A Predator In the Woods (A 'Me Too' moment in the wild)

   She grabbed the fanny pack off the passenger seat and fastened it around her waist. Before climbing out of her SUV, she looked inside the bag to make sure it was still there, a compulsory habit since she started carrying a firearm seven years earlier. The Jimenez .380 glinted silently at her. Satisfied, she zipped the bag and glanced over her shoulder through the Ford Escape's rear hatch. She could see a man walking under the oaks towards her vehicle. He was tall, late sixties perhaps, carrying about fifty pounds of extra weight, and clearly dressed for the woods. She gathered up her camera bag and notebook and stepped out into the muggy August morning to greet him. 

  "Hey there, you must be Renee!", he called to her, closing the gap between them quickly as she shut the driver's door of her Escape.

  She didn't know what was in store for her today, and her anxiety, as usual, was, trying to get the best of her. But she took a deep breath and turned to him as she forced a smile. "I am! You must be John. Nice to meet you."

  Normally she wouldn't have gone alone to meet a strange man in the middle of nowhere, but John Buckner was a friend of a friend, so she had taken a calculated risk to come here. Her newspaper article about Florida's land conservation needed quotes to be credible, and who more credible than a newly formed nature park's land manager?

  As he approached her with outstretched arms, he warned her, "Hope you don't mind a little sweat. We hug around here."

  Indeed, she could plainly see the sweat mottling his gray t-shirt, and would have preferred a simple handshake, especially as she envisioned herself here on business. But this was a new chapter in her life, transitioning to a writing career, and she was determined to go with the flow. After the coerced damp bear hug, she forced another smile. "This is beautiful here!", she exclaimed, to which he replied, "It truly is. Where do you want to start?".

  Not knowing her options, she suggested they start wherever he thought best, so he first led her down a grassy slope at the edge of the parking area. John pointed out passion flowers and rare orchids in between telling her the history of the land dating back to the 1800's. At the bottom of the slope, he showed her the remains of an old mill where early inhabitants ground corn into grits. On the way back up, he told her how the current nature park began, how it was the dream of his dear friend, an ill friend who had become wheelchair bound. John claimed one of her final wishes was to see an Indian burial mound that the park's surveyors had discovered, but by that point she was unable to get there on her own two feet. By John's account, he and a park volunteer had lifted this dying woman, in her wheelchair, straight over their heads and carried her through the woods to set her atop the mound. It sounded a little self-congratulatory and martyr-like to Renee, not qualities she was fond of. "Sounds like your friend was lucky to have you", she offered, making sure to keep a complimentary tone in her voice.

  John continued with a speech Renee still saw as an attempt to impress her. "There's a lot of history here that we're excited to share with the public. But there's a lot of work to be done before we can even think about scheduling a grand opening. Luckily, we have a lot of volunteers with all different skill sets. And most of them come out every few weeks, but me, I'm here every day keeping things going."

  Soon they were back in the parking area under the Spanish moss. "So what do you like to do for fun, Miss Renee?"

  She took a beat to consider what she wished to share in this moment. "Well, I like photographing wildlife, especially snakes. And I live in a historic area, so I metal detect my property quite a bit. There was a resort hotel there in the 1800's, and there's an old cemetery at the end of the road from that time period as well."

  John grinned. "Then I'll show you something you'll really like." He led her to a nearby clearing where Renee was surprised to see a tiny cemetery. A mix of alabaster white and dingy gray headstones stood unwavering in the relentless Florida sun. Most displayed late 19th century dates. Renee pulled out her camera and snapped a few photos. John looked on, occasionally removing his ball cap to wipe sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

  It was late morning now and the August heat was becoming unbearable. Renee wished she could have dressed a bit cooler, but there were two reasons she hadn't - one being to prevent ticks and chiggers from crawling up her ankles, the other a desire to appear modest and unattractive to a strange man of unknown character. But her jeans were becoming damp and uncomfortable, and she was relieved when her tour guide declared they should get out of the sun.

