Lost Man's River Read Online Free Page A

Mikasuki water trails had traversed the Glades from the east coast to the west, and permitted a passage of one hundred miles from great Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. In recent years, with the advent of the Park, the Indians had been banished from
Hatchee Chok-ti
, and the last of the wild Mikasuki—Billie Jimmie’s people, who refused to join the acculturated Indians on the reservations—lived in small camps along the Trail canal, guarding their old ways as best they could behind vine-shrouded stockades which hid all but the roofs of the thatched
chekes
.
    At Monroe Station, the old aid and rescue post for early motorists, Lucius turned south on the narrow spur which joined the Trail to the old Chevelier Road. Known these days as the Loop Road, the track had been reduced by decades of disuse to a narrow passage pocked and broken by white limestone potholes and marl pools. In places it was all but lost in the coarse crowding undergrowth of the subtropics, and brush and thorn raked and screeched at the car’s doors as it lurched along. Farther on, the road lay submerged beneath risen water of the spring rains, and frogs and crayfish and quicksilver sprinklings of sun-tipped minnows moved freely back and forth between the warm gold of the marshes to the south and the soft silvers of the pond cypress to the northward.
    But now the sky had clouded over, casting a pall of gloom over the swamp, and his sunrise mood of early morning evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius’s moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a dread and melancholy dragged at his spirits, as heavy as the graybeard lichen which shrouded the black corridors between the trees. In forcing his way into this road, he seemed to push at a mighty spring which, at the first faltering of his resolve, would hurl him outwards.

    Gator Hook was a shack community on a large piney-woods hammock south of the Trail. The hammock lay on the old road named for the Chevelier Corporation, which was named in turn for an irascible old Frenchman—an ornithologist and plume hunter—who had once attempted a citizen’s arrest of Lucius’s father. In the intoxicated days of the Florida Boom, back in the twenties, the Chevelier people had pioneered a track due west from the Dade County line through the cypress swamps and coarse savanna drained by the upper creeks of Lost Man’s River. Its destination was Chevelier Bay in the Ten Thousand Islands, a wilderness region advertised as “the Gulf Coast Miami.” The developers were confident the authorities would approvetheir road as the middle section of the cross-Florida highway, but at Forty-Mile Bend, the engineers had turned “the Tamiami Trail” toward the northwest, into another county. The Chevelier Road was still ten miles short of its destination when the Hurricane of 1926, followed three years later by the Wall Street Crash, put an end to the last development schemes ever to be attempted in the Ten Thousand Islands. By the time the Trail was finished, in 1928, the Chevelier Road had been all but abandoned.
    In the Depression, the sagging sheds and dwellings of the Trail construction crews at Gator Hook became infested by fugitives and gator hunters, hobos, drunkards, and retired whores, in a raffish community with a reputation for being drunk on its own moonshine by midmorning. This lawless place, eight miles due west across the cypress from the Forty-Mile Bend on the Trail, was cut off from the rest of Monroe County by hundreds of square miles of southern Everglades, which, together with the Ten Thousand Islands, formed the largest roadless area in the United States. In the forties, the old road was decreed a northern boundary of the new Everglades Park, but Gator Hook remained beyond administration, to judge from the fact that the Monroe County Sheriff had never once made the long journey around the