“Let’s have a look,” I called. “This isn’t the place, but we’re close. I’ve got my bearings now.”
“Do we need water?”
“We won’t be that long, but you might want bug spray.”
Already, the silence of lapping water thrummed with the drone of mosquitoes. I wore sleeves, gloves, and long pants. From a Ziploc bag I removed a jacket made of DEET-impregnated netting and pulled it on. Roberta appeared. She was using one hand to swat and carrying a can of Deep Woods OFF! in the other.
“How in the world did people survive in places like this?”
I replied, “A lot didn’t. The name isn’t on most charts, but I think this is Faka Union Island. People used to farm here.”
“Any citrus?” She swatted, and stomped her feet. “Hey—do you mind spraying my back? But don’t get any on my skin—that’s important. I’ll tell you why later.”
I took the can and used it carefully. I didn’t remember seeing orange trees here, but I had remembered something else. “I’m glad you kept your maiden name—it would have been harder to find you. But I’m curious. The Daniels side of your family—where are they from?”
When she replied “Pennsylvania,” I was disappointed, at first, then mildly relieved. I hacked through the brush and found a narrow path, which was a rarity on these backcountry islands. “It crossed my mind this might be upsetting,” I said when I’d found what I was looking for. “The Daniels family has been on these islands forever.”
Before us, a cluster of tombstones peeked out from an intrusion of cactus and vines. Not stones, really, but thin tablets of cement that had been inscribed with a stick, or a knife, when the cement was fresh. After a few swipes of the machete, I stepped back.
Roberta was drawn to a tiny yellow charm—a canary—embedded in the smallest stone.
JAMES P. DANIELS JR
1911–1913
R. I. P.
“He was only two years old,” she said. “How sad for a child to die in a place like this.” She touched a meditative finger to the canary charm, then stood and looked around, puzzled by something. “Hannah . . . what is that noise?”
The wind moving through bushes, I’d assumed. I tilted my head and focused. Drag the weight of a fire hose slowly, slowly over an expanse of dead leaves, and the sound would be similar. More disconcerting, the activity originated from two . . . possibly, three directions.
“Whatever it is, it’s close,” I said.
“This isn’t where you expected to find oranges, is it?”
I continued trying to ferret out what the noise might be until Roberta pulled my arm to turn me. “Come on. Let’s get out of here—I don’t like the vibe of this place.”
When we were safely buckled into the plane, wearing headphones and voice-activated microphones, we laughed about how spooked we were.
“Like a couple of kids! I was damn near running by the time I saw the water—and me, in my condition.”
“Probably raccoons,” I said. “The sick ones, they can be weird; slow, like zombies—” I stopped. “What do you mean, ‘my condition’?”
“Tell you later.” Roberta was using the throttle to taxi us away while she perused the gauges.
I remembered her saying No bug spray on my skin and knew what her condition was. It all fit with her concerns about saving money. “Let’s head back to Immokalee,” I suggested, for that’s where the plane was hangared—a little airport east of town used mostly by the crop dusters that lined the tarmac.
“Not already. We’ve already paid, and there’s a four-hour minimum. I thought you said you had your bearings?”
I did. Even from where I sat, I could look through the windshield and triangulate the landmarks my uncle had used to find that secret place long ago. The markers didn’t appear on charts, or in GPS software. It might take a full day to find the exact spot, but I knew I could get us close.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Some of the details are coming back to me. The bottom there is probably all muck. No telling how deep. Climbing off a boat is one thing; but we can’t get that close. We’d have to wade ashore. Who knows how many tries it will take us to find that tree. Or trees. I can’t remember if there was more than one.”
“How far?”
“From here? Four, maybe five miles. But now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure the spot is too narrow to land a plane. Why not just fly around; do a search from the air, then come back later in my boat?”
“We’re already here,” Roberta said in a determined way. “When we’re airborne, tell me which way to turn.”
• • •
Forking into Buttonwood Bay, miles east of Marco, are three tidal rivers that are navigable by small boat, and a fourth river that is not—unless you travel with a man who loves bushwhacking.
