Trembling Earth
I
THERE are different ways of meeting a fiftieth birthday. Some substitute auction for action. Others stop eating the things which they like and live mostly on spinach until death relieves them of their sufferings.
‘If I must be dragged into old age, it shall be backwards,’ wrote Montaigne — and I agree with him and am going to set my heels in deep and hold back as long as possible against the grip of that toothless hag who at the last overthrows us all.
Accordingly, when I was invited to spend a week on a hidden island in the almost unknown depths of that great marsh which lies between Georgia and Florida, I promptly accepted.
The Seminole Indians, who once lived there, have christened those six hundred square miles of swamp ‘Okefinokee,’ which means in their tongue ‘Trembling Earth.’ It is there that the celebrated Suwanee River has its source, and there too can still be found the magnificent ivory-billed woodpecker, now nearly as rare as the passenger pigeon or the Carolina paroquet, and other birds and beasts unknown to everyday life. Moreover, the island which I was to visit was once a Seminole stronghold before that fierce tribe were driven down into the Everglades. Even now its mounds are occasionally visited by wanderers of that race who find their w ay back to the lost home of their ancestors.
A day and a night after the invitation, and I stood at the beginning of a long channel which stretched away into the mysterious depths of the marsh. As I stared at its shimmering length, there flowed into my blood that joy of the wilderness which so many times has come to me upon approaching some unexplored fastness of the wilds. A moment later and I was in another world where everything was strange and new.
The bleached grass of the banks showed a pale ochre against the copperbrown water, in which strange green and violet lights gleamed, like those one sees in the depths of a black opal. The crimson keys of the red maples were the color of shed blood against the towering cypresses, shrouded with Spanish moss, which gave a curious touch of melancholy to the landscape.
Patches of small lilies, pearl-white with a tinge of crimson, — ‘milk-andwine,’ the country people call them, — and drifts of snowy violets, with sepia pencilings w ithin their exquisite petals, showed here and there on the banks, which were laced with muscadine and bamboo vine. Little waves of perfume floated through the air from the butteryellow blossoms of the wild jessamine, which resembles the false foxglove of the North and has a fragrance like that of no other flower.
Suddenly, from the marsh beside the canal, a white heron with slim black legs and a yellow bill took flight and flapped away like a great, snowy butterfly, and I recognized the American egret, which I had only occasionally seen as a rare visitor in the North. Here these birds were abundant everywhere. Perched on the tops of the cypresses, or rising from the Swamp where they fed, they added a touch of almost unearthly beauty to the landscape.
Then, as we rounded the first bend in the stream, three great birds, shadow-gray in color, with naked reddish heads, round black eyes, and long legs and bills, flew across the canal ahead of us. Unlike the herons, which always fly with a kink in their necks, these birds had their necks stretched straight out, as were their legs, and they presented a curiously stiff, wooden appearance as they flew. They were like no other birds that I had ever seen, and I suddenly realized that I was looking for the first time at a sand-hill crane, not so rare as his larger and almost extinct brother, the whooping crane, but still scarce enough to be an event for most ornithologists. Later on I learned to know their loud trumpet note, kuk-a-row-ow-ow, rippling across the marsh like the call of some giant tree toad. The birds themselves were among the wariest of all the marsh folk, never alighting anywhere except on the ground, and with their wild alarm notes doing sentry duty for all of the wild folk near them.
After several hours on the canal we reached an osprey’s nest, a cartload of sticks in the top of a towering cypress. There we left the tiny canal and, using a curious three-pronged pole, the ‘push-pole’ of the Swamp, followed hidden waterways and secret marks through the very heart of the marsh, everywhere dotted with innumerable islets. Almost immediately I caught a glimpse of another bird strange to my Northern eyes, the anhinga, otherwise known as the water turkey or snakebird. To me the adjective which best describes that bird is ‘narrow.’ His back was long and slim, his tail, nearly a foot in length, seemed scarcely two inches wide, while his long attenuated black body gave him a strange, spearlike effect. The anhinga’s conventional flight is three flaps and a soar. Usually when alarmed he circles up and up until a mere speck in the sky, but at other times the versatile bird will dive and swim under water like a fish.