  They returned to the shade of the mossy oaks where her Escape was parked next to John's 4WD diesel pickup. "Let's go look for snakes!", John said as he clapped his hands together. These were the words she had been hoping to hear. Most of her free time not spent writing this year had been spent finding, photographing, and logging Eastern Diamondback rattlesnakes on an online scientific database. She knew when and where to readily locate the crotalids while cruising rural roads, but successfully spotting one "in situ", a Latin phrase basically meaning as the snake appeared in its natural habitat, was another matter and one she had accomplished only a couple of times previously. She was anxious to try in an area wilder than her local horse trails and rural backroads.

  "I can drive if you like", she offered, but John quickly dismissed the idea - "No, I'll drive. You're my guest today."

  As Renee walked towards John's truck, her hand again sought the reassurance of the hard metal resting stoically at her waist. She felt comfortable firing the gun, and despite its bargain basement pricing, it had proven more reliable than the .22 mini magnum revolver she used to carry in her back pocket. Still, she hoped she would not need it today as she reached for the handle of the Dodge Ram's passenger door.

  As the door opened towards her and the hot air inside the cab spilled out, a familiar smell met her nose. It was reminiscent of her father's old pickup, full of greased tools, leather handball gloves, and his sweaty gym bag embroidered YMCA. At first, the smell of John's truck was a comfort, until she glanced at the bench seat in the back of the extended cab and saw several rifle bags stacked on the seat as well as on the floor below. The greasy smell in this truck was not her father's WD-40, but gun oil.

  Renee did not comment on the small arsenal, but pondered why someone, even a hunter, would need to carry so many weapons with them. Maybe her lone pistol was not enough for the day ahead. As John navigated the grassy field to the main road she had entered from, she realized she had little to no control here and was just going to hope for the best. Where the grassy driveway met the paved road, John surprised her with, "Actually, let's go get lunch first. Then we'll come back and look for your snakes." Without waiting for her response, he turned left towards town instead of right towards the nearby forest road. Renee gritted her teeth in annoyance but replied serenely, "OK".

  When they reached civilization, her tour guide swung into the gravel parking lot of a barbecue joint on the main drag. As they entered the front door, Renee noticed that all the waitresses seemed to recognize John, but not one of them smiled at him...kind of odd for a small town restaurant. Lunch conversation was pleasant enough. He asked why she liked snakes, and she asked what kind of wildlife he had seen in the woods. When they had finished eating, they both got sweet teas to go, and headed back out of town, this time passing the entrance for the nature park and turning instead onto a narrow jeep trail a few hundred yards beyond.

  "This is the part that's still in development," John said as he parked the truck in front of a locked iron gate. "We're going to create a network of hiking trails in here, but for now it stays locked up. I'm the only one with a key."

  Renee continued to silently question her safety, but reminded herself that John was not really a stranger - he was a friend of her photography buddy Bert, a kind older gentleman she had spent many camping trips with, a church-going fellow with grandkids, someone she would trust with her life. Bert was the one that had suggested she come here and write this story. Surely, he would not have knowingly put her in harm's way...

  John got out to open the gate, then pulled through and got out again to drape the chain back around the gate and post, but did not secure the padlock. "If anything were to happen to me in here, you need to be able to get out and go find help. There's no cell signal in the woods.", he warned as he threw the gear shift back in drive. It seemed an odd warning to Renee, but maybe he was just being cautious.

  "What do you think could happen?" Renee inquired.

  "Well, I tell ya," John started, "something really bad happened to me about 20 years ago. I ran into some bad people in the woods, not here, but over in the panhandle. They beat me unconscious with a baseball bat and left me for dead. But eventually I came to and was able to walk out of there. That's where I got this nasty scar." John took off his ball cap and pointed to a jagged cowlick snaking up the back of his scalp like an upside-down lightning bolt.

  "Holy shit", Renee exclaimed, secretly wondering what he had done to deserve such a beating.

  "Yeah, really messed me up. Took a long time to recover. There are still things I have a hard time doing, especially typing an email. It's just hard for me to put the words together. That's why I asked if we could just speak on the phone last week when we were planning to meet."

  Renee thought back to their first phone conversation. They had discussed the nature park briefly before John had invited her to come see it for herself. Just before hanging up, he gave her a recommendation about her attire - "You could wear your mini skirt and stilettos, but I suggest long pants and hiking boots if you've got 'em." It seemed a strange joke to make to someone you didn't know and had never seen. Maybe severe brain damage explained it.