That’s what I’d remembered as I hiked around Faka Union Island. In the plane, I confirmed my recollections with a chart. Mangroves had sealed the mouth of the fourth river centuries ago—possibly, eons ago—so the average boater couldn’t get in. That’s why, as a child, the spot had stuck in memory as a narrow bay.
It was my Uncle Jake’s favorite place for catching what he called bronze snook. Bronze because a lifetime of feeding in tannin-red water had colored their skin that way.
Jake, like many fishermen, was irrationally territorial, and devious, when it came to protecting a good spot. I don’t know how he discovered the remains of a feeder creek that twisted into the river, but he did. He’d returned with a ripsaw and clippers and pruned his way in, foot by foot, pulling me and a skiff behind. His masterstroke was leaving a curtain of mangroves untouched so no one would notice the tunnel he’d cut nor suspect it led to a pristine stretch of water.
“I bet God hasn’t been here in a thousand years,” Jake had said when we finally broke free into sunlight.
That’s the way I remembered the place: no human spoor; palm hammocks and black mangroves a hundred feet high that shaded basins of clear water; rivulets that dropped off, black and deep, near the bank.
“See that tall stretch of trees?” I said into the microphone. “Head for that.”
We flew low over the water and turned back. When we did, I spotted a twisting scar in the mangroves. The passage my uncle had cut still existed but was visible only from the air.
“This is it,” I said. “See those pods of gumbo-limbo trees? That means high ground, probably shell mounds.”
“Which one?”
There were several pods of gumbos along a series of watery switchbacks.
“I don’t know, but we picked oranges on one of those mounds. All I remember is how thick the brush was hiking in—you couldn’t see the sky for all the thorns and vines. And the birdlife—birds everywhere. There seemed to be egret or ibis nests in every tree. I would’ve never found this by boat. Even if I had, we’d have had to cut our way in. A canoe is what you’d need.”
Roberta replied, “When I’m wrong, I admit it. I didn’t think we had a chance in Hades of finding— Hang on . . .” She looked at home wearing earphones, one hand on the yoke while she paused to punch buttons on the GPS. “I’m saving these numbers for when we come back,” she explained.
I assumed she meant there wasn’t room enough to land, which was a relief. “I told you it was a narrow stretch of water. How much muck, that’s the big question. I’ve heard of places, you sink to the waist. People can’t free their legs because of the suction, so they—”
“There’s plenty of room to land,” she cut in, her focus back on flying the plane. “What I meant was, you were right. There’s nothing around here but swamp and saltwater for miles in every direction. If the Spaniards planted citrus, there might be clones—and there’s not much chance they’ve cross-pollinated with modern trees. Wouldn’t that be cool?”
We landed.
• • •
The first spot we tried was deceptively easy. Roberta stayed with the plane. I slogged in alone, thinking it was the fastest way to check an area where several shell hillocks dotted the mangroves. Muck was ankle-deep for twenty yards before I hacked my way inland for a quick look.
“This might take a while,” I said when I got back. I climbed onto a pontoon and sat for a moment, breathing heavily. “The hardest part isn’t getting through the mangroves; it’s cutting through to high ground. First there’s a wall of catbriers, and there’re so many strangler figs—those prop roots they drop? It was like squeezing through bars. And mosquitoes—my lord, they’re worse than the last place.”
“No signal,” Roberta said, looking at her iPhone. “Why am I not surprised?” She placed it on the dash and looked past me through the open door. “I don’t see any bird nests. In fact . . . I don’t see any birds. You said there were ibis and egret nests everywhere. I wonder what happened?”
Odd . . . I had noticed the same thing, but only as awareness that something—I wasn’t sure what—was wrong about this place. No birds. No raccoon scat, or even gopher tortoise holes, had I seen. Their presence would have been dismissed as commonplace. Their absence, however, had registered in my subconscious as shadow knowledge—a potential warning.
