I wanted food, a bath. My own stink was overlaid by the creature’s effluvium. My belly rumbled emptily. I imagined dining on roast portions from Gordon’s fifty-pound turtle tethered at the campsite while I transmitted an endless Mayday on the radio. But the thought was a crutch; it didn’t ease my heavy sorrow. I was alive, on a day that Gordon and Finklestein would not see. They would be my first objective at Point E.
I laid the mutilated bodies side by side, expressed a prayer over them, and. burial being out of the question, covered them with a makeshift shield of palm fronds. Then I crossed the clearing to where the radio was—
A tearing sensation went through me. And I squatted slowly and fingered the wreckage of the short-wave transmitter. A heavy foot had come down on it in passing, crushing it under what must have been at least five hundred pounds of weight.
I could only hunker there, suspended in the prehistoric immensity of this place. I felt eyes watching me, felt the swamp humming a baleful promise all around me. Bamboo clicked softly, like the rattle of clods on my coffin.
Drawing a breath, I fought down the spooky feeling. “The hell with you!” I muttered at the swamp, and pushed to my feet. I wasn’t dead yet. This was still a Survival Exercise.
My first task was to kill and roast the turtle — rations for a trip north. Somewhere in that direction lay the only mark of civilization I had a hope of reaching, the old Tamiami Trail which crosses the ’Glades from Naples on the Gulf to Miami on the Atlantic.
By midday I figured I’d made five or six miles. My surroundings didn’t show it. From any vantage point the ’Glades were the same, an expanding universe of sawgrass and water dotted with hummocks like minor galaxies without number.
In the late afternoon I finally stopped to rest. I stripped off and bathed in a waist-deep lagoon off the perimeter of a hummock. Scrubbed myself with sand. But some of the smell of the monster lingered, whether in my pores or in my imagination. I no longer knew which.
I thought of a legend an old Seminole had once told me. It was the story of Stuestaw Enawchee. Literally translated, the words come out to mean “too much body.” In the old legendary application, the Stuestaw Enawchee were the gigantic beings from some netherworld that had inhabited the Rivers of Grass since the time of creation. They had come out of the great swamp to war on the first Seminoles a thousand generations before the white man appeared. The People, so went the legend, had a shaman who was sent down from heaven with a magic herb with which he anointed his body as he went into the swamp to confront the creatures. The herb killed off so many of the Stuestaw Enawchee that they began to fear the People and retreated into the great swamp, and the People were able to live in peace.
Trekking on northward, I thought about the Stuestaw Enawchee. From what I had seen I was certain that this legend was, like many others, grounded in fact. Troy and Ur were legends until archeologists went after them with their picks and shovels. The African legends of a man-thing were legends no more after Leakey turned up his first fossilized find. In the present case, Captain McCabe, it is imperative that you not dismiss the Stuestaw Enawchee — the SE — as a figment of a Marine’s heat-blasted mind. At the dawn of man, there must have been many such descendants of something that came crawling out of primordial slime, isolated and indigenous to this tropical wilderness a mapmaker would ultimately label the Everglades. The aboriginal ancestors of the Seminoles had discovered a poison, a magic herb, a bait that would kill off the SEs, beat them back, until it seemed that the hideous beings had vanished forever,
But forever is a long, long time…
As the gray fur of twilight spread over the reaches, I slogged onto a hummock and was content to sprawl belly flat for a while. I guessed that I’d covered about fifteen miles. Not much of a hike for a six-foot-seven-inch Marine? Sir. I hope you never have to try it through sawgrass.
I half-dozed, not letting myself think of where I was. After a little, I roused myself, ate a piece of roast turtle, and then curled in for the night in a tiny alcove inside a clump of wild palms. It was not much of a bivouac, but I slept anyway.
And then, when the night was old and strained in a hush, a mist came seeping out of a cauldron from a time when dinosaurs were dying… a body dew… a musk… a nauseating essence coiling over my flesh…
My eyes snapped open. I admit to choking back a scream. My heart felt as if it would burst through my chest. The palms rustled as the SE parted the fronds. The slow steps thudded, heavy beats measuring off the remnants of my life. The great hairy head blocked off the light of a dying moon.
I twisted around and got out through a break between the palms. Into the water once more. Running, fighting aside the sawgrass.
Behind me the SE barked churlishly.
I floundered onto a hummock. Wrong direction, headed south away from the old trail. But I had no choice. The thing was herding me back toward the depths of the Glades.
I could hear the splashing of the huge feet. Nocturnal creatures… quiescent by day, but by night imbued with powers of which I had no knowledge. I felt the sick certainty that the thing had antennae, a sense unknown to human beings — a guidance system like the sonar of a bat, the instinct of a Capistrano swallow, the built-in controls of an SAM missile. A tool evolved a thousand millenia ago to compensate for the bulk that made it hard for an SE to slip up undetected on its prey. No need to crouch and spring when the creature could dog its quarry to exhaustion.
Why had I been given a day’s reprieve? Because the SE’s unique function was impaired by solar radiation, the way sunspots interfere with our own sub-light-level transmissions? Because the thing saw better at night in the infrared range? It didn’t matter now; I was already scrambling onto another hummock, hearing the creature coming through sawgrass and underbrush, forcing me southward.
I turned right and went off the end of the hummock. Calmer now. Again staying low, taking the cover of the sawgrass.
I eeled my way across to the next island as dawn came, hot and angry red out of the east. Tearing through a wall of vines, I squished up onto firmer ground. A clearing spread before me. My footsteps wavered. In the middle of the glen was a low mound about ten feet long. And in the gray light I realized it was not a natural mound at all. I jarred to a halt, staring. The SE lay before me, stretched on its back as if asleep. How had it circled and got here? Why didn’t it move?
By then I had the knife in my hand. Then the scent came, that permeating muskiness, seeping through the dawn… from behind me. I heard crashings in the underbrush in (he direction from which I’d come.
In a crouch I circled the clearing, eased into the shallow-water, took cover in the saw-grass. So there were two of them. A living SE with the single thought of pursuit in its primeval brain. And one dead thing in the clearing. Not like any animal, either of them. Nor like any human. A gigantic blending of the two.
Looking back through the spiny green, I saw the living SE arrive at the side of the dead one. The living one stopped, and for a brief moment I seemed to be forgotten as it knelt beside the dead creature, took one of the enormous dead hands and pressed it to a broad, hairy cheek. The living one’s head lifted and the shrill bark-bark became a lament of pain and heartbreak.