“Buster!” Stacey jumped down to help.
The python’s distended jaws had fastened on his nose and chin. Gushing blood showed red in my flashlight beam. The coils wrapped around Buster’s arm, chest, and throat were as thick around as my thigh.
Stacey tried to pull the snake free, but her efforts only seemed to cause the serpent to latch onto Buster all the harder. I considered shooting it, but there was no way to fire a round through the head that didn’t risk hitting the man. What I would have given for a canister of pepper spray.
Then I remembered. I reached into my pocket and found the small bottle. I leaped clear off the bank and went into the water up to my chest.
Blood pumped rhythmically through Buster Lee’s fingers as he gripped the triangular skull. The fight had torn tatters in the python’s bluish hide. It looked like a zombie serpent.
As Buster muttered and moaned, I directed my pump dispenser of bug repellent at the snake’s squeezed-shut eyes. The poisonous liquid just ran off harmlessly. Then I caught a flash of pinkish white: the corner of the python’s mouth. I sprayed the exposed tissue with a shot of 100 percent diethyltoluamide: commonly known as DEET.
And just like that, Buster was free.
To his credit, the herpetologist continued to fight the thrashing, half-poisoned animal. He closed a hand around the throat below its jaws. Between the two of them, they wrestled the enormous serpent up the bank.
“Get the bag,” Stacey said.
I used the overhanging vines to pull myself out of the sloshing water. Then, on hands and knees, I crawled across the soaked grass to grab the burlap sack. I couldn’t imagine how a hundred pounds of serpentine muscle could fit inside it. Somehow they managed the feat.
Half-blind with blood, Buster knotted the top so the snake couldn’t escape. The sack pulsed like the gullet of a waterbird that had just swallowed a living fish. The wounded man then collapsed to the ground with a hand over his face.
“I believe I may need medical assistance.”
Stacey turned, blinding me with the headlamp she wore. “There’s a first aid kit in my Rover, behind the passenger seat. Grab it for me.”
As I took off down the trail, I remembered a similar incident years ago in which it had been Stacey who had been injured by an attacking animal. In that case, it had been a feral boar in the foothills of southwestern Maine.
It took me five minutes to return with supplies. I found Stacey clutching a handkerchief to her friend’s face. He might have been wearing a red mask.
“Never had that happen before.” His voice betrayed the genuine fear he was feeling. “Are you sure my nose is still attached?”
“Let’s have a look.”
I was struck by her calmness. Stacey had never been one to keep her cool.
In the focused light of her headlamp, I could see that Buster’s nose was ragged but intact. The python’s teeth had missed the major veins and arteries in his neck, fortunately, but his sun-reddened face was mangled and would require surgery to repair.
“How maimed am I?” he asked.
“Mildly,” said Stacey, squeezing his hand. “You’re mildly maimed.”
Buster blinked at me through blood-crusted lashes. “What did you spray into her mouth, anyway?”
“DEET.”
“No wonder she sounds like she swallowed a gallon of bleach.”
The snake thumped in its cloth prison. The sound made my heart hurt. The loud bird—a barn owl, I now believed it to be—screamed again from the darkness of the cypresses.
5
Mist rose from the crushed clamshells and drifted through my headlights as I turned in to the lot outside the ranger station. I climbed out of the Land Rover and stood there in the unbroken heat, listening to the night noises. The frogs were making deep, resonant grunts like an orchestra consisting entirely of tiny bassoons.
A minute later, the top-heavy Ford Expedition swung in beside the Rover. Stacey opened the driver’s door. Beside her sat Buster. His huge bristling face was bandaged from his lips to his hairline. The gauze was spotted with blood. But he was smoking a cigarette.
“Do you want me to follow you to the hospital?” I asked as she stepped out of the vehicle.
“There’s no need for the two of us to wait around there.” She waggled a key loose from her key ring. “Why don’t you go clean up at my house? I don’t know how long I’ll be. But maybe you can catch a few winks, and I’ll be home in time to take you to breakfast.”
The idea of showering at my ex-girlfriend’s felt like a betrayal of Dani.
Stacey noticed my hesitancy. “I won’t even be there, Mike. I’m sure Danielle will understand.”
At first, her use of Dani’s full name seemed like a jab, but there was no mockery in her tone.
Buster called from the Expedition, “I’m still bleeding here!”
“His injuries look worse than they are,” she said in a whisper.
“When did you get certified as an EMT?” I asked.
“Stevens!”
“Buster’s really a sweetheart if you get to know him.”
“So’s my wolf dog, but I’m careful not to get too close when he shows his teeth.”
She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me goodbye. The kiss was light but on the lips.
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, my GPS announced that I had arrived in Everglades City. Stacey’s rented house stood on elevated pilings to protect it from storm surges. It had a low, pyramidal roof, designed to minimize the impact of hurricane-force winds.
At first glance, the interior also looked like Florida distilled to its essence. Rattan furniture, tile flooring, potted palms. But mementos of Maine peeked out from the shelves. I recognized a box turtle shell I had found on patrol. And there was the edition of Audubon’s Birds of America; we had bought it from an antiquarian bookseller on a rainy afternoon Down East.
On the walls hung Stacey’s framed photographs of Maine animals: a moose and her calf, a lynx on a snowy road, an osprey perched with a fish atop a snag. These same pictures had decorated the house we’d shared for close to two years. She wasn’t a great photographer, but she knew how to creep up on wild animals before they spotted her.
Her finest photograph, though, was a black-and-white portrait she had taken of her father.
Charley Stevens looked sideways at the camera, his big chin raised, laugh wrinkles cutting lines in his weathered skin. His thick white hair stood up as if, seconds before, he had run one of his strong hands through it. His expression was one of faux suspicion.
No wonder she missed him. I did, too, in that moment.
I showered as fast as I could, marveling at the dozens of mosquito bites I had sustained in such a short time. Afterward, I stood before the mirror while the steam lifted from the edges of the glass. I hadn’t expected these feelings.
I needed to leave.
Stacey had texted me from the hospital with an update. Buster was receiving stitches on his nose and jaw for the snakebite. The copious blood had made the wounds appear worse than they were, as she had deduced.
I texted back that I was glad for the good news. I thanked her for the use of her shower. I didn’t tell her that I would be gone before she returned home.