Manhunt. Volume 14, Number 1, February/March, 1966

Predator! by Robert Edmond Alter

Coz Tanner was a predator, a man who’d sooner spend half a day stealing a dollar than work honest for twenty. The big swamp was his habitat.

Coming back through the saw palmettos from the swamp pine island where he and Harris had laid the trapline, Ramsay paused to watch one of nature’s vicious little dramas being enacted in a squawk heron creek. An otter had caught a watersnake and it was trying to get the writhing thing up on a fallen cabbage palm to eat it.

The entire scene lasted about five minutes. And that five minutes might have been what cost his friend his life. But he could never be sure about that because he wasn’t a coroner — only a Park Service boatman. Still...

When he first stepped into the little camp he thought that Harris must be asleep in the puptent, because the small clearing seemed so deserted, so void of life and sound. It didn’t even enter his mind at that moment to wonder why the big puma’s hide wasn’t on the drying rack that Harris had rigged between two gum trees.

And then he saw the body.

His instant thought was that Harris was lying there as some kind of joke. The second thought, that he had stumbled and fallen on his face. But the third thought — the one that really didn’t want to come forward, that was almost impossible to accept — was the accurate one.

There was no mistaking the glazed eyes that were staring into nothing — or the punky gnat that was wading over the sticky, fixed right eyeball. A living man would have to blink.

He looked at Harris’ khaki-clad back and saw a one-inch wet red slit in his shirt. The kind of puncture that a hunting knife would make — just under the left shoulder-blade. Then he touched the dead man’s bare arm and it was still warm. That’s when he realized that the man who had used the knife was probably still close by.

And I’m slated to go next, he thought.

Harris, one of the fish and wildlife patrolmen, had come to Ramsay the morning before with a request. “How about you hauling me into Black Water Swamp, Ram? Seems a randy old painter and his bitch has been raiding them backwater farmers by Lost-mans River. Got one of Ben Toll’s heifers last night.”

He was one of those big, quiet, slow-smiling men. Born and raised in the Glades, he had taken to his job like a gator takes to a slough. Which was more than Ramsay could say for himself. He had left the Georgia woods simply because he’d wanted to see something of the country he lived in, and two years ago had found himself stuck in Florida, a penniless victim of the drifter’s curse.

To him this land of palm and bogs was a crazy place. Not only were there no mountains, but here even the water was black, not crystal clear like his home streams. He was sick of it, of his job too. He didn’t give a damn about Ben Toll’s heifer, but trying to trap a pair of pumas would at least help break the deadly monotony of taxiing tourists and entomologists around the swamp.

So he said “Sure” to Harris, and if the Park Service didn’t like it, they knew what they could do with it.

They loaded up Ramsay’s propeller-driven airboat with the trapping gear: four steel wolf traps with chains and dragging hooks, dried bait, a jug of barkstone, and a nine-shot.22 target pistol. Ramsay gave the long-barrelled gimcrack a wry look.

“You aim to shoot anything bigger than a poor-joe bird with that toy?” he asked. Harris pulled his slow grin.

“That’s for the painters,” he said, “and we’re lucky enough to catch ’em. You’ll see.”

The airboat droned by a picturesque little commercial fishing hamlet situated on an ancient Indian shell mound island, and started up the wiggly river. A good-god flight of red-billed white ibis thundered overhead as the interlocking mangroves gave way to the open vastness of the inner Glades.

Ramsay sat on his perch in front of the engine and nodded when Harris called above the whirr of the airplane prop—

“You know that big old pine island north of Duck Creek? I got that painter located there. But likely we can’t get that far in.”

“This buggy will go into water three inches deep,” Ramsay said.

“Not through no log litter it can’t.”

Harris was right. The waving sea of sedges and sawgrass was soon broken up by hammocks, the tree islands of the Glades, and the cypress jungles and pindown thickets began to crowd in. A maze of fallen cabbage palm logs and gnarled cypress knees stubbornly barricaded the waterway. They got out in the shallow black water and started unloading the boat.

A hundred yards beyond the thicket high land waited, with palmettos, liveoaks and swamp pines, and honest, solid earth for a man’s feet. They struggled toward the island, loaded with the traps and drag hooks, wading through knee-deep marl that sucked at their boots and hurrah bushes that clawed at their pants.

Nearing the cocoplum bushes that circled the big island, Harris paused and cautiously tried an open patch of marl with his foot.

“Watch out for this spot, Ram. It’s a sinkhole. Suck you right down to perdition.”

They staggered into a steaming jungle of gumbo limbo trees, wild tamarinds with frilly leaflets, and coffee bushes laced with grapevines — dumped their load and waded into the thicket to get another.

