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

A hundred yards beyond the thicket high land waited, with palmettos, liveoaks and swamp pines, and honest, solid earth for a man’s feet. They struggled toward the island, loaded with the traps and drag hooks, wading through knee-deep marl that sucked at their boots and hurrah bushes that clawed at their pants.

Nearing the cocoplum bushes that circled the big island, Harris paused and cautiously tried an open patch of marl with his foot.

“Watch out for this spot, Ram. It’s a sinkhole. Suck you right down to perdition.”

They staggered into a steaming jungle of gumbo limbo trees, wild tamarinds with frilly leaflets, and coffee bushes laced with grapevines — dumped their load and waded into the thicket to get another.

“You know Coz Tanner is out and back?” Ramsay said.

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“I saw him yesterday on Squawk Creek in his outboard skiff.”

“That so?” Harris didn’t seem to show any interest in the subject, which mildly surprised Ramsay. Tanner was a Glades man; born and raised on a shantyboat, he was one of those illiterate men who would instinctively rather spend half a day stealing a dollar than work a full day for twenty dollars. He was a swamp poacher of the first water; always ready and willing to kill and skin anything from a gator to an egret. He had a deep-rooted, almost atavistic, hatred of the Park Service and its patrolmen.

“Queer cuss,” Harris commented. “I’ve known him to even steal Liguus snails to peddle to collectors.”

Harris had caught Tanner three times at poaching. The fourth time he had lost his patience and turned him in, and the law had put him away for a year. Now he was out again and bearing a grudge.

“And a mean cuss,” Ramsay added. “Remember what he did to that fisherman at the Chokoloskee dance two years back?”

“Yeah. Coz is a randy man with a knife. Goan get him in real trouble some day...”

They set up camp among the palmettos. Harris wanted to keep the traps near the water where some big cat prints showed in the mud, so they laid the trapline between two palm bogs. He hung the bait over the concealed traps and sprinkled it with barkstone, which had an appalling odor that wild creatures seemed to go for.

“Well, Ram,” Harris said, “I sholy appreciate the hand. You might drop back in two days and see do I need a ride home.”

“I reckon I’ll stick out here with you if you ain’t got any objection,” Ramsay said. “I want to see you use that.22 on a puma.”

“What about your job?”

Ramsay shrugged. “I’ve been thinking I’d chuck it anyhow. Figure I might go up to Tennessee for a look around. They got hills and mountains there — and no gators.”

“Well, it ain’t my nevermind,” Harris said quietly. “But I reckon for some perverse reason you’ve sort of made up your mind to throw away something precious. Namely, your life. You got plenty of savvy and a good disposition, but you won’t stick to any one thing. Just keep hopping around like a June bug on a string.”

Ramsay frowned. He didn’t like to talk about his restlessness, or to think about his instability.

“I’ve been on this job two damn years,” he said defensively.

“Sure. And before that a month on a job here, five months on another there, a year somewhere else... Boy, you’re nearly thirty. Next thing you know, you goan look around one day and find you’re just another broken old bindle-stiff hobbling down an empty highway.” Harris thought for a moment, then added:

“There ain’t never nothing waiting beyond the next hill, Ram, if you’re just going there to sightsee.”

“Well,” Ramsay muttered, “it’s my life, ain’t it?”

“Yep. That’s just what I mean.”

Twilight fetched an expectant hush over the wet wilderness. It seemed to totter on the brink of darkness like a great glassy ball waiting to drop and crash. Then a limpkin wailed its sad sad cry and a flight of night ducks got up from the lake with a batter of spraying wings and took off. After that there was the chuckle and squawk of the herons in the creek.

And suddenly Ramsay was aware of a third human presence. He looked up with a start and saw Coz Tanner standing by a liveoak.

A lanky-limbed, big shouldered man, he could move as daintily or swiftly as a bobcat. He was standing there like a tall petrified man, grinning a plastic grin. That smirk and the deep set of his penetrating eyes gave him a demonic look in the firelight.

Harris looked around at him and stared back for a moment. Then he said, “Well, Coz. How you keeping?”

Tanner made no move, held his fixed grin for a slow count of ten, before he said, “ ’Lo, bastard.”

Ramsay looked at Harris to see if he’d get mad. But he didn’t. He smiled evenly, and said, “Have some coffee.” And when Tanner went on waiting where he was, still with that damn grin, he said:

“Ain’t no sense in bearing a grudge, Coz. I’d warned you often enough about killing gators for their hides, but you had to have it your way. Way I figure it, you sent yourself up.”

“I said bastard,” Tanner said.

“I heard you,” Harris said calmly.

“Mebbe you’d hear me better ifn I said son of a—”