H. Palmer Hall: Fierce Fauna

Beware the Fierce Fauna! (an excerpt from a lengthy essay)

Friday morning, August 15, 1997. Planning to take a ten-mile hike back into the Turkey Creek Unit of the Big Thicket National Preserve and shorter walks in other areas, I got up early and, laden with camera, telephoto, wide-angle and macro lenses, plus a SLIK tripod, drove north on US 69 from Beaumont to Kountze, Texas. After a quick breakfast, I headed north a few miles to the Big Thicket Information Center and got there before the sun rose. The park ranger, according to the sign, would not arrive until 9 a.m., but the hiking trails opened at 6 a.m. and would remain open until 11 p.m. "No Camping in Turkey Creek," one sign said. But I saw another, more important, sign:
WATCH FOR MOUNTAIN LIONS AND FERAL HOGS!
People who have lived and grown up in the Big Thicket area would never use "mountain lion." Those big cats have always been panthers and always will be to people named Hooks and Collins and OverstreetCall those people who moved into the Big Thicket area at about the same time the Alabama and Coushatta Indians moved in. All of them have heard panthers scream late at night and all have talked about how those big cats sound just like a woman screaming. But, since the 1970s when the Big Thicket Natural Preserve was carved out of large chunks of what remained of the original old growth forest, the U.S. Forest Service has taken over and mountain lions they have become even though there is not a mountain anywhere closer than 500 - 600 miles.

Recently, though, two "mountain lions" have been spotted back on Big Sandy Creek, just past Turkey Creek, and rangers have seen tracks along the muddy banks of both creeks. No one has mentioned spotting "scat," but perhaps the cats have strong constitutions and have waited until they got out of the Turkey Creek Unit to produce specimens. I suspect "scat" has become such an "in" word among environmentalists that someone would have reported the sight or smell of "cat scat" had it existed.

That feral, tusked hogs have been seen does not surprise me. When my great-great- grandfather and the same number of greats grandmother Hooks migrated from Georgia to the thicket in the late 1850s or early 1860s, probably to avoid being drafted into the Confederacy though there is no written record of that, they had pushed into the thicket driving both cows and hogs. So had the Collinses and the Overstreets and the other early settlers. Some of those hogs, over the intervening decades, had escaped and gone feral. It's natural that some would still be around.

So, when I stepped out from the trailhead, I was a little bit spooked. The beginning of that clearly marked path leads through slope forest with loblolly pines, giant magnolia trees, beeches, black cherry, hickory, long leaf pine, black walnut and a smaller cover of ironwood, bay holly and, in the wetter places, water tupelo and giant cypress trees. Not more than a few yards into the thicket, I spotted disturbed earth: pine needles rooted up, the top layer of dark brown dirt turned over. This was, I thought, a sure sign of hogs. Mountain lions would have come to the thicket, if they actually had, because, I assumed, of the hogs. Mountain lions eat hogs. And, if hogs were near the trail, mountain lions were probably not too far away.

Did you ever decide at the last moment that you did not want to do something you had traveled more than 300 miles just to do? That's how I felt less than a dozen yards into the woods that Friday. I was the only person there. The sun had not risen enough to shed good light through the canopy. I had spotted sign, yes, even what I had assumed was scat, of hogs. I was very much tempted to turn back and wait for more people to show up. I'm glad I didn't. That Friday, in the four different units of the Big Thicket National Preserve I walked through, not one other person would show up all day. I suppose the beginning of the school year and the temperatures that had shot up into the low hundreds were the primary reasons for my solitude.

When you walk alone in the thicket, everything seems extremely quiet except for the bugs that would like to feast on you. They buzz in, swirl around you and, if you are wearing a thick coating of repellant, as I was, fly on off to find a sweeter smelling breakfast. That's all I heard at firstCbugs. It was still too dark on the trail to set up the camera. Although the sun had already risen, the thick cover in this part of the thicket kept the trail fairly dark until almost 8 a.m.. I stopped walking for a moment and sat down to listen. For a few seconds, everything seemed quiet...again, with the notable exception of a few bugs. I put my camera bag and two quarts of water down on the trail and looked warily around. This was, I believe, the first time I had ever been hesitant about walking into the thicket.

Did I say the thicket is extremely quiet? I spoke much too quickly. The thicket is never quiet. When you sit very still and pay attention, you can hear the steady fall of leaves and pine needles. It sounds like a light sprinkle of rain. As the sun climbed higher into the tall trees that morning, two squirrels raced around the trunk of a long-leaf pine and everywhere they jumped I saw something fall to the ground: leaves, pieces of bark, cones. The thicket was noisy; I just hadn't noticed it until I stopped and listened.

