Bachman's warblers once nested in swampy canebrakes of the South but were now extinct. The last one had been seen in 1965. Or so it was said. But perhaps they were not completely gone. Raff believed that maybe they weren't really. Maybe a lucky naturalist like him could be rewarded for long hours at Nokobee by the insectlike buzzing of their song and the glimpse of a survivor.
Ivorybills, the largest of America's woodpeckers, were supposed to be extinct too. But who could say for sure? Unconfirmed sightings had been reported in the Choctawhatchee floodplain forest east of Nokobee. Maybe, Raff said to me, he might be the one to recognize the distinct call, like a toy flute, peet! peet! deep in the outflow woodland of Lake Nokobee, then hear the loud double-hammer strike of a beak as the bird peeled the bark back and uncoiled its long tongue to seize a beetle grub lying hidden. Then he would look up through the foliage to see a pair working their way among the dead hardwood trees standing there, their long white beaks working as organic drills, their flashing white feathers on the upper wing surfaces plain to see, like the field guides said. Then he would understand why they were sometimes called the Lord God bird. "Lord God, what is that?" settlers were reported to say when they first saw one.
Raff would tell you if you asked him that the woods at Nokobee were safer than any city street. Yet they were far from being any kind of a real-life Disney World. Nothing was posed in those woods. Nothing present was crafted by human hands. Habitats like this one had existed across the South for many thousands of years before any human being set foot on the continent of North America. No human hand or mind could begin to duplicate even a small part of such a place.
On Raff's thirteenth birthday Ainesley presented him with a Model 1938 Red Ryder lever-action air rifle. It would change Raff's relationship to the Nokobee fauna. The rifle had a capacity of 650 BBs--small rounded metal pellets, powered by air pressure built by working the lever and fired one at a time. From the instant he held it, Raff was enchanted by the very idea of a personal weapon. It was not like his father's cannon-sized shotgun that had so frightened him three years earlier. The Red Ryder was his size, and it belonged to him, Raphael Semmes Cody. He felt a primordial surge of unfamiliar emotion. The gun was power, not earned, not promised, but instantaneously passed from one hand to another.
When Marcia first saw the Red Ryder, Raff was clutching it against his body at port arms, savoring its weight and balance. She clapped her hands to the sides of her head and shouted, "Ainesley, what in God's name have you done?"
Raff turned away to remove the offending weapon from her inspection.
"You promised. You promised me! Do you want to get him killed? Or kill somebody else?"
Ainesley shook his head as in disbelief, while holding up his hands with palms turned up to placate his wife.
"Nonono," he said. "You don't understand. This isn't a real gun. It can't hurt anybody. It don't shoot nothing but little BBs at targets. Even if it hits somebody, it can't do nothing but raise a little welt."
Marcia came right back, "He could blind someone!"
"No, no, that won't happen. Look here, you can hurt somebody with almost anything. Even a screwdriver. Even a pencil, for God's sake. All Raff has to do is to be a little bit careful. It's time he learned at least something about guns. It's time he took a little responsibility about things like that."
Raff was easing out of the room, thinking about where to hide his treasure in case this dispute turned out badly.
"I've told you a thousand times if I've told you once," Marcia came again at Ainesley, "I don't want him growing up like some kind of a savage. I want Raff to have a better life, and while I'm at it, when he gets older I want him to live in a better, safer place than we have around here."
"You mean you want to live with your goddamn fancy family in Mobile. My own people aren't good enough for you."
Then Ainesley caught himself. They couldn't afford to blow up with Raff in hearing range, and him the subject of the fight.
"I know how you feel," he said, "and I'm not going to take any offense. But let me ask you, use some common sense. We live here and not down there in Mobile, and Clayville's where I make our living."
Marcia tightened her mouth, struggling for equanimity and the right response.
Ainesley, seeing her pause, pressed the initiative. "Look here, half the boys in Clayville Scooter's age own a BB gun like this one. If we was living in downtown Mobile that's one thing, but we live here in Clayville, and Scooter's got a right to grow up in a normal way like other boys."
