He didn’t know if the danger he felt was real or something he sensed in the air around him. But he knew it was there, somewhere in the Everglades.

THE HAMMOCKS
3

Alec’s gaze swept over the saw-grass empire, colored like ripe wheat nearby but shading to emerald green in the distance. It was a wild bright plain, neither land nor water, with no visible limits. It was a land mostly untouched by human hands. It was motionless—and yet Alec sensed in it a throbbing heartbeat of its own.

He shrugged off the feeling of apprehension that had come to him. There was no reason to fear this watery wilderness that was being drained by the canals. He realized that the huge swamp was resisting, fighting for its life. This was evident in the sun-bitten vastness spreading before him as if in challenge to all those who sought to destroy it.

The dirt road went to a remote and isolated Seminole Indian village a couple of miles away. The people there were hunters, he had been told, and lived on one of the high islands in the swamp known as hammocks.

His gaze turned to the nearest hammock, a round clump of land with tall palms silhouetted against the brazen sky. There were some birds flying above it and he watched them vanish behind the palm fronds. There were other hammocks to the west, some larger, others smaller, all emerging from the green-and-yellow-speared sea.

Alec moved his horse on. He had come this far, and there was no reason to turn back now. He did not mind the quiet of the swamp after the months of pandemonium at Hialeah racetrack.

Just ahead, a score of buzzards rose from a mud flat at the sound of the Black’s hoofs. Alec watched them move awkwardly in swift, waddling flight. They didn’t go far but stayed directly above, planing in lazy circles, waiting for him to pass.

When he rode by he saw a dead alligator, its body furnishing forage for the hideous carrion birds. The buzzards had ripped flesh and entrails into a shredded horror; he turned away.

For the first time Alec thought of the devastation to wildlife that the drainage canals must even now be bringing to the Everglades. Yet as he looked at the immensity of the land that stretched as far south as the Gulf of Mexico, he doubted that the swamp ever would be conquered completely by man. It was not meant for human habitation. It belonged to wildlife alone.

Later he came to an unexpected fork in the road and brought the Black to a halt. One way led to the Seminole Indian village, while the other road wound its way through the vast wilderness of swamp to the southwest. Far in the distance Alec saw a large hammock and decided the road went there. Perhaps it was one used as a base by hunters.

He would go in that direction rather than to the Indian village. The road had been built high, creating a dike that held surface water within the area. The saw-grass spears were tall and green beyond, and he would have a chance to see part of the true swamp before draglines and bulldozers destroyed it.

Alec kept the Black at a slow canter, knowing he could go to the distant hammock and back without ever tiring his horse. The stallion’s ears were alert; he would miss nothing and appeared as eager as Alec to go on.

For several miles he rode in a silence that seemed to become part of his bloodstream. The hot sun beat down mercilessly on his bare head and he felt as if he were crossing a desert and looking forward to reaching an oasis in the distant hammock. A dusty brown snake crossed the road just ahead and disappeared into the saw grass. It might be a water moccasin, he thought, and cautioned himself that he must not let the heat and silence dull his senses.

For a long while he rode on until, finally, he approached the hammock. It was even larger than he’d thought and the trees created a towering wall of cypress before him, making it difficult to tell where land left off and the dark water of the swamp began. The water rose high around the cypress knees, and the hammock appeared all the more ghostly with Spanish moss hanging from the trees in heavy shrouds.