Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen Read Free Book Online Page A

just can’t keep up. Damn vultures set hunched up on them dead limbs so stuffed and stupid they can’t hardly fly.

    The Frenchman looked like a wet raccoon—regular coon mask! Bright black eyes with dark pouches, thin little legs and humpy walk, all set to bite. Maybe his heart was in the right place, maybe not. Chevelier generally disapproved of humankind, especially rich Yankee sports that come south on their big yachts in the winter.
    Home people never had no use for invaders. Fast as the federals put in channel markers for them yachts, we’d snake ’em out. Us fellers don’t need no markers, never wanted none. From what we heard, there weren’t a river in north Florida but was all shot out, not by hunters but by tourists. Hunters don’t waste powder and shot on what can’t be et or sold, but these sports blazed away at everything that moved. Crippled a lot more than they killed, kept right on going, left them dying things to drift away into the reeds. Somewhere up around the Suwannee, we was told, they was shootin out the last of them giant red-crest peckers with white bills—
“ivoire-beel wooda-peckaire,”
the Frenchman called it.
    Course our kind of men never had no time for sport, we was too busy livin along, we worked from dawn till dark just to get by. Didn’t hardly know what sport might be till we got signed up for sport-fish guides and huntin. This was some years later, o’course, after most of the wild creaturs and big fish was gone for good.
    Sometimes the Frenchman’s hunting partner, young Guy Bradley from Flamingo, would come prospect in new rookeries along our coast. Guy was quiet but looked at you so straight that you felt like you had better confess real quick whether you done something or not. He was the first hunter to warn that white egrets would be shot out in southwest Florida. “Plain disagrees with me to shoot them things no more,” he said. “Ain’t got my heart into it.” I never did let on to Guy how I was collecting bird eggs for the Frenchman. Swaller-tail kite, he give us up to fifteen dollars for one clutch, depending on how bright them eggs was marked.
    One night the old man come home dog tired from Gopher Key. To cheer him up, I laid out a nice swallow-tail clutch next to his plate, but all he done was grunt something cantankerous about halfwit foking crack-aire kids setting down rare eggs where they was most likely to get broke. When he didn’t hardly look ’em over but just cussed me out, waving that shot-up hand of his to shoo me off, I recalled how Erskine Thompson warned me that the old frog croaked at everyone just to hide how lonesome his life was, so I try again, sing out bright and cheery from the stove, “Come and get it, Mister Shoveleer!” He didn’t need no more’n that to huff up and start gobbling like a tom turkey.
    â€œFor why Monsieur le Baron Anton du Chevalier ees call ‘Meester Jeen Shovel-
leer
’? For
why
?” He stabbed at the venison and grits on his tin plate. Next he thought about Watson and jabbed his fork like he aimed to stab my eyes out. “This
Wat-
son! Fokink crazy man!
Satan foo!
” Chevelier held up thumb and forefinger to show how close Ed Watson’s bullet clipped his ear that morning. When I wondered aloud if Watson had been joking, he shrieked, “
Choke
? With bullet? That ees
choke
?” The Frenchman purely hated E. J. Watson.
    Next day I rowed him downriver to consult with Old Man Harden. Nearing the Bend, I seen Mister Watson far out in his field. I edged the skiff in closer to the bank so’s he wouldn’t see us, then shipped my oars and drifted past so’s our thole pins wouldn’t creak. Damn if that man a quarter mile away don’t stiffen like a panther caught out in the open. Turned his head real slow and looked straight at us, then dropped to one knee and reached into his shirt. I felt a chill.