Manhunt. Volume 14, Number 1, February/March, 1966

Mary Ellen kids me sometimes. She says we had so much bad luck all our lives that something terrific just had to happen when it did. She says the law of average rigged our break.

But I think her ankles had something to do with it.

Predator! by Robert Edmond Alter

Coz Tanner was a predator, a man who’d sooner spend half a day stealing a dollar than work honest for twenty. The big swamp was his habitat.

* * *

Coming back through the saw palmettos from the swamp pine island where he and Harris had laid the trapline, Ramsay paused to watch one of nature’s vicious little dramas being enacted in a squawk heron creek. An otter had caught a watersnake and it was trying to get the writhing thing up on a fallen cabbage palm to eat it.

The entire scene lasted about five minutes. And that five minutes might have been what cost his friend his life. But he could never be sure about that because he wasn’t a coroner — only a Park Service boatman. Still...

When he first stepped into the little camp he thought that Harris must be asleep in the puptent, because the small clearing seemed so deserted, so void of life and sound. It didn’t even enter his mind at that moment to wonder why the big puma’s hide wasn’t on the drying rack that Harris had rigged between two gum trees.

And then he saw the body.

His instant thought was that Harris was lying there as some kind of joke. The second thought, that he had stumbled and fallen on his face. But the third thought — the one that really didn’t want to come forward, that was almost impossible to accept — was the accurate one.

There was no mistaking the glazed eyes that were staring into nothing — or the punky gnat that was wading over the sticky, fixed right eyeball. A living man would have to blink.

He looked at Harris’ khaki-clad back and saw a one-inch wet red slit in his shirt. The kind of puncture that a hunting knife would make — just under the left shoulder-blade. Then he touched the dead man’s bare arm and it was still warm. That’s when he realized that the man who had used the knife was probably still close by.

And I’m slated to go next, he thought.

Harris, one of the fish and wildlife patrolmen, had come to Ramsay the morning before with a request. “How about you hauling me into Black Water Swamp, Ram? Seems a randy old painter and his bitch has been raiding them backwater farmers by Lost-mans River. Got one of Ben Toll’s heifers last night.”

He was one of those big, quiet, slow-smiling men. Born and raised in the Glades, he had taken to his job like a gator takes to a slough. Which was more than Ramsay could say for himself. He had left the Georgia woods simply because he’d wanted to see something of the country he lived in, and two years ago had found himself stuck in Florida, a penniless victim of the drifter’s curse.

To him this land of palm and bogs was a crazy place. Not only were there no mountains, but here even the water was black, not crystal clear like his home streams. He was sick of it, of his job too. He didn’t give a damn about Ben Toll’s heifer, but trying to trap a pair of pumas would at least help break the deadly monotony of taxiing tourists and entomologists around the swamp.

So he said “Sure” to Harris, and if the Park Service didn’t like it, they knew what they could do with it.

They loaded up Ramsay’s propeller-driven airboat with the trapping gear: four steel wolf traps with chains and dragging hooks, dried bait, a jug of barkstone, and a nine-shot.22 target pistol. Ramsay gave the long-barrelled gimcrack a wry look.

“You aim to shoot anything bigger than a poor-joe bird with that toy?” he asked. Harris pulled his slow grin.

“That’s for the painters,” he said, “and we’re lucky enough to catch ’em. You’ll see.”

The airboat droned by a picturesque little commercial fishing hamlet situated on an ancient Indian shell mound island, and started up the wiggly river. A good-god flight of red-billed white ibis thundered overhead as the interlocking mangroves gave way to the open vastness of the inner Glades.

Ramsay sat on his perch in front of the engine and nodded when Harris called above the whirr of the airplane prop—

“You know that big old pine island north of Duck Creek? I got that painter located there. But likely we can’t get that far in.”

“This buggy will go into water three inches deep,” Ramsay said.

“Not through no log litter it can’t.”

Harris was right. The waving sea of sedges and sawgrass was soon broken up by hammocks, the tree islands of the Glades, and the cypress jungles and pindown thickets began to crowd in. A maze of fallen cabbage palm logs and gnarled cypress knees stubbornly barricaded the waterway. They got out in the shallow black water and started unloading the boat.