Everglades Assault by Randy Wayne White Page B

leader, the great fish gave an awesome slap of its tail and freed itself.
    I hadn’t noticed the dog. He had been watching the fish in the same way a cat eyes a bird.
    And when the leader gave way, the big Chesapeake didn’t hesitate. He jumped full-bodied directly onto the fish. He gave a loud roar, then dove under after it.
    But the ’cuda was way too fast for him. It disappeared torpedolike through the clear water.
    The dog wasn’t convinced. He dove again and again, eyes wide open, searching the bottom in water twelve feet deep.
    He looked and swam with the grace of a mammoth otter.
    â€œYou’re right, Hervey. That’s no ordinary dog. He’s shark bait disguised by a fur coat.”
    â€œI’d rather let him take the chance than rob him of the pleasure,” Hervey answered sagely.
    â€œYou mean he actually catches fish?”
    â€œHe’s pure hell on small sharks in the shallows. And every now and again I’ll cut a fish loose, and he’ll jump in and catch it again.”
    â€œI think that ’cuda might have taught him a lesson had he caught it.”
    â€œYou never know. He’s caught ’cuda before. Never one as big as that—but, like I said, you never know.”
    Finally convinced the fish was gone, the dog surfaced, blowing water through its nose. He barked once in frustration, scanned the horizon, then defecated with imperial concentration. He climbed back aboard on the dive platform, his yellow wolf eyes bloodshot with diving.
    â€œMind if we get under way?” I asked the dog.
    He gave me a sour look, then collapsed by Hervey’s feet.
    â€œI think he’s ready,” Hervey said, chuckling.
    â€œHow nice,” I said. “I’m honored.”
    I climbed back atop the flybridge and headed for Nine-mile Bank.
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    The water was so clear, you could see the shoals of Bamboo Banks long before they became a hazard.
    In the turquoise distance, heat shimmered over the shallows, and the darkness of them looked like a gathering of gigantic creatures.
    On the swollen expanse of sea and sky, I felt very small indeed aboard Sniper.
    After a steady hour of running, I picked up the markers at Schooner Bank, and just off intercoastal marker 12 I saw the first thin landmass since we had left the Keys: Sandy Key and Carl Ross Key.
    Someone in a yellow bonefisher casted toward an oyster bar nearby. The mangrove islands were like trimmed hedges.
    â€œJust about there?” Hervey yelled up from below.
    It was a rhetorical question. He probably knew as well as I that Flamingo wasn’t far away. He had spent his boyhood exploring the offshore reefs and the shallows of Florida Bay.
    But it was his way to let the man running the boat serve as the source of all knowledge.
    â€œNot far,” I answered.
    Once safely away from the crescent expanse of banks, I brought Sniper around marker 4 below the white sweeping beach of Cape Sable and headed east.
    There were more mangrove islands now. They looked frail and desolate on the open sea. Pelicans and frigate birds roosted on the islands, and there was the harsh guano smell as we cruised past Murray and Oyster keys and the distant silhouettes of Johnson and Dildo keys.
    The little settlement of Flamingo at the very tip of Florida proper was, in early times, a fish ranch and charcoal center. The pioneers there made charcoal by cutting buttonwood, piling it in neat stacks, then burning it. The boats would come across Florida Bay from Key West with food and supplies, and return with a load of coal—or cane syrup, with which the Flamingo pioneers supplemented their income.
    No one seems really sure how the place got its name. Some seem to think that the big pink flamingos used to come there in large numbers from Cuba, going strangely northward out of their natural range. Others think early settlers there just mistook the pink roseate spoonbills for flamingos.
    As I said, no one really seems to