Just beyond the first anhinga, my guide, a celebrated bear-hunter, Pungie Slaughter by name, lost for a time the winding, tangled waterway which he had been following like a clue through the maze of the Swamp, and we found ourselves confronted by a wall of shrouded cypresses. Zigzagging in and out between their trunks, we suddenly shot into a tiny, hidden lake, perhaps forty feet across, so encircled by the close-set trees that we never suspected its presence until we were floating on its smooth water. There it lay like a great aquamarine set in platinum, and it gleamed so lonely and lovely that I like to believe that no one else has ever seen it, save we two.
For a long time we floated in silence in the golden afternoon light that filtered through the ghost-gray Spanish moss. Then, as at last we reluctantly turned our boat toward the hidden entrance through which we had come, from the farther bank of that still, green pool a song bubbled out full of crystalline runs and trills, yet with a loud ringing sweetness in it which reminded me of the song of the Northern water thrush, as I have heard him sing in lonely forests from the tangle of roots of some overturned tree where he had made his nest. Yet the song which I heard on the bank of that hidden lake was not that of any thrush. There were strange cadences in its depths that I have never heard in the music of any other bird, and it ended in a wild strain of the same kind which ‘charm’d magic casements . . . in faery lands forlorn ’ for another sweet singer so many years ago.
For a long time we both sat still as stones, hoping to glimpse the unknown bird, but he kept out of sight in the tangle of undergrowth which stretched away before us. Then, even as I feared that he had gone, the singer showed himself in a tangle of cane at the water’s edge. His bill bewrayed him as a warbler, but not one which I had ever seen before. For a minute he reminded me of the worm-eating warbler with its striped head, but this bird had a white stripe over the eye, and I finally identified him as the Swainson warbler, that rare bird which Dr. Bachman found near Charleston in the thirties, at the same time that he discovered the other warbler which bears his name. Like the Bachman, the Swainson for many years was never seen again, and remained practically unknown until rediscovered in the eighties. This one was grayish brown in color, with a reddish-brown crown, while the broad white line over and through his eye was his most obvious field mark.
II
The setting sun gleamed through the trees like a vast incandescent ruby as we approached the end of our journey. Crossing the last wide stretch of open marsh, we came to a dark clump of cypress trees. Swinging around the largest one, we found ourselves at the beginning of a hidden waterway hardly broader than the width of the boat, which had been cut through the undergrowth and along which we pushed our little craft for over a mile until we reached Secret Island, one of the most beautiful of all the known islands of the Swamp.
As we landed, a mocking bird sang his afternoon song, the most delicious melody which I have ever heard one
of those great performers give. I counted nine distinct staves of his song before he began to repeat, nor did he deign to imitate any other bird. His florid, sweet song reminded me of the Carolina wren, the brown thrasher, and the cardinal grosbeak, yet with a phrasing and beauty all its own.
Before the bird had finished singing, Uncle Billy, the caretaker of Secret Island, came out to welcome us. He was a little man less than five feet in height, with a martial white moustache, bristling white hair, a pair of wistful blue eyes, and a soft voice, and for months at a time lived in the Swamp without seeing a human face. Almost immediately we became fast friends. He had a tiny cabin about a hundred yards from the little bungalow between the two live oaks, where I was to stay, and there he, Pungie, and I pooled our knowledge of cooking and produced some very respectable meals.
‘No, suh,’ said Uncle Billy, as we sat around his little cookstove after supper, ‘I don’t have no time to get lonely here. There’s always so much doin’ with the birds comin’ an’ goin’ an’ the flowers a-bloomin’ an’ the different animiles on the island. Sometimes it seems as if I could hardly keep up with ’em all. Yes, suh,’ he went on, ‘I’ve lived in the Swamp all my life an’ I reckon I’ll die here. Onct I went away an’ stayed a long, long time to see if I could get used to liv in’ outside, but I was n’t happy a single minute till I got back.’
‘How long did you stay away, Uncle Billy?’ I inquired.
‘Two days, suh,’ he answered.