“You know Coz Tanner is out and back?” Ramsay said.

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“I saw him yesterday on Squawk Creek in his outboard skiff.”

“That so?” Harris didn’t seem to show any interest in the subject, which mildly surprised Ramsay. Tanner was a Glades man; born and raised on a shantyboat, he was one of those illiterate men who would instinctively rather spend half a day stealing a dollar than work a full day for twenty dollars. He was a swamp poacher of the first water; always ready and willing to kill and skin anything from a gator to an egret. He had a deep-rooted, almost atavistic, hatred of the Park Service and its patrolmen.

“Queer cuss,” Harris commented. “I’ve known him to even steal Liguus snails to peddle to collectors.”

Harris had caught Tanner three times at poaching. The fourth time he had lost his patience and turned him in, and the law had put him away for a year. Now he was out again and bearing a grudge.

“And a mean cuss,” Ramsay added. “Remember what he did to that fisherman at the Chokoloskee dance two years back?”

“Yeah. Coz is a randy man with a knife. Goan get him in real trouble some day...”

They set up camp among the palmettos. Harris wanted to keep the traps near the water where some big cat prints showed in the mud, so they laid the trapline between two palm bogs. He hung the bait over the concealed traps and sprinkled it with barkstone, which had an appalling odor that wild creatures seemed to go for.

“Well, Ram,” Harris said, “I sholy appreciate the hand. You might drop back in two days and see do I need a ride home.”

“I reckon I’ll stick out here with you if you ain’t got any objection,” Ramsay said. “I want to see you use that.22 on a puma.”

“What about your job?”

Ramsay shrugged. “I’ve been thinking I’d chuck it anyhow. Figure I might go up to Tennessee for a look around. They got hills and mountains there — and no gators.”

“Well, it ain’t my nevermind,” Harris said quietly. “But I reckon for some perverse reason you’ve sort of made up your mind to throw away something precious. Namely, your life. You got plenty of savvy and a good disposition, but you won’t stick to any one thing. Just keep hopping around like a June bug on a string.”

Ramsay frowned. He didn’t like to talk about his restlessness, or to think about his instability.

“I’ve been on this job two damn years,” he said defensively.

“Sure. And before that a month on a job here, five months on another there, a year somewhere else... Boy, you’re nearly thirty. Next thing you know, you goan look around one day and find you’re just another broken old bindle-stiff hobbling down an empty highway.” Harris thought for a moment, then added:

“There ain’t never nothing waiting beyond the next hill, Ram, if you’re just going there to sightsee.”

“Well,” Ramsay muttered, “it’s my life, ain’t it?”

“Yep. That’s just what I mean.”

Twilight fetched an expectant hush over the wet wilderness. It seemed to totter on the brink of darkness like a great glassy ball waiting to drop and crash. Then a limpkin wailed its sad sad cry and a flight of night ducks got up from the lake with a batter of spraying wings and took off. After that there was the chuckle and squawk of the herons in the creek.

And suddenly Ramsay was aware of a third human presence. He looked up with a start and saw Coz Tanner standing by a liveoak.

A lanky-limbed, big shouldered man, he could move as daintily or swiftly as a bobcat. He was standing there like a tall petrified man, grinning a plastic grin. That smirk and the deep set of his penetrating eyes gave him a demonic look in the firelight.

Harris looked around at him and stared back for a moment. Then he said, “Well, Coz. How you keeping?”

Tanner made no move, held his fixed grin for a slow count of ten, before he said, “ ’Lo, bastard.”

Ramsay looked at Harris to see if he’d get mad. But he didn’t. He smiled evenly, and said, “Have some coffee.” And when Tanner went on waiting where he was, still with that damn grin, he said:

“Ain’t no sense in bearing a grudge, Coz. I’d warned you often enough about killing gators for their hides, but you had to have it your way. Way I figure it, you sent yourself up.”

“I said bastard,” Tanner said.

“I heard you,” Harris said calmly.

“Mebbe you’d hear me better ifn I said son of a—”

“Get out a here, Tanner!” Ramsay said, and he started to get up. There was a hollow feeling above his solar plexus and the blood was tingling away from his face. He didn’t like fighting — always avoided one if he could — but he couldn’t go on listening to Tanner insult Harris while Harris just sat there and took it.

Tanner crouched, catlike, and his right hand flashed a hunting knife. Ramsay looked at the knife. The blade gleamed, the thin red light from the fire dancing along the edge like blood.