Ainesley and Marcia went on like this for a while, cooling off slowly. Raff was by that time in his room out of earshot, examining the Red Ryder, sensing he was going to keep it, thinking about the meaning of it all. Soldier in the army, Sergeant--no, make that Captain--Raphael Cody. A sniper, picking off charging enemy soldiers, machine guns rattling to the side. A hunter, having closed to within the killing range of a ten-point buck, hunter friends admiring him, watching as he took very...careful...aim. A man with power, a hero.
After a half hour more of debate, flare-ups, pauses, and back-and-forth, his parents reached a compromise and called him out. Raff could keep the gun if he used it only to shoot at targets set up on the backyard fence, with his father supervising.
Right after dinner Raff was out in the backyard with his Red Ryder. Ainesley showed him the simple procedure of firing an air gun. Pour the BBs into the chamber, pump the lever, aim, shoot, pump the lever, aim, shoot. Continue for up to 650 times before reloading.
Raff took quickly to this routine. The vestigial shame of the shotgun incident during the turkey hunt faded completely as his father guided him. The last residue of his earlier fear was also soon gone. He found deep pleasure in simply pulling a trigger, then seeing a physical impact far away. It was a kind of control he had never experienced. It was precise, and far better than slingshotting a stone.
He kept going the next day, this time without Ainesley and whenever Marcia was busying herself at some task away from the back door. His aim improved steadily. Raff, it turned out, was a born marksman. He thought himself one of those keen-eyed Southerners of olden times described to him by Ainesley.
Raphael's imagination soon led him from Red Ryder in the backyard to Red Ryder at Nokobee. He could be a real hunter! Maybe without actually killing anything, just stunning them and letting them recover. There were lots of small animals at Nokobee that were so elusive and fast it was next to impossible to catch one with your hands. Five-lined skinks and six-lined race runners, the sprinters among lizards, were so alert that almost as soon as you saw them they were gone--vanished into a woodpile or tangle of scrub. Green anole lizards were mostly seen perched on tree trunks. Like squirrels, they were able to scoot to the other side and up above you before you got close enough to grab them. Water snakes were poised to race into the lake shallows by the time you came within ten feet, and you almost never saw them again.
The escape strategies were hereditary. For millions of years their ancestors had been stalked by predators a great deal faster than Raff. Few of these experts in surveillance and escape had ever been caught by unaided human effort. Now maybe Raff could catch them at will and hold them in his hands for close study.
Raff told his mother he wanted to take his Red Ryder into Clayville Center to show to his friends. He offered to let her hold on to his ammunition, the BBs, as a guarantee. He didn't mention the spare cylinder he carried in his pocket.
When she gave her reluctant permission, Raff placed the gun across the handlebars of his bicycle and rode out of the driveway. He turned in the direction of Atmore Street and the town center, in case Marcia was watching from the window. He proceeded on to the first street corner, then out of sight of the house, cut ninety degrees at the next corner, rode one street over, and continued on toward Nokobee. After twenty-five minutes' hard cycling he arrived at the trailhead.
As usual at this time of day, there was no one else at Dead Owl Cove. Raff walked onto the trai
l around the west side of the lake and off it, into the forest. He held his head up, staring this way and that. He gripped the air rifle in both hands, ready to pump and fire. He entered the hunter's trance, scanning now back and forth, up and down, his senses open for any sign of an animal that might be a suitable target. A giant sulphur butterfly--hard to catch even with a net--flashed across the trail in front of him and alighted on a flowering bush. It was big and showy, but he paid it no attention. Close by, a murder of crows began quarreling. Their loud clamor meant nothing to the searching rifleman.
A skink started up and raced a short distance down the trail before halting. A target! Raff froze. He raised the rifle slowly and carefully. But the little lizard, watching his movements intently, sprinted into the undergrowth and disappeared.
