Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

I got my breath and mopped my brow, getting a whiff of my own acrid stink in the steaming heat. “These big ol’ dinosaurs take a lot of killing, don’t they?” I said to the son behind me, who protested when I started to move on; I had to explain that the belly flat on a gator of this size was knobbed and horny, not worth stripping. He gazed at me in that open way he had inherited from his mama, then waded into the red water and touched the head of the dying gator. Leaving his hand there, he said, “Well, then, why kill it, Papa?” That turned me in my tracks. “Why kill it? That’s a bull gator, boy.” And as an afterthought, I said, “That’s one big gator less to come downriver, take a dog or child.”

This sounded like bluster to my son because bluster is what it was. Still polite, he said, “Papa? We going to stay out in the Glades till we kill ’em all?” We slogged on back to camp, where I told the others we were heading home. We all knew we had killed enough but it took a nine-year-old to put a stop to it. In the loaded boats, the flats stacked up above the gunwales. Any more would have been dumped out to rot.

At Everglade, we laid our loads along the dock to be checked and measured by George Storter. We were tangle-haired, bearded, sun-cracked, filthy, our clothes caked stiff and dark with reptile blood. Folks stepped back when we went into the store. Lucius said they recoiled from all that death on us. He never went on a gator hunt again.

That summer my wife was feeling poorly; she spent long hours in that river breeze, in the shifting sun and shade. To provide distraction from our insect-ridden life, I rowed her upriver one fine Sunday for some cultured conversation with Baron Msyoo de Chevelier-“Shoveleer,” as the local people knew him. Long ago, I’d shot the Frenchman’s felt hat off his head as a warning to keep out of my plume bird territory and I warned Mandy that, seeing my boat, he would rush into his cabin for his weapon. When he did just that, Mandy had to smile, but fortunately that kind smile reassured him: he set down his fowling piece and resigned himself to Watson’s imposition.

Jean Chevelier sniffed crossly as he picked his way about. Those hooded eyes of his were a raccoon’s eyes, bright black and burning. He had long since lost the last of his good manners, having shrunken in old age and solitude to a peevish little gnome who would bark their orders to a firing squad lined up to shoot him. Ignoring my courtly introduction, he neither greeted Mrs. Watson nor welcomed her to Possum Key. Instead, he thrust under her nose the ugly queer black blisters on his withered forearm, cackling in triumph when her challenged husband could not tell her what had caused them. “Man-chi-neel!” he cried. In a perverse impulse of scientific inquiry so typical of this old man, he had purposely taken shelter from the rain beneath a manchineel or poison tree, a small smooth-barked reddish tree found in the Glades country. To tease him, I claimed I’d seen manchi-neel on Gopher Key-was that where he got those blisters? Rattled, he cried Am-po-see-bluh! To the end, he pretended he knew nothing of Go-phaire, though everyone knew he had dug up that whole mound in a frantic latelife hunt for Calusa treasure.

Mandy was plainly entertained by his prickly scientific stance and could scarcely wait to report back to Lucius that the big “ironhead” or wood ibis was not a true ibis, in Chevelier’s view, but a New World stork and that the “shit-quick” was the reed heron or bittern. “Sheeta-queek!” he yelled at Mandy, who shifted in her seat. “All birts sheeta-queek, for fly away queek, voo com-prawn, Madame?”

Deftly Mandy changed the subject to that huge greenish gator which frequented the riverbank across from Chatham Bend. Firing snippy questions to display her husband’s ignorance, the Frenchman sneered that in the unlikely event that my description could be trusted, my giant “alligator” was no alligator but a saltwater crock-o-deel, rare in south Florida. Surely a more observant man, Chevelier insinuated, would have noticed the pointy snout, quite unlike the shovel snout of the brownish, blackish alligator, and that even when its mouth was closed, its teeth protruded along the entire length of its lower jaw.

I might have known that the first naturalist to describe this brute had been a Frenchman. But the crocko-deel, Chevelier complained, had been falsely claimed by a mere French colonial, the rascally Jean-Jacques Audubon, who had dared to belittle Chevelier’s old mentor Rafinesque-Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz-after robbing him of his discovery. Chevelier’s hatred of “fokink Aud-u-bone” was only exceeded by his oft-expressed disdain for God Almighty. (In the face of sacrilege, Mandy batted her eyes prettily, her smile an entreaty as well as a signal that her honor would remain unsullied if her husband did not rise up in wrath to strike this villain down.)

However, to spare Mandy, I distracted him: “Is it true there are white shell canals at Gopher Key?” The old man hitched forward, a gleam of duplicity lighting his eye. Avoiding all mention of Gopher Key, he proposed that the white shell found in such canals could only have derived from a huge clam bed somewhere along this coast-an obvious conclusion that had not occurred to me. If he were a younger man, he assured Mandy-he had yet to address me directly, far less look me in the eye-he would locate and stake out that area for a canning industry. I pictured the coast charts in my head: that clam bed’s location could only be the vast shallow bank off the empty coast north of Chatham River, easily accessible from Pavilion Key.

Seeing me distracted, cracking my knuckles, Mandy guided the conversation to the topic of French poetry, agreeing with Msyoo that Edgar Allan Poe was less esteemed in his own country than in France, where he’d been discovered and translated by the poet Beau Delair, ness pa, Madame ? But what Msyoo was most anxious to discuss was the inferiority of all aspects of American culture when compared with those of La Belle Frawnce, a paradise to which he hoped to return before death caught him een thees fokink Amerique.

Msyoo presently declared that France had conquered Florida back in the 1590s, as proven by such local names as Cape Sable and Cape Romaine: had it not been for the Louisiana Purchase, France’s rightful territories would include most if not all of North America. He scurried inside to dig out mildewed books by a pair of clever Frenchies who knew a great deal more about America than we Americans could ever hope to learn.

De Tocqueville, who had visited this country in the 1830s, had been appalled on the one hand by the callous indifference with which most Americans regarded slavery and astonished on the other by the slaves’ strange apathy and acceptance of their lot, which not only inured them to wretched servitude but caused them to imitate their oppressors rather than hate them. In my own experience, this was also true of chain gangs, cane crews, and other hard-used men, not merely blacks, but Chevelier dismissed my idiotic quibble by flicking his fingers toward my face in the way he might brush cake crumbs off his lap. “Compared to lay negres, ” the Frenchman said, “lay poe rooge, lay redda-skeen-”

Here Mandy neatly intervened, observing that most European writers-the French writer Chateaubriand, for one-seemed to cherish a romantic view of les peaux rouges, perhaps to compensate for their prejudice against les peaux noires. She politely reminded him that to avoid capture and a bitter return to slavery, black warriors had reinforced and often led Seminole resistance to the whites.

“As was recognized by the U.S. Army and most historians,” I chimed in, quoting a general who had told the Congress that the First Seminole War was essentially a “Negro war.” Even De Tocqueville had remarked, said Mandy-I was so proud of her!-that escaped slaves who in the early days had turned up among Indian tribes throughout the South had to be men of exceptional courage and fortitude to survive a hostile wilderness and its wild peoples. Therefore they were much admired by the Indians and often married into the head families, producing a mixed-blood progeny of fine physical specimens of high intelligence-