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ON A FALL morning at Dead Owl Cove six months later, rays of the sun first touched the longleaf pine canopy, then climbed silently down the branches and trunks until, filtered by the understory, they cast a kaleidoscope of light and shadow, of warmth and chill, onto the forest floor. A breeze lifted off the water and worked its way across the bluff forming the lake margin. It passed over the anthills and into the surrounding woods, where it raised a fresh, life-affirming scent of fallen pine needles accented by holly and clethra.
In the forest, beads of dew still clung to drooping webs spun by orb-weaving spiders the night before. Wolf spiders, deadly hunters of nocturnal insects but tasty prey for ground-foraging birds in the day, retreated into their silk-lined burrows to await another night. Midges danced in a mating flight above a nearby stream. Their tiny bodies formed a ghostly cloud that dissipated and reformed and dissipated again, then vanished for good. Their brief performance was instinctively timed for safety--the little flies came and left too late for hungry bats and too early for dragonflies.
A biological clock also turned on in the anthill nearby, once the home of the Trailhead Colony, now owned by its lineal descendant, the Woodland Colony. A wave of activity spread down the vertical nest channels to deep nursery chambers filled with pupae and hungry grublike larvae.
Life was at its best this day, following a summer's growth, for the Woodlanders and their many allies and predators. All around the nest, caterpillar prey still fell to the ground from the pine canopy like ripened fruit, and mealybug herds grew thick on succulent vegetation in the understory. The skies had cleared during the night after a brief shower. Workers old enough to forage were poised to take the field.
As the sun warmed the upper chambers of the nest mound, some of the clustered workers made their way through them and out of the central exit. A few stayed close to rearrange bits of straw and charcoal, the heat-retaining debris used to thatch the mound surface. Others drifted farther away and began to patrol the nest perimeter, then pressed on into the surrounding terrain to search for bounty accumulated during the night--new prey, fresh arthropod corpses, and the sugary excrement dropped by mealybugs and other sap-sucking insects.
Within an hour human visitors arrived at Dead Owl Cove. They were the Panther and Hawk Patrols of Troop 43 of the Boy Scouts of America out of Mobile, prepared for a day-long nature hike around Lake Nokobee. They were led by their scoutmaster, Raphael Semmes Cody. They could not know how desperately he wanted to return to Nokobee, yet was unable to come alone. He had to have a crowd of people around him. The boys, turning to him often, served the purpose splendidly.
Shouting back and forth in the distinctive too-loud and honking voices of adolescent boys, they spilled out of the vans that brought them. They passed the anthill without notice and walked on to the trailhead. In their backpacks they carried waterproof notebooks to record their observations. Around their necks were slung cameras ready to capture all things visual. Their discoveries at Lake Nokobee would be gathered together later as a dispatch to Troop 43 headquarters.
As the day unfolded, Raff and the scouts saw a great blue heron spear a catfish. Found the shed skin of a diamondback rattlesnake wrapped partly around the stump of a longleaf pine. Watched a large cottonmouth moccasin slide off the bank into the water and undulate with insolent slow deliberation toward the shelter of a cattail thicket. Recorded mud turtles in the lake shallows, desmognath salamanders under wet mats of vegetation at the shoreline, bronze frogs calling, three kinds of lizards scurrying for cover, dozens of species of flowering plants, legions of flying and crawling insects none could identify. They saw twenty-three species of birds, including the main goal of the trip, the rare red-cockaded woodpecker.
The high point of the expedition was not, however, the endangered woodpecker. It was the discovery of a snake, eighteen inches in length, brilliantly colored from its nose to the tip of its tail with red, black, and yellow rings. This beautiful prize was uncovered by a scout when he turned over a dead tree limb lying at the edge of the trail.
"Coral snake!" shouted Raff. "Stay away from that. It's deadly poisonous!"
The boys, of course, moved close to get a look at the snake. But at least they kept well out of range, and one said, "Yeah, you get bit by that sucker and you die in an hour."
The colorful serpent started to push its way into the duff beneath the tree limb. Raff leaned over and looked more closely. "Wait a minute. Hold everything. That's not a coral snake. It's a scarlet king snake! It just looks like a coral snake. Hey, it's not poisonous at all! It fools everybody and nobody messes with it because they're fooled. Look at the bands: red, black, yellow, black, red, black, yellow, black, and so on. Coral snakes have red, yellow, black. Y'all know how to tell a king snake and a coral snake apart? Just remember the little ditty: Red next to black, you're all right, Jack; Red next to yellow can kill a fellow."
No one stepped forward to touch the reputedly harmless king snake. The protective mimicry used by the species for countless millennia worked its magic once again, and the scarlet king snake left the scene unharmed.