Farther along the trail, Raff spotted a green anole lizard resting on the trunk of a small pine. It was a large male, pumping its scarlet dewlap up and down, the instinctive response to a male encroaching its territory. At fifteen feet it was a perfect target. Raff turned around so his back was to the target and his arm movements could not be seen. He pumped the lever of the gun, turned back slowly, aimed at the lizard just behind its front legs, and fired. The lizard flipped off and fell to the ground. Raff ran over and laid it in his open hand. He examined it closely, pulled the red dewlap out, and let it fold back. There was a small tear in the skin just back of the left shoulder, with the skin pinched upward. The pellet had evidently struck at an angle and bounced away. Raff was unsure whether the lizard was dead or just stunned. He placed it gently on the ground and moved on in search of his next trophy. No candidate was found, and after an hour Raff returned home.
Over the next several excursions, Raff stayed most of each day, stunning or killing dozens of lizards, small snakes, and one tree frog that he knocked off a pine branch too high to reach by hand. He looked up the victims in a set of field guides he kept at home. When finally he was tired of this level of wildlife slaughter, he turned to sparrows and other small birds. In this endeavor he was consistently unsuccessful. The targets were usually constantly in motion. They kept too far away, and at the distances he could approach, thick feathers shielded their bodies too well for the pellets to have much effect. Raff intensified his effort to kill or at least capture a bird. Finally, he found an ideal target. It was a tiny golden yellow bird perched on a low branch in a swampy portion of the lakeside scrub. It stood stock-still, calling in a continuous monotone, Sweet, sweet, sweet...Raff raised the rifle into firing position, stock to his shoulder, and walked in slow motion toward the bird. When he had closed within fifteen feet, he took careful aim at its head, remembering his father's advice when bringing down the guinea hen several years previously. Always shoot for the head. Raff squeezed the trigger. There was a slight pop, and the bird leaned to the side and fell to the ground.
Raff walked over and picked up his trophy. Lying in his open hand, the bird looked up at him with expressionless eyes. It struggled but could not get up. Its left wing hung low, obviously broken. He had struck the bird's shoulder. Its legs quivered slightly, seemingly paralyzed.
Raff was faced with an unpleasant dilemma. If he took the bird home and tried to nurse it back to health, his parents would see it and know he'd been lying about the rifle. If he just left it on the ground, it would suffer before it died, maybe taking a long time. There was only one solution: kill it, put it out of its misery.
Raff lay the bird down and fished out a National Park Service notebook from his hip pocket. He made a rough sketch of the bird and wrote down the color: deep yellow with blue-gray wings. Then he brought the muzzle of the air gun to within six inches of the eye of the bird and pulled the trigger. He glanced down and saw that its head was thrown back. Its body was still. Without touching it he turned abruptly and walked away, mounted his bicycle, and rode home.
Back in his room, Raff thumbed through his field guide and found a perfect match for the fallen bird: male prothonotary warbler. He had brought down a prothonotary warbler, and while it was looking at him, while it was singing. Raphael Semmes Cody, big-time hunter, had bagged a prothonotary warbler.
By supper that evening, the excitement of stalking and shooting a bird had died completely. It was replaced with shame. Struggling with that emotion, he had a revelation. With his little gun he had taken power over Nokobee. It had been so easy. Now, suppose, he thought, he had a better weapon, say a .22 rifle; he knew boys only a little older than himself who did. With it he could kill birds easily, shoot anything at all he wished out of the trees. He could roam the woodland back and forth until he hunted down almost all the birds and everything else that moved. Any person could do that, any boy could kill part or the whole of it.
Then it came to Raff with sickening clarity that Nokobee was not at all the edge of an infinite nature he envisioned as a younger child. It was just a tract of land that could be walked from one end to the other in an hour. The Nokobee he loved was a fragile entity, and today he had thoughtlessly disturbed its grace and beauty.