As we all sat together on a little bench in front of his cabin, while the soft dark spread like a slow stain across the marsh, I could see the belt of Orion, that mighty hunter, gleaming overhead, with Saiph the Sword Star shining at its side, while below, Sirius gleamed green in the fell jaw of the Dog. Then, well below that constellation, I glimpsed an unknown star close to the edge of the horizon, and for the first time in my life looked upon great Canopus, that wild, blue-white star of the desert which led Mahomet out to conquer half a world. Only in our southernmost states can it be seen.
While we were talking, a company of Florida barred owls began to hoot in the distance, their notes sounding like the deep-toned bay of some great dog — who-who-who-who-who-ah. All at once they broke into a perfect chorus of ghastly shrieks, like that company of fiends which Christian heard in the distance as he was crossing the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Then, across the narrow island, which is only half a mile wide, from the black depths of the Swamp came a deep booming bellow with a snoring note at t he end, an indescribably wild, menacing, arrogant sound.
‘That’s an old bull ’gator,’ explained Uncle Billy. ‘He’s the biggest thing in the Swamp an’ listen to him say so,’ and once again the ground fairly trembled under t he deep-toned roar of the great saurian, the challenge of the reptile to the mammal, almost as menacing as the roar of a lion.
At last it was time for me to turn in.
‘Wait a minute an’ I’ll light a lantern for you,’ said the old man.
‘I don’t need a lantern, Uncle Billy,’ I assured him. ‘It’s only a hundred yards to go.’
‘Son,’ said Uncle Billy, earnestly, ‘it ain’t far, but if you go without a lantern you’re liable never to get there. Do you see that chap on the wall?’ and he pointed out to me the skin of a magnificent diamond-back rattler as wide as both of my hands, with twenty-one rattles and a button. ‘ Well, suh,’ he continued, ‘ them babies do their huntin’ at night. I was goin’ along after dark on the same path you ’re goin’ to take, when I heard a rattlin’. It seemed to come from all sides o’ me, an’ I stood like I was froze an’ yelled my head off for Rid Chesser, who was stoppin’ with me. He came out with a torch, an’ there, not a yard in front o’ me, was coiled up the snake who owned that skin. Rid, he came as fast as he could, but if you leave it to me, he was over twenty years a-gettin’ there. He hit the ol’ snake a clip with his torch an’ bruk his back. If I’d a moved one inch after that old-timer’s alarm clock started, I’d be six feet underground to-night.’
‘Yes,’ Pungie advised me, ‘you take a lantern, an’ when you go through that patch o’ dwarf palmetto you step kind o’ high an’ proud.’
Needless to say, I carried that lantern and probably stepped higher and prouder and slower than any man who ever visited Secret Island.
Just as I reached the little house where I was to sleep, there was a glow in the dim lavender sky, and very slowly the rim of a dull orange moon thrust its way above the ghostly live oaks. As it rose higher in the sky the trees were silhouetted against the sepia and silver water, and a still, unearthly beauty spread like a mist over the whole landscape.
As I sat on the top step of the porch and stared unbelievingly at the loveliness spread out before me, the same mocking bird who had welcomed me at twilight began to sing low and sleepily. Then, as the moon climbed the sky, his song became louder, and I fell asleep that night in the pale gold moonlight with his wild, sweet cadences thrilling in my ears.
III
Early the next morning, just as dawn began to glow through the shrouded trees, I was awakened by another song, entirely different from that of the mocker, and in its way much more appealing. From the top of a great slash pine close to the house came a pure strain of exquisite tenderness. The sound had all of the silver, flutelike quality of that song of the field sparrow which floats across darkening pastures in the North. In it too was something of the pathos and spiritual quality which one hears in the song of the hermit thrush. Hurrying into my clothes, I slipped out of doors and identified the unknown singer as a pine-woods sparrow, one of the most beautiful singers of all his large family. As the light became stronger he flew away, and I heard him only that one morning, but his limpid, crystal-clear song is among my best memories of the Swamp.
On our way across the prairie that day, a long dark animal rushed into the water from a little island. Its heavily furred body was so sinuous as to seem to flow along the ground as it shot through the bushes. Pungie identified it as an otter, and for a long time we pursued it by the line of air bubbles rising through the shallow water beneath which it swam.
