is protected and they've multiplied into a large population. In fact, some parts of the Glades are infested with them. The Fish and Game Commission allows controlled hunts now and then to keep the numbers manageable."

  "How big do they get, Bill?"

  "You see that big one over there with his head toward the water?"

  "Uh huh."

  "That one is about twelve feet long and about three hundred and fifty pounds."

  "That's about twice as long as I am and about twice my weight." Diaz said.

  "Right. And that's not the biggest they can get. The record set back in the eighteen-hundreds was nineteen feet. Nowadays, fourteen feet and just over four hundred pounds is about the limit. But there's no telling how big they can really get, especially since they became a protected species. If the poachers don't get to a big one, it could get even bigger than the old record."

  "What do they eat?"

  "Everything and anything. The supply of raccoons, 'possums, birds, snakes and turtles is probably endless, and this time of the year they eat constantly. In the fall and winter, they don't eat much at all. If a gator's hungry, or protecting its nest, it'll attack anything, including a Sherman tank. The bigger ones take deer, bear, pet dogs, even full grown cattle. There is an authenticated report of a ten-footer swallowing three pigs one after the other."

  "They just swallow what they kill?"

  "Yeah, they don't know how to chew. There are recent cases of them taking children and teenagers right here in Florida. They'll even take adults."

  "People who are swimming where they shouldn't be?"

  "Or walking. Alligators, contrary to the way they look most of the time, are fairly fast on land. They get up on their stumpy little legs, like that one over there, and they can run like hell for short distances. As fast as a man. In the water, they're very fast, as you might imagine. Like torpedoes. Silent and deadly. And when they hit their prey, the water explodes. If it's a small animal, they just give a big chomp and six thousand pounds per-square-inch of jaw pressure squishes the life out of the victim. On larger prey, they'll grab hold of a paw, an arm or leg, whatever, and then start twisting and rolling their bodies, ripping off whatever pieces they can.

  If the prey is especially large, like a man for
example, the gator would simply grab hold of an arm or leg and drag it to the bottom to drown it. They do that with deer all the time. Then they wait on the bottom until the victim has expired."

  "They can tell when it dies, huh?"

  "Sure. They watch him, and when the prey stops struggling, that's it. They wait maybe twenty minutes. Even longer if the gator is old and a lot of its teeth are worn down. Then they let go of the prey to see if it moves. Then they have dinner."

  Although neither Diaz or Zebhardt knew it, this is exactly what was happening to Malcolm as they spoke. How ironic it was that this conversation was taking place at this point in time, as Malcolm lay on the bottom of a dark lagoon with his arm clamped in the mouth of a huge alligator. An alligator that was waiting for him to drown before ripping off parts of his body to eat.

  "But doesn't an alligator breathe air? I mean, how does it stay down for twenty minutes or more?" Diaz asked.

  "Metabolism. The alligator has a unique natural ability to slow its body down so it needs less oxygen."

  As Zebhardt spoke with Diaz, the big gator holding Malcolm to the bottom lay as still as stone. From the tip of its nose, along the length of its dinosaur-like armor plated body, to the tip of its tail, nothing moved.

  Malcolm didn't move either. Both were locked in a freeze-frame. Both with eyes wide open. Each one looking at the other for more than twenty-five minutes.

  "It can slow its heart beat down so slow that it barely sustains life. The same thing bears do in hibernation. But the gators can do it at will. It shuts off blood to non-essential parts of its body, with only its tiny brain, heart and lungs using small amounts of energy."

  "That's amazing," Diaz enthused.

  "It is. But even more amazing are the air-breathing animals that can ‘breathe’ underwater.”

  "Breathe underwater? Without gills?"

  "That's right, take a look over here."

  Zebhardt pointed to a smaller pool of water separated from the alligators.