14
AS MUCH AS RAFF loved the creatures of Nokobee, none of his fellow citizens there loved him back. All of the birds, lizards, and mammals were frightened by even his most cautious approach. They either moved along to keep their distance or else they tensed, ready to run or fly to safety in a split second. Except for an occasional snake or turtle rendered torpid by a winter chill, or a frog hiding among waterweeds, he found it almost impossible to stalk and touch an animal of any kind. Surely they would be pleased to see this giant intruder fall down dead. And if he did perish at Nokobee, a dozen kinds of scavengers would come to fight over his body, rendering it down to the last fragments of flesh and skin, until only the skeleton was left, and that too would in time be strewn about by scavengers and covered in humus by rivulets of the unfeeling rain.
Nokobee was nevertheless perfectly safe for people. Well, almost perfectly safe. You could walk the length and breadth of the tract for days or weeks, step anywhere, come close to any object that caught your eye, and suffer no ill consequence. Statistically, however, if you came back enough times and stayed cumulatively long enough, and if you were consistently careless to boot, then in a flash, and likely for some mundane reason, Nokobee could cripple or kill you.
One day, when he was fifteen years old, a few weeks after his trip with Junior Cody down the Chicobee, Raphael Semmes Cody learned this harsh lesson of cumulative probability. While taking one of his frequent hikes around the lake, he saw an unusual animal submerged in shallow water a foot from the shore. It appeared to be a medium-sized frog with a dark cross-shaped pattern on its back. This was the kind of discovery Raff was primed to make. Totally focused, he stepped close and slowly extended a hand to seize what now was certainly an animal of an unfamiliar kind. At the last moment he was surprised to see a large cottonmouth moccasin less than a foot from the frog. The snake, coiled in a clump of sedges, was evidently stalking the same animal.
In an eye blink there it was, all very familiar in form but in a new context, terrifying, seen from this close monstrous in size, the body woven through the aquatic stems of the sedges, the tawny bands of its species spaced along its blackish brown flanks, the coarse keeled scales of its upper surface fitted together like armor, and dry, not slimy or wet. The triangular head was swollen behind by the poison-filled oral glands, the mouth fixed in a mirthless smile. In another eye blink the snake lunged, its head coming like a spearpoint on the uncoiling neck and straight and fast as though a stone thrown by a hand. The maw opened wide, its lining dead white as shaded snow. The fangs unfolded and unsheathed, transforming the whole of the snake into a perfect predator, an instrument of death. In reflex Raff started to pull back but could move his hand no more than an inch or two when the snake struck.
Its fangs did not hit Raff directly. They passed through the top of one of the rolled cuffs of his shirt, spurting venom on the cloth instead of into flesh. Then they became entangled in the cloth as the moccasin tried to
pull them out. In an instant the snake gnashed its jaws a second time, and Raff jerked his arm all the way back, causing the tips of both of the fangs to scratch the skin on his wrist as the cottonmouth pulled free.
There followed a splash and a swirl of water, and both the snake and frog were gone, each in a different direction. Raff fell back, squirming away from the lake edge with a frantic push of arms and legs. The enormity of what had happened, spanning less than five seconds, was stamped crystalline-clear in his mind, and it would remain so forever. He felt the rush of adrenaline, and his mind dissolved into a confused jumble. He'd been bitten by a deadly snake! Not a full strike, but the venom-laden fangs had broken the skin. He had no idea what was to follow. He might faint before he could make it out of Nokobee and find help. He might die. He got up and started to walk back to the trailhead. Don't run, he remembered, that would speed up the heart and circulate venom through his body faster. What about getting the venom out? He stopped and sucked on the scratches for a few seconds. He had a knife, and he thought maybe he could cut into the scratches and suck the blood from around them. Then he remembered reading that this old method doesn't work very well. It could even push the venom more deeply into the bloodstream.
The bite of a big poisonous snake is, next to drowning, the most feared natural cause of death in the wildlands of the Gulf Coastal Plain, although, that said, very few people actually die from it. Raff often considered the possibility of such an attack. His fantasy usually featured a diamondback rattlesnake coiled and camouflaged among dead leaves, poised to strike before you knew it was there. But he didn't think it would ever happen to him.
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