As the sun rose higher and the marsh warmed up, Pungie suddenly pointed his finger toward a dim black mass showing in the bleached grass at the edge of a pool some ten feet across. I focused my field glasses on the spot and with difficulty made out the outlines of a huge, serrated body, black as death. There was something abhorrent to me in the monstrous figure — perhaps an instinct handed down from the ages when mammals were fugitives and weaklings among the dragons of the prime.
As we came closer, I could see that the eyes of the great ’gator were closed. Dipping his pole into the water without a sound, Pungie drove the boat swiftly forward. Suddenly, when we were not more than thirty feet away, a turtle slipped off a log into the water with a splash. At the sound, two murky, fathomless eyes opened in the alligator’s head and stared at us inscrutably. Then the crocodilian raised itself from the ground on four bowed legs, with an awkwardness which disguised the real swiftness of its movement.
Once I saw a toad approach an unsuspecting insect. Instead of hopping, it stalked forward on bent legs with a stealthy, swift, menacing movement. As I watched the alligator move, he reminded me of a great hunting toad. The body was carried high on bent, tense legs which could shoot it forward with unexpected swiftness, and as I looked I was glad that I was not within reach of those black jaws.
In another instant the great reptile had reached the edge of the pool and slipped into it with hardly more of a splash than a turtle would have made. For a moment the end of his muzzle and his two protruding eyes showed above the water, and then disappeared.
Our next meeting with this dark king of the marshland was out on the open water, when we saw what seemed to be two knots on a sunken log some distance ahead.
‘That’s a big ol’ he-one,’ said Pungie, and, as we approached, the black dots suddenly disappeared. Immediately Pungie stooped until his head was close to the water, and gave several deep grunts, an imitation of the love notes of an amorous alligator. At once the ominous knobs showed again, but went under as the boat reached them.
‘Let me take the pole and give him a poke. Perhaps he’ll come up again,’ I said rashly.
‘Now I would n’t never go pokin’ no ol’ bull ’gator. Howsomever, do as you like,’ objected Pungie.
With the idiocy of ignorance and relying upon divers authorities which state that alligators never attack humans, I thrust the pole down until it grated upon the ridged back of the monster hidden beneath the brown water, hoping that he might come to the surface again. He did! As I prodded the ridged back, it was as if a depth bomb had suddenly exploded beside me, as, with a tremendous splash, the bent, ten-foot body of the alligator shot above the surface like a black bass breaking water. I had one glimpse of a huge lashing tail, and then two grim jaws clashed together so close to the boat that they splashed water all over my face as the great ’gator fell back with a crash, nearly swamping our tiny craft.
For once Pungie showed speed.
‘This ain’t no place fer you an’ me,’ he exclaimed, snatching the push-pole from my nerveless hands, and with a mighty shove he shot the boat a dozen yards away from the mass of foam and bubbles the alligator had left behind.
Fifty yards farther on he came to a halt and regarded me severely.
‘Don’t you never do that again,’ he commanded. ‘That ol’ bull was snappin’ fer your hands. If he’d caught ’em he’d a pulled you under an’ rolled you until you was drownded dead. He’d a hid you up under some bank until you softened up a bit an’ then he’d a et you. Don’t you never poke no ’gator again.’
‘Well, Pungie,’ I gasped, ‘if you feel that way about it, I never will’ — and I never have.
Pungie told me of a similar experience with a porpoise.
‘They’re like ’gators,’ he said; ‘kind o’ sudden. Once when I was fishin’ with Zeb Kahler at Limb Sound we seed two porpoises comin’ toward us. They was goin’ under the boat like they allus do, an’ I told Zeb I was goin’ to jab one of ’em with the oar. “Don’t you,” says he — but I did. Each one of ’em was about ten feet long, an’ I poked the front one right in the middle o’ his fat back. The next thing we knew we were lyin’ in a mud flat fifty feet away, with our boat upside down beyond us. Both o’ them darn porpoises had rose up under us an’ shot us through the air, boat an’ all, like as if we’d been blowed up by a torpedo.’
