“Since when does your work involve catching pythons?”
“It doesn’t, but once a biologist, always a biologist. My friend Buster is in charge of python eradication for the National Park Service. And God knows he needs the help.”
“From what I read, it sounds like the snakes are here to stay.”
“That depends on your frame of reference.”
“What do you mean?”
“In fifty years, South Florida will be underwater and the pythons will be Georgia’s problem. So you said the Warden Service is looking for a new chief warden pilot? Maybe I should apply.”
“Ha ha.”
“Who says I’m joking?”
I must have shown alarm.
“You should see the look on your face,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m just having fun with you.”
At the edge of the high beams, I saw a mud-spattered Ford Expedition with what I assumed was a snake-spotting tower bolted onto the SUV’s roof.
A wide-beamed man in jeans and hip waders leaned over the tailgate, rummaging around for something. He straightened up when he heard our engine. He had long gray hair beneath a camouflage-patterned fedora, a stubble beard, and skin the color of a baked ham.
“That’s Buster Lee. If anyone can find this snake, it’s him.” She opened her door and leaned out. “I’ve brought along a helper.”
The man’s drawl was so slow and syrupy it had to be a put-on. “The swamp’s no place for amateurs, Stevens.”
“This is Mike Bowditch. My game warden friend from Maine. You remember me telling you about him?”
He was wearing a safari shirt stretched tight across his belly. In one hand, he held a floppy canvas bag; in the other, a five-foot-long hooked tool. Presumably a snake-catching device. “He doesn’t look like any conservation officer I ever met.”
Stacey shook her head at me in mock disbelief. I couldn’t remember seeing her in such high spirits.
Despite the bug dope, the mosquitoes had already begun to mob the bare skin of my face and the fleshy parts of my exposed hands.
Finally, Buster let the deadpan drop. “Hell, son, I’m just having fun with you. Any friend of Stevens is a friend of mine. So you’re the warden she’s always going on about.”
“Stacey tells me you’re Florida’s champion python-catcher.”
He struck a heroic pose with the hooked tool and the gunnysack. “I don’t call myself that, understand? It’s an honorific others have bestowed upon me. But I’m not going to say I don’t deserve the title. Is this your first python hunt, Warden Mike?”
“They haven’t made it to Maine yet, fortunately—except as pets.”
“That’s how they arrived here, too.” He fastened a headlamp over his brimmed fedora and fiddled with it to get the beam properly aligned. “Florida is the world capital of unintended consequences.”
The raindrops slapped the flat leaves of the palmettos. Lightning flashed to the south, but the thunder took a long time rolling across the saw grass prairie. At least we would be safe from electrocution.
“How do you plan on finding a snake in the dark?” I asked.
Buster let his drawl drop. “The man who reported it said it was ‘in blue.’”
“That means its eyes were opaque,” explained Stacey. “It’s getting ready to shed its skin.”
“Shedding snakes go inactive,” Buster explained. “The little ones hide—because they’re vulnerable—but these big boys and girls don’t have natural enemies; they’re the new apex predators in town, so they just camp out wherever. Go into temporary brumation.”
“That’s like hibernation,” Stacey translated.
“Enough talking,” said the python-catcher, recovering his false drawl. “More walking.”
We began our hike, single file across a board bridge and down the wet path, illuminating both sides with our headlamps. Lush green ferns sprouted everywhere except in spots where pale limestone outcroppings poked through the humus. The trees along the trail were too scraggly to keep off the face-smacking rain. I recognized a few species from my nature guide: live oak, poisonwood, gumbo-limbo. All the trunks were crawling with big, banded snails like mobile carbuncles.
The mud sucked with real determination at my shoes, eager to steal them from my feet. The onslaught of mosquitoes continued, unabated. I wondered which disease I was most likely to contract: malaria, dengue fever, or the Zika virus.
“Don’t let Buster fool you,” Stacey said in a whisper. “He’s not even from the South. He got a Ph.D. in herpetology from the University of Wisconsin. He just gets a kick out of playing the cracker.”
“Kind of like your father, except he’s a different brand of cracker.”
“Touché.”
Off in the darkness, not a hundred feet away, something screamed. Not called, not shrieked, but screamed. My first morbid thought was of a young girl being stabbed to death.
Stacey didn’t slow or stop.
From around the next bend, Buster called to us, “Hey, lovebirds!”
We hurried in the direction of his voice and found the herpetologist huffing wind beside a bench.
He had his headlamp focused on the ground at his boots, but as we approached, he raised the beam just enough to show a pale, coiled form in the slough. If the python hadn’t been shedding its skin, I never would have spotted it.
Stacey let out a whistle. “She’s huge.”
“How do you know it’s a she?” I asked in a whisper.
“The females are usually bigger than the males.”
“Here’s a fun fact for you, Warden Mike,” Buster Lee said, taking a tentative step down the bank. “Female pythons can produce offspring without even mating. I’m not shitting you. Look it up. The process is called facultative parthenogenesis. Lots of human females would sign up for that deal, I would wager.”
“Do you want me to go down there with you?” Stacey asked, speaking fast in her eagerness.
“It’s easier for one person to grab the head,” he said. “Just be ready to pounce on her coils before she can wrap them around my neck.”
I had never been content being a bystander. “What can I do?”
“Spectate.”
I watched as Buster slid down the muddy embankment into the edge of the water, maybe two yards behind the snake’s pale head. The ghostly creature seemed not to register the man’s approach at all. I was beginning to think he moved with a certain unexpected grace for a person of his girth. Then he took a step forward, lost his footing, and fell face-first into the brown water. The splash caused the snake to awaken, and faster than seemed possible, it ducked into the undergrowth.
Buster sprang up from the drink to grab desperately at the tail. His fedora and headlamp had disappeared. Despite how wet he was, he managed to get a grip. The python—brought up short—whipped around with its pale mouth wide and bit him on the face. Buster gave a whimper, stumbled, and half disappeared beneath the surface, which the snake was now churning to a coffee froth.
I knew constrictors did this: used their backward-curving teeth to secure a hold on prey—or, also presumably, an attacker—but I hadn’t expected this one to act like a monster out of a horror movie, and neither did the two biologists.