Read Acts of Nature for Free Online Page A

swallow the gator and ended up bursting open at its sides after it had the reptile midway down.
    Sherry stopped and put half of her sandwich down and stared at me.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    She just shook her head and looked out in the direction of our last gator sighting and after a long silent treatment asked: “Didn’t you say this boat is thirteen feet long?”
    By three in the afternoon I was sweating. We’d moved well west and the sun was high and there was no shade. Sherry had peeled off her long-sleeved shirt and was paddling in one of her simple runner’s jerseys. She’d done her hair in a ponytail that was sticking out through the hole in the back of a baseball hat. I kept the broad-brimmed, plantation-style straw hat on and had gone bare-chested but still built a sheen of sweat on every exposed inch of skin.
    We were working toward a gathering of pigeon plum and strangler fig trees that had started off looking like low bushes an hour ago but had now grown to a thirty-foot-tall hammock. Jeff Snow used the outcropping as a landmark to take a clear shot north to his fishing camp. Although the sawgrass and other vegetation was always changing and shifting, this season the GPS setting from this small island ran through a fairly open-water trail due north to his place and would be easy canoeing. He had explained to me, as I now did to Sherry, that inside the thick hammock we now approached was a cabin that had been built by one of the early Gladesmen. The owner had brought in most of the trees as small saplings with the idea of someday providing himself with shade. He had been more prescient than he could have imagined. Now you could not even see the structure inside and the root systems had eventually trapped enough moving soil to establish a foundation and the seeds the first trees dropped had proliferated.
    “Snow says he’s only seen an airboat slip into the place one time in all the trips he’s taken out here. Usually folks are pretty friendly, swapping fish stories and helping each other out,” I recounted to Sherry. “But he says he’s never met anyone from the place.”
    As we slid by some one hundred yards from the northern edge of the small island of old growth trees, the place looked deep green going almost black in the interior. An entrance stream actually looked cold to me and not in a way that beckoned one out of the heat. I kept paddling.
    “Shame to be out here and not take advantage of the view,” Sherry said as we passed. I checked the reading on the GPS and dipped an oar, catching a back current and spinning us north.
    “That’s not going to be a problem at the Snows’ place, I promise,” I said, changing the mood. “We’re about an hour and a half out.”
    Maybe having a specific time to the journey’s end challenged the athlete in her, but Sherry began to dig her paddle in earnest and I tried to keep pace. We made the fishing camp in sixty-eight minutes.
    Now here was Eden. The low buildings, three in all, were joined together by a dock, wide porch, and walkways. One building held a great room with a fold-out couch that made up into a full bed facing big windows and a freestanding fireplace. The kitchen was against one wall; the cooking and living spaces were separated by a standing island. The next building was a sort of bunkhouse for guests with bathrooms attached. The third was a small equipment shack for the generator and water storage and tools and such for on-site repairs. Most of the encampments out here were so constructed, Jeff told me, so that if a lightning strike or other accidental fire started, the flames would not automatically take out everything at once. This place had only been built in the last few years and the honey blond glow of the new wood in the late sun made it look warm, inviting, and almost magical sitting the midst of the low grasses and shimmering water.
    “Wow,” Sherry said as we got close. I was pleased to have brought her on a venture that coaxed