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  Two smaller hawklike birds with long forked tails sailed over the canopy on the opposite shore.

  "Those have got to be swallowtail kites," Raff said. "I never saw one of those before." He added helpfully, "They eat snakes up in the trees."

  Their eyes lifted often to scan the sky and trees, but they stayed on the unspoken lookout for the Chicobee Serpent. Neither saw anything that could qualify as even a hint of it, but neither really expected the serpent to reveal itself in broad daylight on calm water. They kept hoping, just the same.

  And then, like a door flung back, the forest opened. They came to a sandy landing on which rested a small boat similar to their own. A dirt path, cleared of grass and leaves, led about a hundred feet to a small box-shaped house with a slanted galvanized metal roof. The dwelling was well kept. Although unpainted, it appeared solid, with no sign of decay. Several planks on one side were much lighter in color and probably newly installed. Three steps led to a narrow porch at the front entrance. There was a window to the side of the door that faced the river, partly covered by a shade with a drawstring, but no curtain.

  When their boat scraped bottom, the boys piled out and together pulled it partway onto the landing.

  When they turned around, there stood Frogman, scarcely ten feet away. He must have spotted them and started out the door while they were pulling the boat up.

  Frogman was an inch or two over six feet, narrow in face and body, about forty years old, weathered enough to look ten years older. His face was deeply tanned and creased at the eyes and corners of his mouth. He wore old-fashioned blue overalls with a front tool pocket and suspenders, a beige shirt buttoned at the cuffs, and a bill cap labeled FLOMATON LUMBER. He wore a short, neatly trimmed beard, and he had long hair tied behind in a ponytail. He was barefoot.

  And in his right hand was a pump-action shotgun, which he held steady and pointed at the two boys.

  He was not smiling.

  "What in hell do you want?" he shouted. He pronounced it hey-yell.

  Junior Cody, used to confrontations with his elders, lied smoothly. "Sir, we're Boy Scouts on a special trip we were told to take, and we thought we'd stop by just to pay our respects."

  Frogman stood still, expressionless, and adjusted his shotgun slightly. Then he jerked the barrel in the direction of the river. The interview was over.

  Raff had an inspiration. "Sir," he said, "you sure have a beautiful place here. They're such big trees, and there are all kinds of birds and butterflies. We saw them while we were passing by."

  Frogman stood unmoving for half a minute, then answered loudly, "Damn straight, and any sons of bitches come around here and mess up my property, I'll kill 'em."

  He fell silent again, the shotgun held steady, still pointed at the boys.

  This too was an obvious dismissal, but Junior tried yet again. "We have to get movin' along right away, but could we maybe just see Old Ben first? People say he's the biggest gator in the world, like maybe twelve feet."

  "Fourteen," Frogman shot back, lowering the shotgun a bit and speaking now in a normal voice.

  Junior had broken through. Alligator pride was the key.

  "Fourteen feet," Frogman continued. "They used to be gators bigger'n that around here, but they all got shot out. You ain't gonna see Old Ben, though. He comes out only at night. And he stays 'round here close to me. I watch over him, feed him catfish and frogs after I take they legs off."

  Frogman, it was widely known, used a headlamp to gig bullfrogs on the river at night, then took the legs the next morning to the nearest gas station and one-stop store at Potomo Landing. He walked overland, never took his boat, made enough off the sales to buy sundries. He rarely spoke, the store owners reported, and he never stayed more than a few minutes. Each time the owners and any customers were happy to see him leave.

  Frogman fell silent once again.

  Time to go, for sure. But as Junior started to leave, he turned around and pressed his luck again.

  "We know we got to leave right away, sir, but could you tell us--have you ever seen the Chicobee Serpent?"

  Frogman continued to stare at the boys, but Raff sensed that something had almost imperceptibly changed. Frogman passed his tongue once quickly over his lips as though preparing to speak. He worked his mouth around a little bit, and finally said, "Maybe I have. Maybe I haven't."