“Sit down, Ram!” Harris’ voice was sharp. “He’s trying to herd me into going at him. Then he’ll make with that fool knife of his and call it self-defense, and you’ll be his witness.” He looked at Tanner again and shook his head.

“Better get along, Coz. Go poach some wild orchids or some more tree snails. Ramsay ain’t goan fight you neither.”

Tanner wagged the blade at Ramsay, insinuatingly.

“I reckon he ain’t at that,” he sneered. He started backing, moving absolutely without sound, as if he were not actually touching the ground. Then the night shut him off, and all they heard was his voice — “I’ll be around, boy.”

Ramsay sat down, feeling the blood rush back to his cheeks. He looked at Harris who was complacently sipping his coffee. There was such a thing as being too passive, he thought. And for the first time he wondered if the patrolman was gutless.

In the heron chuckling dark a godawful outcry ripped across the swamp night. It sounded as if wildcats were being skinned alive. Harris scrambled up, saying, “C’mon! We got us one.”

Holding the.22 in one hand, a flashlight in the other, he led the way through the moony palmettos, heading upstream. It was a puma, a big tan male with a bloody mouth. He was snapping at the steel jaws of the trap in his pain and outrage as he writhed in the weeds like something gone crazy.

The trap had him by the left hind leg and the iron drag hook was pronged in the pindowns, holding him in place. When the beam of light hit him his wild eyes sparked liquid fire and he leaped at Harris like something from a catapult.

Ramsay sprang aside in a frantic jump — but the hook’s chain stopped the cat short in midair and piled him on his back. And then Harris stepped in, pointing the flashlight in the cat’s face, and as the big sleek snarling head started to come up he pulled the trigger and the.22 went pak.

And that was that. Straight through the left eye to the brain.

“My gawd,” Ramsay breathed, and then he started to laugh, from nerves mostly. “And I was wondering if you were gutless!”

Harris smiled, nudging the dead cat with his foot.

“If you can get in a shot like that, it gives you a nice whole hide. Bet Tanner would give his grampa for a skin like this.”

They cut a sapling carrying pole and toted the heavy carcass back to camp, where Harris went to work skinning the big cat.

“Mebbe tomorrow will wind it up,” he said. “Mebbe we’ll get lucky and catch that she painter right off.”

Tomorrow...

Now was the tomorrow that Harris had talked about the night before. And now Ramsay was bending over his knifed body.

Tanner has to be close by, he thought, or he would’ve already hauled Harris’ body into a slough and left it for the gators. He must’ve heard me coming back and hid in the brush.

He broke out in a cold sweat as an almost hysterical terror stole over him. He could feel Tanner watching him. Crawling into the puptent, he pawed wildly through Harris’ gear until he uncovered the.22 pistol. His head jerked up — listening.

Something crackled in the underbush. Animal — or Tanner?

He tried to think rationally. Tanner probably had a gun, but likely he wouldn’t use it unless he had to. Nobody could detect a knife thrust after the gators were through with a body, but a bullet too often left obvious bone damage. And there was a good chance that Tanner didn’t know about the target pistol.

The 22 will keep him away from me, he thought. At least until he decides he has to shoot me.

His best course would be to slip back to the airboat and go for the law. And quick. Tanner might already be creeping up on the tent. Again the hollow feeling came to his solar plexus, and he knew that he was scared. Honestly and completely scared.

He scooted out of the tent like a cat from a bag — expecting the shocking smash of a rifle bullet in the back at every step. Then he was breasting the whipping palmettos and he sprawled into the sand and scrambled under the cover of the avid fronds.

No rifle shot. Nothing. The silence was complete, but ominous too — like a mute monster watching solemnly from the jungle.

He crawled, staying under the palmettos until they petered out. By then he had reached the little footpaths he and Harris had made between the camp and the outer thicket. He started along it, trying to trot quietly as the flowery jungle closed in like the green walls of a narrow hallway.

Cypress roots clutched the edge of the path and fronds touched down every which way, and he didn’t give it a thought when his left foot slashed through one of the crisscrossing creeper vines.

Something instantly started to give and he caught a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye, and he threw himself sideways as a heavy ten foot dead log came crashing across the path.

He looked at the log, at the vine his foot had triggered. It stretched across the path, through a cypress root, and up the side of the log where it had been tied by hand. A deadfall.

He rigged a widowmaker for me, Ramsay thought blankly.

He left the path, plunging into the jungle and scrabbling down to the mucky bank and the looming thicket. He started wading into the ghastly marl, stepping over hoop bushes and clawing his way around the pindowns. The thicket thinned as he approached the log litter where they had left the airboat.

But the boat wasn’t there.