A tendril of breeze furrowed the water’s surface. The rented plane swung a few degrees in search of air.
“You’re okay standing on the pontoon,” Roberta said when I was holding on to a strut, then yelled, “Clear!” and she started the engine.
The next low rise was around a serpentine bend. Our prop kicked spray; pontoons flooded a wake ahead of us. Among the flotsam we pushed to the bank was proof that feral citrus grew here. I’m not sure who saw it first, but we both yelled, “There’s an orange!” at the exact same instant, so precisely in synch that we were laughing when Roberta killed the engine. All the while, we stared with affection at that solitary piece of fruit. It bobbed along beside us, just out of reach, then disappeared beneath a wall of leafy green.
“Now all we have to do is find the tree,” I said.
I set a small anchor while Roberta did another search through her bags, her movements quicker because she was excited. “Wish to heck I’d brought that machete. Oh well, doesn’t matter. I’m going in this time. I don’t care how thick it is—I can’t let you get all the credit when we win the Nobel Prize. What do you think it’ll feel like to be rich?”
Here, in this remote place, money didn’t matter. The missing machete did. I had no idea how much—or, perhaps, I sensed the importance, but, again, in the back of my mind. It was a niggling awareness of danger that was signaled not by the presence of wild creatures but by their absence, and by the encroaching gloom of shadows and black water.
I said, “Why don’t you stay with the plane—just until I’m sure it’s okay.”
Roberta’s head reappeared above the seat. “What do you mean, ‘okay’? Did you see something?”
Not one living thing had I seen. “Could be gators around,” I said. “That’s all I meant. We don’t want to both be halfway to shore if a gator surfaces.”
“In saltwater?”
“Sometimes. Or a croc. There’s probably nothing to worry about, but why not be extra-careful now that”—I stopped before mentioning her pregnancy—“now that we’ve found what we’re looking for?”
She didn’t notice my near slip. “Geez, talk about a nightmare scenario. A gun is what I should have brought. Hey”—the girl who had once led show cows into an arena grinned—“are you actually worried or just trying to scare me?”
The words of my friend Birdy, the deputy sheriff, were replaying in my head: Always carry. Always, always, always . . .
Yet, I said, “A gun’s the last thing we need, flying around in an airplane.”
I slipped off the pontoon and tested the bottom before risking my full weight. It felt as springy as clay. I’d cut a walking stick at the last stop. I speared it ahead of me and took a long, sliding stride, as if skiing. In my fanny pack was a trowel for digging seedlings and a large net bag for storing oranges. In my right hand was a machete I’d taken from my uncle’s toolshed. It was old, with a leather wrist thong, the blade as long as my arm and very, very sharp. After another sliding step, I became more confident. I’d feared the springy bottom was a false crust, but it seemed okay.
“I’ll bring water and the bug juice,” Roberta hollered. “I’ve got that little camp shovel, too, and some other stuff we might need.”
I glanced back and saw that she was already in the water, hip-deep, with the plane floating high on its pontoons behind her. The shoulder pack she was lugging looked heavy. When on foot, I prefer to travel light. Two trips can be faster than one if the terrain is rough, but, outdoors, companions must be allowed to make up their own minds.
I quickened my pace. What I’d said was true: it was unwise for us both to be in the water at the same time. A few steps later, the bottom softened and began to fall away. Rather than resume my sliding technique, I lunged toward shore, which was only a few body lengths ahead. It was a mistake. Beneath my feet, the rubbery crust broke. A step later, I sunk to my knees in a pudding of muck, the first low branches of the mangroves just out of reach.
I turned and called to Roberta, “Go back, there’s no bottom here.”
Too late. She was already bogged down because of the heavy pack on her shoulder. Nor did she have the advantage of a walking stick. I watched her struggle for balance, then she made a humorous whooping sound and fell forward with a great splash. My friend floundered for a moment—more wild splashing—and righted herself, her hair dripping and both arms black to the elbows with mud. “Next time, I’ll learn to listen to you,” she laughed.