  He paused for a moment more, then unleashed a veritable oration. "I've seen somethin' big out there, always when it's gittin' dark, and heard some things too. It ain't a gator, for sure. It ain't no sturgeon either, come jumping out of the water big as a man. It might be a big old bull shark, come upriver out of the Gulf somewhere, long as a new-cut log, but I don't think so. That kinda shark don't break the surface, they come at you underwater."

  Raff knew, if Junior didn't, that bull sharks are among the few species in the world that travel up rivers, and are also among the few that sometimes attack humans.

  Frogman looked past the boys and seemed to be talking to himself. "But I seen somethin'. I heard somethin'."

  Junior and Raff were riveted. They waited for Frogman to continue, but he was done. His mouth tightened, his eyes squinted, and the ogre of the Chicobee returned.

  "Now you get the hell off my land, and if ever I see either one of you little bastards come here again I'll make you the sorriest you ever been your whole life."

  They walked backward to the landing, kowtowing, heads nodding, murmuring, "Yessir, yessir." They quickly pushed the boat free, climbed in, and pushed off.

  At the Potomo Landing, they worked the boat up onto the mud shore, walked up the grassy bank, and sat down next to the bridge abutment in the shade of a giant live oak. Raff opened his knapsack and pulled out a lunch his mother had prepared for the two: peanut butter and strawberry jam in white-bread sandwiches, apples, and Hershey's chocolate bars with almonds.

  Raff and Junior then walked past the little convenience store and gas pump on down the one-lane blacktop Potomo Road until, twenty minutes later, they reached the crossing of the old Thomasville Railroad. They proceeded south along the track, sometimes hopping from one wooden tie to the next, sometimes navigating through the dense weeds growing on the embankment. When they came to State 27 they followed it southeast into Clayville. Along the way they agreed to hike the next day to the Johnson Farm to retrieve their bicycles. Then they exchanged solemn oaths never to tell their parents about their adventure, for fear of being grounded.

  Exhausted by the long walk home but exhilarated, they arrived at Raff's house in time for supper, and Junior went on his way. At the kitchen table, over baked chicken, fried okra, and cornbread, his mother asked Raff how his day had been at the Nokobee tract.

  "It was okay," Raff said. "I just wish Junior was more interested in natural history, though. And he's scared of snakes."

  In the days following, Raff and Junior described the Chicobee adventure in detail to their friends, each puffing up his own heroic contribution. Accounts of a stolen skiff, as opposed to a borrowed skiff, were reserved for only two or three of their closest confidants.

  II

  THE CITIZEN OF NOKOBEE

  2

  IN ALL MY years at Florida State University I never met a student more devoted to nature than Raphael Semmes Cody. When he arrived there as an eighteen-year-old freshman, he was already a practiced naturalist. In spite of our generational difference in age, we became fast friends. I had known Raff, as he was usually called, almost all his life. We met at the unspoiled environment of Lake Nokobee, located in central South Alabama close to the border of the Florida Panhandle. It was a world few knew existed and fewer still could speak of with any understanding, a world that we shared and loved. I was the scientist and historian of this place, Raff the boy who in a sense grew up there. His intimacy with Nokobee provided the moral compass that was to guide his remarkable life. I was his mentor, yet in many ways he knew Nokobee far better than I or anyone else, and he cherished it the more.

&nbs
p; My name is Frederick Norville. I am a professor of ecology at Florida State University, though now emeritus. For thirty summers my wife, Alicia, and I traveled up from Tallahassee to Nokobee for relaxation and research. My scientific interest in the place was not the lake itself but the old-growth tract of longleaf pine savanna that stretched from its shore over a mile westward to the edge of the William Ziebach National Forest. Nokobee was a private reserve, one of the few in pristine condition remaining on the Gulf of Mexico coastal plain.

  It was there we met Ainesley Cody and his wife, Marcia, who came up from nearby Clayville with their little son Raphael for weekend picnics. Whenever my work and weather allowed, we sat together on folding chairs around a card table and shared sandwiches, potato chips, and MoonPies, and sipped cold beer. In time we came to know one another like family.