About half a mile down the trail, I rested on a bank beside a large cypress slough. The sun had finally risen high enough that light, in particle-filled streams, slanted between the trees to hit the still water. I attached the camera to the tripod and mounted the wide-angle zoom lens on my old Pentax K 1000 The water was dark, slimy, a thick layer of lichen covering most of it. A log moved. I watched more closely. What I saw was one of a growing number of the alligators that have repopulated the thicket since they became a protected species several years ago. They live in the cypress sloughs and baygalls and all along Big Sandy and Village Creeks.

I heard woodpeckers drilling into the trunks of trees. Some woodpecker species are forever silent in the Big Thicket now, most notably the Ivory-Billed, a huge woodpecker which nested in the old forest long-leaf pines that have been harvested by the logging companies. Even the pileated woodpecker's numbers have been severely depleted and their distinctive sound is rarely heard these days. What I could hear was squirrels running around and around and, off in the distance, the cawing of black crows.

Everywhere, I heard the steady dropping of leaves onto the lush forest floor. Nearby some animal made a strange noise as it pushed through the thousands of pine needles and the thicker leaves of the magnolia trees. And I froze. Hogs, I thought, rooting through the ground matting. Picture this: I am standing on a low ridge that circles a dank slough filled with alligators. Okay...at least one alligator I have seen, perhaps more that I have not spotted. The water is dark brown from the tannin of the pine trees and a thick coat of algae covers most of it. I can see hundreds of cypress knees, some more than five feet tall. Some animal I cannot see is rooting in the leaves behind me. I have read only this morning a sign warning that feral hogs are in this unit of the Big Thicket.

What I do is look quickly for a magnolia tree nearby or two of any kind of tree close enough together or with low enough limbs that I can shinny up. Young magnolia trees are easiest to climb because of their almost evenly-spaced branches, the old ones that grow more than a hundred feet high in the thicket don't have branches until you climb twenty or thirty feet up, so what I really want to find is a young one. The last time I checked hogs could not climb trees.

When I spot a likely magnolia, branches drooping near the ground, I take off running and jump into the lower limbs. The young tree almost bends over with my weight as I climb five feet very quickly. I look around and see nothing on the thicket's floor but leaves, my camera and tripod and water bottles. I am not quite as stupid as that preemptive race to safety makes me appear. I know, intellectually, that if a hog had caught sight of me, that hog would probably have run the other direction...unless I got between a sow and her litter. And litters do not swim around in foul-smelling cypress sloughs populated by alligators. I know I have made a mistake. I am the only person in this section of the thicket. I have read a notice telling me that feral hogs and mountain lions have been spotted in this unit. I have heard a rooting sound and have over-reacted. I climb down from the tree.

As I walked back to my camera, I made a lot of noise. Should there have been what I truly knew was not around (perhaps lions and tigers and bears, oh my!), that non-existent thing would run from me if it knew I was here. When I got back to the camera and the slough, I listened again and heard the same scuffling noise. This time, feeling foolish, I investigated. I saw a small animal pushing through a matting of pine needles. Hardly anything but his ears were visible and an armored back curved like a narrow turtle's. What had frightened the scat out of me that early Friday morning was a small, absolutely harmless armadillo. They are not native to the thicket, but migrated from Mexico back in the latter part of the 19th century, after my ancestors had migrated from Georgia.

Spotting this small animal delighted me, not only because I had a simple, safe explanation for the rooting noises and the turned up earth, but because I had not seen an armadillo in the wild for years. No, they are not threatened, they are not rare, they are so common that I can hardly drive along the roadways of Texas without seeing them as road kill. William Cronon explains it very well in an essay he called "The Trouble with Wilderness":

[Remember]: the moment on a sandstone ledge, your boots damp
with the morning dew while you take in the rich smell of the pines,
and the small red fox--or maybe for you it was a raccoon or a
coyote or a deer--that suddenly ambles across your path, stopping
for a long moment to gaze in your direction with cautious indifference
before continuing on its way...and you will know as well as I do that
you were in the presence of something irreducibly nonhuman, something
profoundly Other than yourself. Wilderness is made of that, too.
(New York Times Magazine, 1995)

For me, that morning, a small armadillo had been my Other and had, somehow, made me shrink from an environment that has been a part of my family for generations. That day, I had ignored the advice of General Patton and had taken too much counsel of my fears. I watched the armadillo for a while, snapped some photos of the slough and the 'gator and walked on down the trail.