In late afternoon the sixteen members of the Panther and Hawk Patrols arrived back with Raff at the clearing between the trailhead and the road leading from Dead Owl Cove. They sat and sprawled on the ground to await the vans that would take them home, chattering about snake folklore they had heard and some half believed--of giant snakes, snakes that spit poison, snakes that roll in hoops, snakes that chase you on sight. And the Chicobee Serpent. Then they turned to football at Nokobee County Regional High School, the next big nature hike, and, for the few who could boast of it, travel to other states and abroad. Because an adult was within earshot, girls and sex, among the usual favorite topics, were not mentioned.
"Jesus, look at that!" a scout interrupted, standing up. He pointed to hundreds of large ants dragging a small lizard in the direction of the Woodlander anthill. A few yards away, a stream of their formicid nestmates passed in and out of the nest entrance, running in a ragged line to the forager group. Some turned around soon after reaching the lizard and sped homeward, apparently to report news of the bonanza to the rest of the colony. The lizard was mangled, its tail gone and its head nearly severed from the body.
Most likely caught and then dropped by a sparrow hawk or loggerhead shrike, thought Raff.
"Hey, there must be a million of them in that nest." The scouts now began to talk about ants.
Ten thousand, actually, Raff said to himself. He had settled apart from the scouts, on a knoll clothed in bunchgrass and low herbaceous plants in bloom. He could just make out a sliver of Lake Nokobee through the longleaf pines that fringed its shore. The late afternoon sunlight, having fled the ground around him, still lit the canopy of the pines and open water of the lake.
A faint roll of thunder came from the south beyond the wall of trees behind him, although the sky directly above and as far as he could see remained cloudless. Here, on the Gulf Coastal Plain, at the fringe of the North American subtropics, the weather was always changing. In the far distance, a thousand feet up, Raff watched a kettle of hawks and vultures leisurely tracing circles in the air. They rose on the last thermal drafts of the day, gliding stiff-winged in a spiral to gain height, then down and out to gain distance. Then they caught another current, rode it up and down and forward yet again. Together they resembled leaves in a boiling kettle of water. They were headed south, in their fall migration. They flew together, but were otherwise indifferent to one another. They were neither friends nor enemies.
The birds seldom flapped their wings. The moving air that carried them up and down like magic could not be seen. Watching the kettle had a hypnotic effect on Raff. He thought how powerfully liberating it would be to travel on tireless wings south with them, across the tranquil Gulf waters into some unimagined new land, and stay for a while.
Raff was very tired at this day's end, and his thoughts drew inward to become reverie. The voices of the boys, jumbling together, faded into white noise. Only an occasional loud laugh or whoop broke through their collective monotone. He had returned to Nokobee to see this small world that managed to hold together perfectly while human forces raged around it. This time it was a crowd of boys who made a visit possible, albeit unknowingly.
No matter, it was done. Nokobee was here, now and forever, living and whole and serene as he had first found it in his childhood. This was his sacred place, just as his immemorial ancestors had their sacred places. Nokobee was a habitat of infinite knowledge and mystery, beyond the reach of the meager human brain, as were the habitats of his ancestors. It was his island in a meaningless sea. Because Nokobee survived, he survived. Because it preserved its meaning, he preserved his meaning. Nokobee had granted him these precious gifts. Now it would heal him. In return, he had restored its immortality, and eternal youth, and the continuity of its deep history.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR SUGGESTING I write this book and for his wise counsel throughout its writing, I am extremely grateful to my editor, Robert Weil. For additional advice and help, I fervently thank William Finch, Kathleen M. Horton, D. Bruce Means, Anne Semmes, James Stone, Walter Tschinkel, and Irene K. Wilson. I owe much to Dave Cole for his close and expert editing of the final text. David Cain drew the map, placing Nokobee County with pleasing exactitude within the preexisting geography of South Alabama. And not least, I thank my literary agent, John Taylor (Ike) Williams, who with expertise, friendship, and refreshing good humor has aided me through the development of this and much of my earlier published work.
"The Anthill Chronicles," a section of the present narrative, is derived from scientific information about several real ant species compounded into one, documented individually, for example, by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson in The Ants (1990) and The Superorganism (2009). It is written in a manner that presents the lives of these insects, as exactly as possible, from the ants' point of view.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EDWARD O. WILSON is regarded as one of the world's leading biologists and naturalists. He grew up in South Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, where as a boy he spent much of his time exploring the region's forests and swamps, collecting snakes, butterflies, and ants--the latter to become his lifelong specialty. Descended on both sides from families that came to Alabama before the Civil War, Wilson developed a deep love of the history and natural environment of his native state, and especially of the region that made the setting for the present story. After graduating from the University of Alabama, he traveled to Harvard University to earn a doctorate in biology. As a professor there (now emeritus) he became a pioneering researcher on the environment, animal behavior, communication, and biodiversity. His many awards in science include the U.S. National Medal of Science and the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences--the latter the most prestigious award given in ecology. In letters he won two Pulitzer Prizes in nonfiction, for On Human Nature (1978) and, with Bert Holldobler, The Ants (1990). In recent years he has spent much of his time on issues of global conservation, while returning often to the South of his childhood and to the wildlands that nurtured his spirit.