  It was on these occasions that Raphael, while little more than a toddler, developed a fascination for the wildlife of Nokobee. Without playmates and deprived of television and the other encumbrances--one could more sagely say freed from them--he turned to the mysteries of Nokobee's natural environment. His parents allowed him to explore freely and to bring me whatever creatures he could capture to find out what they were. They warned him to stay strictly away from the water and from snakes. That covered almost all the risks a child might take.

  Among the treasures Raphael collected were several kinds of salamanders, boldly striped, spotted, or banded; chorus frogs, whose mating calls sounded like a fingernail scraped along the teeth of a comb; metallic-blue damselflies that bobbed through the air at the sunlit water's edge like flying gems on a string; and giant lubber grasshoppers that could be tamed to sit on your hand.

  Once Raphael entered grammar school, he began to venture farther along the Nokobee Trail, and fearlessly. He brought me spiders of various kinds, small and harmless, plucked from their webs and transported in his cupped hands. Once he returned with a Nephila silk spider nearly the size of his hand, partly wrapped in the web from which it had been seized, its legs waving and fangs gnashing. He held the monster by its long abdomen between thumb and finger--aware that he should not allow the fangs to touch his skin, the same instinct that keeps the hand away from the mouth of a snarling dog. I didn't tell his parents about the incident. Perhaps that was wrong, but I was afraid they would cancel his expeditions altogether. Instead, I showed him how to scoop spiders and centipedes into glass jars without touching them at all.

  I thoroughly enjoyed teaching Raphael. He was a good kid, and he grew quickly in knowledge and enthusiasm. I cannot say, however, that he was a born naturalist. Perhaps no one really ever is. I know I wasn't. But of one thing I am certain: whatever predisposition he had to become a naturalist was richly nurtured by the wild environment of the Lake Nokobee tract. All children have a bug period, unless they are frightened or otherwise discouraged by adults. I exited my bug period to become a botanist. Raphael never left. He stayed and simply widened his attention to become an all-around naturalist, with an interest in plants and animals both, in insects and invertebrates especially, and in Nokobee as a whole.

  Because Alicia and I had no children of our own, Raff became a surrogate son to us. To our delight his parents encouraged him to call us Uncle Fred and Aunt Alicia, a gesture of exceptional friendship and trust in this part of the country. From one summer to the next, with each period between when I was away teaching at Florida State University, I watched his mind opening like the flowering of a plant seen in a time-lapse movie.

  From the beginning I also sensed a strangeness in Raphael. He had a calmness of temperament unusual for a boy. He combined it with the ability to focus intently on a single subject for long stretches of time.

  Raphael came to regard the Nokobee tract as a part of his home, and his personal space. By the time of his graduation from high school, he had become an amateur expert on scores of species in the local fauna and flora. He achieved a remarkable store of experience for someone his age. I thought that he would surely become a scientist, perhaps a great one.

  But Raphael Semmes Cody, as it turned out, was to set upon a very different course. You may say it is impossible to predict the outcome of any person's life, including even one's own. Yet it seems to me that Raphael was bound for a life of achievement at a high level, if not in science then in some other field, but either way connected to the environment. I believe that, had I more logically pieced together all I learned of the influences acting upon him, I might have guessed correctly what he was to become, and why he ended up that way. I admit that this is probably just a conceit of hindsight. In any case, what really happened is important at several levels, and I think well worth the telling.

  3

  ONE DAY, WHEN Raphael Semmes Cody was in college and we were on more nearly equal footing, he told me a story he called "The Great Turkey Shoot." Raff treated it as a mildly amusing anecdote, good enough for after-dinner conversation. Yet it had a bittersweet tone, and I could tell its effect on him ran deep. He returned to it occasionally thereafter and added bits and pieces. In time, it became clear to me that the episode was the opening of a week in his childhood that was to shape his relationship with his mother and father and, from that, affect the outcome of his entire life. A lot he told me, but I have filled in a few gaps--confidently, because I knew Raff so well.