  As they inched along the overgrown jeep trail at a snail's pace, John asked, "Do you know your way around a gun?"

  "Yes", Renee replied, "I've got one right here", she said as she patted her fanny pack. She wasn't sure if it was wise to reveal she was carrying but decided it preferable for him to not picture her as a helpless victim. She continued, "Sometimes Bert and I go shooting." Maybe reminding him of their mutual friend would keep her safe today.

  "Good. You never know when you'll need a gun."

  About 20 minutes or so into their wilderness safari, John stopped the truck right on the trail and killed the engine before declaring, "This is as good a spot as any. Let's take a walk."

  Renee had brought along her Canon Rebel and pulled the strap over her head before hopping out of the truck. John had parked next to a stand of pine trees, and thanks to regular controlled burns, the undergrowth was sparse, unlike so many other areas of Florida where suburban sprawl prevented proper land management. They walked under the trees easily, dry pine needles crunching softly underfoot. Just 15 yards in, something was resting in the shade on this 90 degree plus day. John and Renee seemed to spot it at the same time.

  "This is your lucky day," John said matter-of-factly.

  "Holy shit!", Renee exclaimed for the second time today.

   There coiled on a carpet of dried pine straw was an adult Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake of respectable size. The heavy bodied serpent did not rattle as they approached...in fact did not even twitch. Renee immediately grabbed the camera hanging at her right hip and brought it up to her face as she began snapping photos for the database. As John looked on silently, she inched closer and closer, expecting the animal to slither away at any moment, but it remained. Perhaps it was sleeping, as rattlesnakes do not have eyelids to close. Feeling confident that there was no danger here short of her physically laying hands on this wild animal, Renee got down on her knees before sprawling on her belly, elbows propped on the ground and she continued taking photos. This was when John pulled out his cell phone to take a picture. "Beauty and the beast", he commented.

   Much like John Buckner's stiletto comment earlier in the week, Renee found this comment inappropriate, but benign enough, and she smiled politely for his photo before rising to her feet and placing the lens cap back on her Canon.

  "Alright," John said, "let's walk down here to the swamp." He motioned for her to follow as he moved beyond the pines. Renee obliged, hopeful for another snake encounter, but as they reached the bottom of a gentle slope depositing them in the parched swamp bottom, something large moved nearby in the dappled light, crunching dry cypress needles underfoot. Renee's first instinct was bear, but John immediately identified the dark shape to be a wild hog, one of Florida's many invasive species.

  "How good a shot are you?", John asked.

  "Decent, but I don't think my .380 can take a hog down."

  "Nah, you're going to shoot it with this." John pulled a 9mm from a holster on his belt and pressed it into Renee's hand. Something about him trusting her, a stranger, to control his weapon was both flattering and endearing, but also odd. Renee studied the gun in her hand, determined not to make a fool of herself. John continued, "You're going to get as close as you can and when you have a clear shot, you're going to take it down." Renee was an animal lover and generally objected to any killing of wildlife, but she also knew how damaging feral hogs were to Florida's landscape. "Well, I guess I'm doing this", she thought.

  Renee crept forward towards the palmettos as John looked on. She felt silly and wondered if she looked like Elmer Fudd trying to sneak up on Bugs Bunny. The hog didn't seem to notice her but was moving further and further away as it foraged, its stride length matching her own, and she couldn't quite close the distance between them. When a hickory branch snapped loudly under her boot, the game was over, the hog taking off at a gallop crashing loudly through the brush. Renee had been moving along at a half crouch and now straitened up to look back sheepishly at her instructor. He was chuckling, and Renee wondered if he had really expected her to succeed. "Come on," he said with a smile, "let's go back and see what that rattlesnake's up to."

  They climbed the hill back to the stand of pine trees. When they reached the spot where the diamondback had been coiled, it was nowhere to be found. They had only been gone about 20 minutes and Renee was disappointed it had moved on. "It can't have gone far", she insisted as she scanned the surrounding forest floor. After just a couple of minutes, she spotted it less than 20 feet away, now recoiled under some vines blanketed in pine straw. "Good eye!", John said enthusiastically.

  She snapped a few more photos of the cryptic serpent before they finished the return walk to the truck. Once they were both seated back in the mobile armory, John turned the key bringing the diesel engine roaring to life with a puff of black smoke from the exhaust pipe. As they began to again roll along the forest road, John said, "I've got a spot up here you can pick up dinner. You cook?"

