Read Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island for Free Online

demonstrating. Unseen, he loaded a bullet in the chamber.
    “Put that down, boy!” Earl shouted, and snatched the revolver out of his hands. Then he turned and showed the gun to his friend Tom Dickey, brother of the celebrated author of Deliverance , James Dickey.
    “This is a military .45 with a special lockout,” Earl said. He explained that the lockout was a safety feature in case an enemy soldier grabbed it in close combat. Whenever the barrel was pressed against a person’s chest, the gun locked up and wouldn’t fire. That way, an officer’s gun could not be used against him.
    “How can a gun know how to lock itsel f ?” Tom asked.
    “I’ll show you.” Earl held the pistol against his chest and pulled the trigger. Halfway back, the trigger locked.
    “The gun isn’t loaded, but even if it had bullets, the trigger will lock when the gun’s barrel is fully pushed in by someone’s chest.”
    Earl demonstrated again, this time on Tom. He pressed the gun into his chest and pulled the trigger. It locked again.
    “That’s amazing!” said Tom.
    “Now, if I pull the trigger without the barrel pushed in by someone’s chest, the trigger unlocks and works just fine.” He nonchalantly pointed the gun off to the side and pulled the trigger, unaware that the gun had been loaded. Earl expected to hear an empty click. Instead, a bullet exploded from the chamber. It ricocheted off Earl’s table saw and struck Carol in the abdomen.
    Carol felt a gust of wind blow through her. There was no pain, only a whoosh of dizziness. She steadied herself against a chair. The room was silent. Carol didn’t realize she had been shot until her mom saw blood soaking through Carol’s white shirt.
    “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” her mom screamed.
    The room erupted in bedlam, but Carol felt strangely detached and calm. She pressed her left hand against her abdomen, concerned that her guts might spill out. Earl carried Carol out to the car and laid her in the backseat while Tom called the hospital. The paramedics met Carol at the emergency room entrance, loaded her onto a gurney, and rushed into the operating room.
    The bullet had barely missed her stomach and only nicked her small intestine. “I probably could have crawled under a bush and made it,” Carol said. But the surgery had split her abdomen, and she spent one long, miserable week recuperating in the hospital. “The only thing that got me through that week was the ice cream,” she said.
    Seven days after being shot by her father, she was tromping the wild woods again; she held no grudge but she never looked back.
    After graduating from high school, she camped in her cave beside the river, testing her self-taught, self-reliant outdoor skills. She bathed in the Chattahoochee and drank from its springs. She scavenged road-killed raccoons and squirrels, then cooked the meat over campfires and shared the bones with Catfish. She fished from the river and gathered salads of violets, dandelions, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, sow thistle, and watercress. There was plenty of food—even on the outskirts of the South’s largest metropolis—to eat well year-round.
    In the evenings, she sat atop the bluffs and scribbled in her journal. “Tonight the fireflies are truly in competition with the stars!” she wrote. “Where the bluffs meet the sky, it is impossible to tell them apart. As always, I wish for a human companion to share this with.”
    It was a lonely but life-changing summer: she proved that she could live on her own terms, by her own rules, without money or a steady job. In her cave beside the river, Carol made a lifelong promise to herself:
    “I’ll get as far away from the fighting and from expectations as I possibly can. I’ll live according to my own rules. And the only way to live wild and free is to not need money. I can’t allow myself to want things, because I’ll have to get a job and stay locked in that way of life. I don’t belong there. I belong