So Tanner hadn’t hung around after he killed Harris. He had gone directly into the jungle and set up the deadfall, knowing that Ramsay would come along the path sooner or later. Then he had hauled off the boat and hidden it. Where? God, it could be in any little setback in the thicket. It would take him hours to find it!

And Tanner was probably somewhere in the thickets too. Where? How near? He looked at the.22’s cylinder. No, he thought, and he quickly broke open the pistol.

One.22 long rifle cartridge. One. Because that was all Harris had needed, knowing that if he missed with the first one a second slug of that caliber wouldn’t do him any good.

“Ramsay!”

The gut-grabbing bellow reacted on him like a bomb. He jumped and shrank into the lofty tules, trying to see everywhere at once.

“Goan kill yuh, taxi boy! Goan feed you to the gators!”

Then Tanner laughed — a high, maniacal laugh that got a short-winged cooter bird all asquawk.

Ramsay crawled into the reeds, the echo of the savage laugh ringing in his ears. He realized that for the first time in years he was at the edge of a complete and violent loss of temper. Tanner had killed a good man, one of the few really good men Ramsay had known. And now Tanner was playing games with Ramsay’s life.

In an odd way he was almost glad that the boat was gone. Now he couldn’t run for help. For the first time in his life, out of all the false beginnings and phony endings, he was going to have to stick to one thing and see it through.

He snaked through the tules, under the pindowns and around the gargoyle cypress knees — then stopped in consternation when he suddenly found himself face to face with a big bull gator drowsing on a fallen tupelo. The huge saurian started to unhinge its ponderous jaws with a wet hiss, and Ramsay beat a hasty detour.

The marsh dust was balling in the air, covering him with a fine powder, turning to mud where his clothes were wet. The sun was straight up and hell hot, but the jungle was looming now, and he plunged through the last of the reed and gained the mucky bank.

Here at its outer edge, the jungle was thickly grown with cocoplum, bay and willow shoots interlaced with bamboo. The thorny vines tore his shirt, entangled his feet, snatched at his pants.

Sweating a pint a minute, he smashed through to a place where the ground was still marshy but the island more open. Dense laurel bushes crowded him, and the gums and bay trees and swamp pines rose higher, their branches spreading overhead.

Stopping to listen, he thought he heard Tanner following the run of the creek. But it might have been anything from a gator to an otter.

He crept along the path that led to the downstream bog at the foot of the trapline, looking right and left. He actually didn’t have any plan in mind. He was simply keeping on the move.

He came to an abrupt stop, staring at a length of grapevine across the path. It was partially concealed with dead leaves, as if a breeze had banked them there. Crouching down he pawed aside the laurels on one side of the run.

A six-foot sapling was cocked back to the ground and held in place by a forked branch. The end of the grapevine was tied to one tine of the fork. A hunting knife, blade up, was lashed to the tip of the taut sapling. A spring trap.

He triggered the vine with an outstretched foot. The fork flew out and the sapling sprang at the path with a swish, the steel blade describing a flashing arc. Ramsay yanked the knife free, looked around, and let out a sharp, painful cry — “Aagh!”

Dodging into the sheltering laurels, he dropped to his knees. His damp hand gripped on the butt of the.22 as he waited. He felt like a guitar after a quadrille solo, beat and trembly.

Some unseen limpkins moaned about his cry for a little while. Then they shut up and the silence picked up again, and there was nothing but the usual sing of the attacking mosquitoes.

Five minutes... ten minutes...

A redheaded pilcated woodpecker banked among the trees in its peculiar up-and-down flight pattern. Ramsay watched it go. Had it been flushed out? His thumb stretched for the.22’s hammer.

“Haw!” Tanner’s laugh exploded in the jungle.

“Smart bastard, ain’t you? Figgered to bushwhack old Coz, did you? Figgered I’d thunk I got you and would come booming along to see the body. But you ort a left my knife on that titi!” Tanner let out a crazy laugh, and a chill zagged up Ramsay’s spine.

“Now I’m goan show you real bushwhacking, boy! I’m coming at you, hear? But you won’t see me!”

He was now certain that Tanner had a gun — else he wouldn’t have risked wasting his knife on the spring trap. And Ramsay didn’t dare try to match the.22 against a real firearm. Conscious of his danger, he scrambled hastily to his feet and took off into the jungle.

He didn’t flee in absolute terror this time. He ran with an idea forming in his mind. Two could play at traps...

The jungle opened and he ran panting into the sawgrass. Four wild turkeys, flushed out of hiding, raced like streaks through the grass and palmetto and took flight, thrashing the air with powerful wings. Ramsay dodged in among a tall, lacy stand of Caribbean pines and cut back toward the creek and the pindown thicket again.