  Renee couldn't imagine what there was to eat out here but imagined it must be some edible flower or wild-growing vegetable. "Not much more than spaghetti," she admitted.

  "Perfect!", John exclaimed. "Have you heard of Chanterelles?"

  "Nooooo," Renee started waveringly, "what's that?"

  "Mushrooms. Real fancy, expensive mushrooms, like they serve in high end restaurants. We have them growing right here in the woods."

  As they neared the next stop on John's nature park tour, his cell phone rang from its resting place in the center console. John picked it up, looked at the screen, and silenced it before laying it back down. Moments later, it rang again. As John retrieved it once more, he said, "Sorry, I don't usually have service out here." Renee wasn't sure what he was apologizing for. As he stared at the ringing phone in his hand, he grunted, clearly annoyed at the distraction. After a few more rings, he answered it abruptly, "WHAT?!"

  Renee heard a female voice on the other end but couldn't make out the words. Then John's angry reply - "I'm in the woods with a woman, what do you want?" The caller's reply was indecipherable, but her tone remained unbothered and benign. Renee felt very uncomfortable, and kept her gaze directed out the passenger side window. John finished the call with, "I'll get home when I get home. I don't have service out here. I'm hanging up."

  "Sorry about that," John repeated. "My wife doesn't know when to leave me alone, so I'm just going to turn my phone off." 

  "Yikes, that's how you talk to your wife?", Renee thought. "She bugs you out here a lot, huh?", Renee asked in a commiserating tone.

  John went on to complain about how annoying and ditzy his wife was as Renee added bullet points to her mental list of red flags. At the end of his rant, John stopped the truck beside another stand of pine trees. "Look over there to your right. See all those mushrooms?" Renee didn't immediately know what she was looking at, but as she searched the landscape, her eyes became drawn to tiny pops of color on an otherwise drab carpet of pine needles and sand. "Those little orange things?", she wondered aloud. John confirmed, "Yep, those are Chanterelles."

  John reached behind his seat and rummaged around a bit before producing an old fast food paper sack. He handed it to Renee before turning to open his door and climbing out of the truck. Renee climbed out of her side and met him at the front of the Dodge where he handed her an opened pocket knife, then proceeded with instructions. "Try to cut them off above where the sand has splashed up on the stem. You'll want to wash them before cooking, but no need to take home any more sand than you have to."

  Renee, armed with the knife and paper bag, turned from John and started to walk away. What happened next was the final entry on Renee's mental list. "Go get 'em!", John said as he smacked her ass.

  "What the FUCK. Did that really just happen?" Renee maintained her composure in an act of self-preservation and continued towards the spattering of mushrooms. She did not turn back to see the expression on John's face, though her mind was reeling. "Was that meant to be a fatherly 'GO GET EM, TIGER' kind of smack?" After all, this brain-damaged sonofabitch was twice her age. She pondered his intentions silently as well as the possible outcomes if she displayed any signs of irritation.

  She thought about John's ditzy wife on the phone, calling to ask when he'd be home for dinner, and about his arsenal of well-oiled guns in the backseat of a truck she had to get back in if she wanted out of here by nightfall. So she filled the Hardee's sack with all the fancy orange mushrooms she could gather, and made sure to maintain pleasant conversation during the rest of the expedition. When John Buckner stopped the truck and told her to get out to look at something, she did. When he mentioned an upcoming event at the nature park, she promised she'd come. And aside from the looming threat of sexual assault, she really did enjoy the sights - a bear track here, a Luna moth there. These woods really were full of natural wonders that were sure to make this newly established nature park a success.

  When they at last arrived back at the parking area and her Ford Escape appeared like a mirage, she breathed a sigh of relief. Before departing, she allowed him to give her another disgusting sweaty bear hug, and again promised she'd return soon for another outing. But as she drove home that evening, she thought about the predator she had met in the woods the day - not the rattlesnake that did not hide what it was, but the man that took the time to feed her lies about his character before ultimately revealing that he was neither noble, faithful, nor a victim himself, but rather the villain of this story. And she went to sleep that night wondering, and doubting, if she had been the first woman he had told his wife he had in the woods...