The very next day after my experience with the alligator I had another reptilian adventure that was even more trying to my nerves. Pungie and I had been searching for the trail which led to Bugaboo Island, which was reputed to be haunted and where the ivorybilled woodpecker was said to be found. I was sitting in the bow and bent my head as Pungie pushed the boat through a fringe of bushes. Even as I did so there was a thud behind me, as if someone had dropped a piece of heavy fire hose into the boat, and I heard Pungie give a gasp. Then at my back came that sound which no man born of woman may hear unmoved — the fierce, thick hiss of a snake. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the head of a monstrous serpent rising from the bottom of the boat not a foot away. As I stared helplessly at it, the grim mouth slowly opened, showing the white lining which marks the dreaded cottonmouth moccasin. The snake had been basking in the upper branches of a bush and, startled by our approach, had tried to slip into the water, only to land in our boat.
It was the largest water snake that I have ever seen and must have been fully five feet in length and thicker around than my forearm, dingy brown in color with dark blotches showing faintly along its back.
I had nothing in my hands, and my legs were so cramped that if I tried to stand up I should undoubtedly fall out of the boat. Moreover, the snake was so close to me that any attempt on my part to move would probably be met by a dart from the curved, movable fangs I could see faintly showing in the white gum of the upper jaw.
I sat still, very still, watching the snake over my shoulder. It was so close to me that I could plainly see the curious pit between the nostril and the eye, which is found also in the rattlesnake and the copperhead and which gives their fatal family the name of pit vipers. The glassy, lidless eyes with their curious oval pupil, the hall mark of a venomous serpent, had an expression of cold menace quite as threatening as the fierce glare that shows in the eyes of the larger Carnivora when enraged.
A diamond-backed rattler, with its higher tension and more irritable temperament, in a similar situation would undoubtedly have bitten me. A moccasin, however, although it will open its mouth and hiss when approached, rarely strikes unless actually touched. Once the great cold-blood turned its hissing head toward Pungie, who gripped his pole like a pole vaulter ready to break a record.
For what seemed to me a long time I sat motionless, until at last the menacing mouth with its white satin lining closed, the great heart-shaped head thrust itself over the gunwale of the boat, and the monstrous body flowed after it smooth as oil, and, with scarcely a ripple, disappeared in the water.
‘I don’t mind a bear,’ confided Pungie to me a few minutes later, ‘though some folks get flustered when a big she-one charges, grittin’ her teeth an’ smashin’ down the bresh. A big ol’ rattlesnake or a moccasin, howsomever, gets my goat every time, they look so kind o’ unfriendly like.’
On our way back we came to a dead cypress, white as bleached bone. On one of its limbs, perched in a row, sat
six black vultures, my first sight of that grim bird. Although smaller than the turkey vulture and with less expanse of wing, the black vulture is yet a heavier bird. The sextette showed no signs of alarm even when we came close, but sat regarding us fixedly out of their red eyes like a dark company of witches.
Beyond the vultures we found a shaded pool from which Pungie dipped me a drink of the celebrated Okefinokee water, a rich golden brown in color, with a curiously soft, spicy taste. After drinking it for a few days I came to like it better than any other water. In the early part of the century, captains of sailing vessels used to fill their casks from the upper reaches of St. Mary’s River, which rises in the marsh, and at the end of a two years’ voyage the water would be as pure and potable as when first used.
My days and nights on the hidden island and in the heart of the great marsh passed all too swiftly. There was fishing, such fishing as I had never expected to find on earth — largemouthed bass, jack, bream, blackfish, and perch. The flowers and the trees were new to me and all strangely beautiful, and everywhere were the birds of the South — red-bellied woodpeckers, blue-gray gnat catchers, prothonotary warblers all gray and gold, and a score of others whose songs and habits were a continual delight.
Then, all too soon, came the day when I had to leave those lonely wilds and go back to live among the tame folk.
‘I wisht, I wisht that you’d spend a month here with me,’ said Uncle Billy, wistfully. ‘We’d have such a good time together watchin’ the birds an’ flowers an’ critters.’
‘I’ll come back, Uncle Billy,’ I promised.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Once drink swamp water an’ you’ll allers come back, but — I may not be here when you come.’