In the winter dry season, when the fresh flow weakened, the gators returned upriver into the Glades; in a real dry year, they would pile up in the few sloughs that still had water in them. Taking a skiffload of coarse salt in 160-pound sacks, I set up camp on a long piney ridge near the head of Lost Man’s Slough. Tant and Erskine were with me, also Lucius, who came along as camp cook out of curiosity. Working ever deeper into the swamps, leaving a trail of gator pools turned muddy red, we clubbed and axed for three weeks without cease, then stayed up late slashing the soft flats off the bellies and rolling them in salt by firelight. Around our camps hung that purple smell of heaped raw carcass; when we came back through, that smell had turned to the stink of putrefaction, as if the earth had rolled over and died. Lucius, thoughtful and subdued, lagged behind as the days passed and no longer nagged me to let him shoot the rifle.
One day we came across a big boar gator, fourteen, fifteen foot, in a little slough under a willow head. Having eaten or driven off the other gators, it did its best to scare us, too, emerging slowly from the water swinging its long head to run these two-legged intruders off its territory. By now we were low on ammunition, wasting no bullets: I jumped to one side and fetched the thing a solid ax blow to the nape. The brute thrashed back into the pool and kept on thrashing till it rolled and shuddered and finally lay still.
I got my breath and mopped my brow, getting a whiff of my own acrid stink in the steaming heat. “These big ol’ dinosaurs take a lot of killing, don’t they?” I said to the son behind me, who protested when I started to move on; I had to explain that the belly flat on a gator of this size was knobbed and horny, not worth stripping. He gazed at me in that open way he had inherited from his mama, then waded into the red water and touched the head of the dying gator. Leaving his hand there, he said, “Well, then, why kill it, Papa?” That turned me in my tracks. “Why kill it? That’s a bull gator, boy.” And as an afterthought, I said, “That’s one big gator less to come downriver, take a dog or child.”
This sounded like bluster to my son because bluster is what it was. Still polite, he said, “Papa? We going to stay out in the Glades till we kill ’em all?” We slogged on back to camp, where I told the others we were heading home. We all knew we had killed enough but it took a nine-year-old to put a stop to it. In the loaded boats, the flats stacked up above the gunwales. Any more would have been dumped out to rot.
At Everglade, we laid our loads along the dock to be checked and measured by George Storter. We were tangle-haired, bearded, sun-cracked, filthy, our clothes caked stiff and dark with reptile blood. Folks stepped back when we went into the store. Lucius said they recoiled from all that death on us. He never went on a gator hunt again.