In the forests the fleet, under-sized Floridan deer is watchful and furtive because of the activities of that tawny killer, the “catamount” of the frontier; and the black bear sometimes grunts and soliloquizes and gobbles persimmons in the thickets. The lynx that mews in the twilight, the raccoon that creeps like a furtive shadow through the velvet darkness, the pink-nosed ’possum that can only sleep when danger threatens, and such lesser folk as rabbit and squirrel, weasel and skunk, all have their part in the drama of the woods. Then there are the game-birds: wild turkey, pheasant, and that little red quail, the Bob White known to Southern sportsmen.
Yet the Ochakee country conveys no message of brightness and cheer. Some way, there are too many shadows. The river itself is a moving sea of shadows; and if the sun ever gets to them, it is just an unhappy glimpse through the trees in the long, still afternoons. The trees are mostly draped with Spanish moss that sways like dark tresses in the little winds that creep in from the gulf, and the trees creak and complain and murmur one to another throughout the night. The air is dank, lifeless, heavy with the odors of vegetation decaying underfoot. There is more death than life in the forest, and all travelers know it, and not one can tell why. It is easier to imagine death than life, the trail grows darker instead of brighter, a murky mystery dwells between the distant trunks.... Ordinarily such abundant wild-life relieves the somber, unhappy tone of the woods, but here it some way fails to do so. No woodsman has to be told how much more cheerful it makes him feel, how less lonely and depressed, to catch sight of a doe and fawn, feeding in the downs, or even a raccoon stealing down a creek-bank in the mystery of the moon; but here the wild things always seem to hide when you want them most; and if they show themselves at all, it is just as a fleet shadow at the edge of the camp-fire. These are cautious, furtive things, fleet as shadows, hidden as the little flowers that blossom among the grass-stems; and such woodsfolk as do make their presence manifest do not add, especially, to the pleasure of one’s visit. These are two in particular—the water-moccasin that hangs like a growing thing in the wisteria, and the great, diamond-back rattlesnake whose bite is death.
The river flows into the gulf about half-way down the peninsula, and here is the particular field of the geologist, rather than the naturalist. For miles along the shore the underlying limestone and coraline rocks crop up above the blue-green water, forming a natural sea-wall. Here, in certain districts, the thickets have been cleared away, wide areas planted to rice, and a few ancient colonial homes stand fronting the sea. Also the sportsman fishes for tarpon beyond the lagoons.
A strange, unhappy land of mystery; a misty, enchanted place whose tragic beauty no artist can trace and whose disconsolate appeal no man can fathom! Forests are never cheerful, silent and steeped in shadow as they are, but these moss-grown copses beside the Ochakee, and crowding down to the very shores of the gulf, have an actual weight of sadness, like a curse laid down when the world was just beginning. Yet Grover Nealman defied the disconsolate spirit of the land. He dared to disturb the cathedral silence of those mossy woods with the laughter of carefree guests, and to hold high revelry on the shores of that dismal sea.
CHAPTER II
The allurement of a September day had brought me far down the trail, past the neck of the marsh, and far from my accustomed haunts. But I could never resist September weather, particularly when the winds are still, and the sun through the leaves dapples the trail like a fawn’s back, and the woods are so silent that the least rustle of a squirrel in the thicket cracks with a miniature explosion. And for all the gloom of the woods, and the tricky windings and cut-backs of that restless little serpent of a trail, I still knew approximately where I was. A natural sense of direction was seemingly implanted with less essential organs in my body at birth.
The Ochakee River wound its lazy way to the sea somewhere to my right. A half mile further the little trail ended in a brown road over which a motor-car, in favorable seasons, might safely pass. The Nealman estate, known for forty miles up and down the shore, lay at the juncture of the trail and the road—but I hadn’t the least idea of pushing on that far. Neither fortune nor environment had fitted me to move in such a circle as sometimes gathered on the wide verandas of Kastle Krags.
I was lighting a pipe, ready to turn back, when the leaves rustled in the trail in front. It was just a whisper of sound, the faintest scratch-scratch of something approaching at a great distance, and only the fact that my senses had been trained to silences such as these enabled me to hear it at all. It is always a fascinating thing to stand silent on a jungle-trail, conjecturing what manner of creature is pushing toward you under the pendulous moss: perhaps a deer, more graceful than any dancer that ever cavorted before the footlights, or perhaps (stranger things have happened) that awkward, snuffling, benevolent old gentleman, the black bear. This was my life, so no wonder the match flared out in my hand. And then once more I started to turn back.