James Smith - The Flock

It had taken only a few weeks before several environmental groups had taken to the courts and filed suits that were serving as staying actions on any further development beyond the couple of thousand or so acres the studio had bought outright. But they were not well funded, being environmental groups, and the big company was having no major problems in outflanking those suits.

The true monkey wrenches had come from two unexpected sources.

First and foremost, one Vance Holcomb was found to have legal right to a one hundred-acre tract of land abutting that of the Salutations town limits. Concurrent with the groundbreaking of the town, he had begun construction of what the billionaire was calling a "research park," to be the nexus of a school for the study of the pristine environment of the land. With all of those dollars in assets to back him up, Holcomb was proving to be a greater bother than almost any other group vying for the status of the acreage.

The second cog breaker had been the appearance in court of Colonel Winston Grisham, U.S. Marines, retired. He was best known as a right wing extremist with widely publicized racist views, what amounted to a private army, and friends in the Florida legislature. He also owned a one thousand acre farm, which also lay cheek by jowl with projected expansion for Salutations. While a wealthy man, he was not in Vance Holcomb's money class, and his legal strengths had so far lay in the good ol' boys he chummed with in the state government. He'd become something of a thorn in the side of plans to expand Salutations. But he was also a thorn in the side of those who wanted to preserve the acreage as wilderness.

And that was the extent of Ron's knowledge of the current legal status of the almost half a million acres of roadless wilderness he now stood beside and peered into.

The sun was up and startlingly yellow in a clear blue sky about as dark and cloudless as any. Florida skies were the equal of any he'd seen, from the East Coast to Alaska. They rivaled those of the Big Sky country where he'd spent a year as an intern with the Park Service when he was just out of college. Rainy days scoured the air and the prevailing winds from the Atlantic or the Gulf brought in clean breezes. He enjoyed the skies here, most definitely.

He had parked his truck on the south end of Salutations, near an unobtrusive electrical substation that was surrounded by a red brick wall eight feet tall capped with a cast iron row of ornamental spikes. The station had been built on a bed of crushed river rock, he'd noted, hauled in from out of state. That was a very expensive setup for a small substation. But the place reeked of money. He supposed the average price of a home here was about $400,000.

Riggs looked back, down the street, as someone in a Mercedes sedan drove by. A kid in the back seat waved at him, and he waved a return greeting. He walked around the side of the substation and followed a small path through the grass that led off into the tall pines. There were sedges growing here and there, brown in all of that greenery, and the path took him through a field of a type of grass he couldn't identify. But botany wasn't his strong suit. He bent and tugged on a tuft and put the stuff in a plastic baggy he drew out of his pocket. He'd let one of the guys back in town have a look at it. Might be endangered or threatened. Wouldn't hurt to check.

Stuffing the sealed bag back into his pocket, he continued down the path. It was possible humans made the path, but he suspected it was more likely a deer trail. Apparently some of the deer were coming into the new neighborhoods and eating the shrubbery and whatever garden vegetables some of the housewives and retirees were planting. Tatum had admitted that a couple of the residents had shot at deer, once successfully. Ron told him that he wouldn't call the game warden, but asked that Tatum inform the shooter that the act was illegal.

The sun was tilting up toward its high point in the sky. He looked back through the grasses and through the trees. There was no sign of anything not put down by Mother Nature. Just trees and palmettos. He calculated he'd hoofed half a mile, maybe a shade more. The vegetation and the breezes swallowed up even the sounds of any passing cars. Some quail called off to his right. He smiled.

Ron supposed that a big snake might follow a path such as this one. He had touched up his knowledge concerning big constrictors and knew that they would cruise game trails looking for a place to waylay their victims. Deer were a bit out of their league, but other animals could use a deer trail, too. He suspected that raccoons and opossum were probably the main prey of any introduced python or anaconda. But considering the size of some snakes, there weren't many animals out of the question for their menu.

Soon he was two miles out from where he'd parked the truck. He'd seen a Pileated Woodpecker on a tall, dead pine ten yards to the left of the deer trail. Ron knew that bird watchers sometimes made the mistake of identifying the Pileated as one of the extinct Ivory-Bills. Hopeful thinking on the part of novice bird lovers, he suspected. Every so often he heard tales that there might still be a pocket of Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers living here or there, but he knew it was just hopes and wishes. He was convinced they were all gone. It was a good thing that the dead snags and dying trees here were left to stand and fall on their own. Some birds preferred to feed on the insects that lived in such trees, refusing to dine on the trunk if it was on the ground. If ever there was a place to find a lost Ivory-Bill, he supposed this was it.

The trail had branched a couple of times, but Ron had kept to the main one, which led southward. A dog might use such a trail to snoop around, checking out the nearby forests. Dogs would be quite edible where a big snake was concerned. Alligators loved them, and that was for certain. Ron had lost count of the number of dogs that were taken by gators every year; it was a common occurrence, and he knew that a resident construction worker had lost at least a pair of dogs to a gator before the place had opened to the public. Apparently, that had pretty much started Dodd's Jurassic Park articles. Ron hadn't seen the reporter since that brief meeting on the steps of the administrative building, and he wondered if the man had gone back to home base.

He was about two and a half miles out when he came to the longleaf savanna he'd spotted from Tatum's office. There was a line of mixed oaks and pines, and suddenly he was out on a wide plain interspersed with longleaf pines, a species mostly gone from Florida, pushed out by the planting of slash pines and other more commercial types. He'd read about such environments, but had never seen one this large. This one was almost a mile square and he was tempted to hike across, just to see what it was like. The trail led out a ways, and just vanished in all of the low grasses and Spanish bayonet. This was a type of forest and grassland that had once dominated vast areas of the Gulf and low country of the East Coast. But now it was reduced to small pockets here and there.

Standing in it, viewing the wide, open country, the pines tall and strong amidst the fields, he understood why groups would vie to own or protect it all. Despite the fact that he was supposed to remain officially neutral about these things, he found himself hoping that no one would be allowed to harm this area in any way.

He smiled. At one time, this kind of country would have been prime hunting area for a large constrictor. This would be perfect habitat for such an animal. Which threw his thoughts back to the job he was there to do.

The only thing that was bothering Ron about the possibility of a python being the culprit of the missing dogs was the time between the disappearances. In the past ten days, four dogs had vanished. Having spoken to owners of the missing dogs, he was aware that only one of the pets had weighed less than twenty pounds. One had been a full-grown Airedale terrier. That dog alone would be enough food mass for even a big snake to sleep off for several weeks.