Lost Man's River Read Online Free

where some man tells how them Chokoloskee fellers killed your daddy.”
    â€œMy God.” Lucius sighed. “Tell him I’m coming.” Whoever he was, this old Collins knew what had become of Robert Watson, having somehow come by his remains before Rob’s own siblings even knew that he was dead.
    Pressing huge smooth hands to his knees, Billie Jimmie rose as slow as smoke, to such a height that Lucius Watson, a tall man himself, had to step backwards. “Gator Hook,” the Indian said. He set off down the white moon road without a wave. At the wood edge, he half-turned to look back, then disappeared into the dark wall of the forest, leaving Lucius alone with the strange urn, under the moon.
Gator Hook
    The day after the Indian appeared out of the forest, Lucius Watson drove eastward on the Tamiami Trail through the Big Cypress, which opened outinto wet saw grass savanna. A century ago, in the Seminole Wars, the Indians still crossed their Grassy Waters,
Pa-hay-okee
, to the high hardwood hammocks where palm-thatch villages and gardens lay concealed from the white soldiers. Since then, the bright waters had been girded tight by the concrete of progress, and a wilderness people, like the native bear and panther, could scarcely be imagined anymore. Of the half-hidden dangers which in the nineteenth century had sapped the spirit of the U.S. Army and led at last to its defeat, what remained were the tall scythes of toothed saw grass and the poison tree called manchineel, the treacherous muck pools and jagged solution holes in the skeletal limestone, the insect swarms which could drive lost greenhorns to insanity, the biting insects and thick water moccasins, opening their cotton mouths like deadly blossoms, and the coral snakes and diamondbacks on the high ground.
    Beyond the tiny hamlet at Ochopee, Lucius crossed the small bridge over the shady headwaters of Turner River, which flowed south through shining grasslands and the brackish mangrove coast to the backwaters of Chokoloskee Bay. In the fiery sunshine which arose from the Atlantic horizon, the stately pace of his antiquated auto, putt-putting and rumbling like an old boat, permitted a calm appreciation of the morning. Strings of white ibis crossed pink sky, and egrets hunched like still white growths on the green walls of subtropical forest that had taken hold on the higher ground along the Trail. Over the savanna flew a swallow-tailed kite which, in recent days, had descended from the towering Gulf skies, at the end of its northward migration from the Amazon.
    Delighted, Lucius stopped the car and climbed onto its dented roof to follow the bird’s hawking course over the Glades. Before him, the bright expanse spread away forever, seeping south and east over the infinitesimal incline of the ancient seafloor which formed the flat peninsula of southern Florida. In the distance, like a green armada sailing north against the sky, rose isolated hardwood hammocks, tear-shaped islands in the slow sparkling sheet of grassy river. The hammocks were rounded at the northern end and pointed at the south from long ages of parting the broad water that the Indians knew as River Long or
Hatchee Chok-ti
, transcribed by the early white men as “Shark River”—“the Undiscovered Country,” Lucius’s father had called it, evoking not only the remoteness of that labyrinthal wilderness but its mystery. “From whose bourn no man returns,” Papa intoned. In those days, there was no sign of man, only fine cracks in the floating vegetation made by narrow cypress dugouts, which left scarcely more trace than the passage of great birds in the Glades skies.
    Placing one hand on the hot metal, Lucius made the jump down to the road. Though the road jarred him, he was grateful he could still do this withoutundue creaking. He straightened and stretched and gazed at the silent savanna all around. How terrible and beautiful it was! At one time,