He was laying a track that a blind man couldn’t miss.

Nearing the pindowns, he turned south and started forcing a path through the devilclub and catclaws until he reached a little soggy leaf-covered patch of earth. The number two downstream trap was under those leaves.

With Tanner’s knife he cut down the telltale bait dangling from a gum tree, and pitched it into a witch hobble. Then he stepped over the concealed trap and pushed deeper into the devilclub.

Not three minutes later a piercing shriek all but split his eardrums, and all manner of little creatures went scurrying in the sky with a great beating of crimson wings. Ramsay stopped short with a tight grin. A moment later he slipped quietly back along the path.

He spotted Tanner from some distance away. The killer was thrashing around in the damp leaves like a wounded cougar, wearing the steel trap on his right foot. Suddenly he wheeled over, belly to the ground, and his eyes glared insanely at Ramsay.

He snatched for something by his side, and Ramsay piled sideways into the thicket as Tanner whacked out a shot.

That was that. He had a 30 carbine, and Ramsay didn’t stand a chance of getting close enough to put the.22 to use. He pulled back in the bush, wondering what to do next.

Tanner, evidently, knew just what to do. He knew he didn’t have a prayer of forcing down those powerful springs on the trap by hand, so he disentangled the drag hook and picked it up along with the connecting chain, and started hobbling painfully after Ramsay.

Ramsay understood Tanner’s desperate play. The killer was going to go back to the camp and find Harris’ jackscrew which would loosen the steel jaws on the trap. Which meant that Ramsay would have to get to the camp first and pocket the jackscrew.

The trouble was, he didn’t know where Harris kept it. It would probably cost him precious minutes trying to find the damn thing among all the patrolman’s gear. And all Tanner needed with that carbine was one clear shot.

Then he remembered there was one other kind of trap that he had completely overlooked...

He started laying a fresh trail back to camp, making it comparatively easy for Tanner to follow him. Reaching the marshy thicket at a point where the godawful pin-downs pushed far over the spongy bank of the island, he hacked a sizeable path through the tules and hoop bushes with the knife. The oozy marl was only ankle deep.

He paused, listening to Tanner’s labored breathing and gasps of pain, still coming on strong. And he knew then that Tanner was one of those hardheaded, iron-ribbed men who would never throw in the towel. Even if he never got the jackscrew, he would keep right on limping after Ramsay with that damned thing on his foot, until he ran him down and killed him.

Cutting reeds right to left, he forged on through the clinging muck until he reached the place where Harris had warned him to watch out. Carefully separating the tules with his hands, he veered around the danger spot and came back again on the opposite side of the sinkhole.

He hacked open a path in the tules — one that would look as if he had waded straight across the marled space. Then he slogged on toward the rising jungle, slashing and shoving at the damn Moses reed which was as thick as the business end of a broom. But not for far. He stopped, panting for breath, listening—

A startled cry splintered the silence, and he turned back.

Tanner had blundered smack into the sinkhole. Within two steps he felt the jelly like ground give under his feet, and he stumbled and fell and all at once he was knee-deep in gooey marl which seemed to suck at his legs like thousands of voracious little mouths.

He dropped the drag hook and snatched at a spindly reed, and it bent and snapped off in his hand. He kicked with his free foot and it swung free, but — as he took another panicky lunge — both his feet sank into the viscous marl which was suddenly as soft as warm mush.

He dropped the carbine and floundered wildly, beating the slimy muck with his hands. He sank — sank — screaming and thrashing as the ghastly, glutinous marl crept up to his crotch, to his waist...

“Ramsay! For gawdsake, Ramsay, help me!”

Ramsay, standing in the tules, looked at the helpless man and nodded. It was already far too late. He couldn’t reach Tanner without blundering into the sinkhole himself. And even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to pit his strength against the combined weight of Tanner and the steel trap and the chain and drag hook.

But a sense of compassion struck him, and that was why he nodded. At least he could make it painless.

He raised the.22 and took careful aim and squeezed the trigger on his one shot. The target pistol went pak with a jolt.

Tanner’s body lunged backward, bowing at the spine, and a thin bright red ribbon ran out of his right eye. Then he settled forward, his face in the brown muck and his arms spread-eagled. The marl oozed up on him, swallowing — swallowing — until only his cloth cap sat complacently on the placid surface.

Ramsay lowered the.22 and turned away. He had to find the airboat and haul the body of his friend back to civilization. He waded on into the marl and tules, searching. All around him now, the swamp was silent.