  It began on an early Sunday morning, when Ainesley, accompanied by Raphael and his cousin Lee Jr., drove his cherry-red pickup truck out of Clayville north into Jepson County. The boys, Raphael and Lee Cody, Jr.--Scooter and Junior, to their close relatives--were ten and eleven, respectively. Junior was a husky boy on the cusp of puberty. He talked excitedly during the trip about the adventure ahead, peppering Ainesley with questions about turkey hunting. Raphael Cody, in contrast, was a wisp of a child, short for his age, and skinny. Fearful of what might await him, he kept quiet.

  A boy's first hunting trip was and remains a rite of passage in rural and small-town communities in these parts. No one can say when the practice began. It probably dates to the Stone Age. The emotions expressed are too instinctive and powerfully expressed, too tightly linked to the bonding of adult males, to be anything else. There are whoops of joy when the kill is made, slaps on the back of the shooter, punches to the arm, photographs made of the hunter's band with guns and the slain animal, cutting off and presentation of a body part as trophy to the shooter, and, finally, capering and telling hunters' war stories around the campfire that night. I know folks don't talk this way anymore, but it's how we think. Real men hunt, real men find the prey, and real men pull the trigger. Girlie and disabled men stay behind in camp and cook the meat.

  Soon after crossing the county line that morning, Ainesley turned the truck off State Highway 128 onto a weed-grown dirt road. Not on most ordinary road maps, it ran in a wavy line through three miles of pine-oak scrubland. Scattered on either side were scores of abandoned tenant farms. Most of the occupants had left nearly half a century before for better jobs opened by shipbuilding and other such changes in Southern cities during World War II. Black and white the same, they had escaped at last their exhausting indentured labor in the indifferent fields.

  Given opportunity elsewhere, these emigrants broke the debasing chains of farmland rental. They left without regret, having owned neither the land nor even the houses in which they lived. Now the roofs of the houses were crumbling and falling in, and their porches sagged to the ground. The weedy seedlings that took root in the abandoned yards had grown to sizable trees. The last remnants of old cars jettisoned in the front yards had been carted off for scrap metal. Outhouses and chicken coops in the rear no longer manufactured blowflies and dung beetles.

  "Good country for deer and turkey," Ainesley said.

  The land they entered was accessed by a tracery of overgrown logging roads and unused foot trails. Few of these led to any discernible destination, often instead petering out in shallow, rain-scoured gullies. The wild turkeys and white-tailed deer native to the land had been over
hunted to relative scarcity, but enough were still about and free enough for the taking to make the odds for a one-day hunt favorable.

  A mile down the bumpy road, Ainesley slowed the truck and turned it onto a nearly invisible logging track. He inched it along for fifty yards before stopping. Then he opened the door on his side and climbed out. Hawked, spit, and hitched up his pants.

  "Looks good," he said to the boys. "We'll get something today. But we got a lot of work to do. Now get your asses moving."

  He let the boys out the other side, and, directing his gaze up the logging path, he intoned the venerable adage of the outdoorsman.

  "Don't see anything yet, but they're there. The woods are empty only if you're a lousy hunter."

  "I got to pee," said Junior.

  "Me too," said Raphael.

  Ainesley nodded assent. He lit a cigarette and leaned against a fender of his truck, waiting as the boys walked a few yards into the bush to relieve themselves. When they returned, Ainesley tossed the still-burning cigarette to the side of the trail and walked to the rear of the truck. He untied a tarpaulin there and pulled out a break-action, breech-loading shotgun. It looked old enough to be a family heirloom.

  "Now, you guys, the first thing you've got to learn is how to handle your weapon safely."

  Raphael only half heard. He was watching Ainesley's cigarette. When the dead oak leaves around it mercifully failed to catch fire, he turned his attention back to his father.

  "First, we break the barrel like this and check it out. Come over here and see how clean and oiled I got everything after the last time I used it."

  To Raff, who held back, he said, "Son, what the hell's the matter with you? Git over here with Junior and take a look."

  The boys bent forward and peeked down through the breech. Raff glanced back and forth over the trigger casing, trying to figure out where the bullets were.