I called, “Get rid of that pack—we’ll find it later. Are you stuck?” As I spoke, I yanked my right boot free. The effort suctioned my left leg deeper.
Roberta was having the same problem. “Geez . . . Dang it all! This is like trying to walk through glue. Do you think it would be better to crawl? You know, distribute the weight . . . Whoops!”
Again, she splashed forward, but was still in good spirits when she was upright again. She started to say, “I wish we had video of this because—” then stopped abruptly, her attention suddenly on something in the water to the right. I watched her expression go slack; her face drained ghostly pale. She attempted to speak through parted lips but couldn’t find words until instinct reverted to a child’s high-pitched wail. “Oh my god,” she screamed, “Hannah, what . . . what the hell is that?”
It was an alligator, I thought at first. No . . . the creature swimming toward her sailed too smoothly atop the water’s silver veneer. Gators ride low. This animal swam with its head up, as high and motionless as the prow of a Viking ship, while its body, fifteen feet long and as wide as my thigh, carved a curving, escalator wake.
It was a snake—a giant Burmese python. Ford, my biologist friend, had provided the name. Only twenty yards of water separated Roberta from the snake’s insect eyes and vectoring tongue.
“Dump that pack!” I hollered. “Get on your belly and crawl to the plane.”
She tried but only sank deeper. “Hannah, what should I . . . ? Shit . . . I’m stuck. Goddamn it—do something. Throw me your machete! Oh Jesus Christ, it sees me—hurry . . .”
Panic helped me bust my left leg clear of the muck. I fell forward. I wrestled my right boot free. I fell forward again on my hands and knees. Survival instinct sent me crawling toward the trees. Then Roberta screamed another sickening plea for help—help from God, this time. Not me. I spun around. The python was there. It had stopped, its eyes at eye level with my friend’s face. A flicking tongue scanned her body for heat—two beating mammalian hearts thudded within. Roberta stared back at the snake’s massive head. She was panting, frozen, and still holding that damn pack instead of the machete she needed.
A microsecond later, the snake acted. The speed of its strike didn’t register. The thunk of fangs hitting bone did. Then the length of the reptile was on her; a writhing, coiled mass that boiled the water, and silenced a squealing plea that possessed no words.
THIRTEEN
When the python struck, I yelled something, no telling what, it all happened in such a blur. I belly flopped toward Roberta, then scrambled and crawled through mud, slowing only when I was close enough to know there was no turning back.
Rational thought played no role in what I did. My friend’s screams and wild thrashing were like an electric prod. The snake was too big to coil its entire length around Roberta yet tried to by swinging its tail section like a bullwhip in search of something more to grab onto. I lunged, got an arm around the animal’s girth—and was vaulted high out of the water, then slammed down into mud. I surfaced, fearing I’d lost the machete. But, no . . . the leather thong had kept it on my wrist.
I staggered up, anchored my feet in the muck, and waited, the machete poised above my head . . . waited for the tail section to writhe past me again. My god . . . the thing was huge. As thick as a log, so I used both hands and swung as if chopping wood. The snake’s back was a diamond pattern of yellow and black scales. When cleaved by steel, the skin split like a sausage, but the blade snagged for a sickening instant in bone. I pulled the blade free and swung again and again, missing a couple of times, but often the machete bit deep. My frenzy was such that it blinded me to the python’s head. Only at the last instant did the snake’s open jaws rocket into peripheral vision—not in time to stop the thing from burying its fangs just above my left elbow.
I went down beneath a relentless, seeking weight. The mesh bug jacket I wore became a tourniquet around my wrist. The snake spun; its teeth became a fulcrum. Desperately, I pulled the jacket over my head and wiggled my body free—all but my left arm. The snake’s head was tangled in the mesh. No . . . its teeth. The python had released me for some reason but could not free itself. We were locked in a gruesome tug-of-war that I was doomed to lose until Roberta, thank god, reappeared. She grabbed my belt, screaming, “Give it to me . . . give me the machete—I’ll kill that son of a bitch.”
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