comfort into her ear. She tried hard to concentrate on what it was saying and was surprised to find that it wasn’t words at all. It was a sound, an easy shhh somewhere beyond these walls.
In a small voice that hovered midway between conscious thought and dream, she breathed, “That sound. What’s that sound?”
“That’s the saw grass,” he said. “A river of grass swaying in the breeze.” His voice was low with reflection from across the room. “Sometimes I can sit and listen to it for hours. If you wade into it and look down, you can see the water moving slowly, almost imperceptibly, past your feet. So gradually it makes you wonder whether we move through life or life moves past us.”
But Rennie wasn’t listening. She was asleep, lulled into slumber by the effect of the tea, the shhh of the saw grass, and John Panther’s hypnotic, regretful voice.
Chapter 2
With a weary gesture John Panther swept back an unruly lock of black hair that fell from his forehead as he gazed out the small-paned window into the fading light of dusk.
The air outside was filled with familiar sounds. Alligators prowling among the aquatic plants. A mad flapping of wings as a flock of great blue herons took to flight. The croakings of the frogs. The coocooings of the doves. All were as familiar to him as the sound of his own voice.
A mosquito buzzed maddeningly at his ear. He swatted it away. Beneath his breath he grumbled at the persistence of the pesky insect, yet he accepted its right to be there just as he accepted everything else about the Everglades, as natural, necessary ingredients.
He loved this place like no other. The soft, squishy land, the creatures that lived in the mangrove forests and swam in the still, shallow water, the grass, as sharp as saw blades, swaying hypnotically in the breeze, the sky, so endless and unfettered there was room for a whole month of sunsets in a single evening such as this.
If the mosquitoes had not been so thick and the land so soggy, the white men who came here would have split the mahogany hammocks for lumber and turned the mangrove forests into fertilizer and cattle feed long ago. Resort hotels would now stud the wild beaches. The land he loved would have been drained and subdivided and carved into lots, and he would not be standing here now looking out at its ferocious beauty with as much awe as if he were seeing it for the very first time.
The land itself was as flat as a Kansas wheatfield, but what to some was monotonous, John found hypnotic. It was what drew him to the window at just about this time each day, when it was neither light nor dark, when the world seemed to hover in a sort of limbo where there was no past to haunt him and no future to look forward to, when the sky was ablaze with color and all that mattered was the moment and the land. This was country that had to be understood. It was a wild, unforgiving place inhabited by dangerous, venomous creatures. And the most dangerous of all was the one that looked back at him in the clear glass.
With unerring predictability his thoughts drifted back to the past. It was crazy, he knew. After all, he wasn’t responsible for Maggie’s death. At least not in any court of law, tribal or otherwise. Nevertheless, he had tried, convicted and sentenced himself in his own heart.
He heaved a ragged sigh at the cruel irony. Whoever would have guessed how things would turn out? How, in a heartbeat, something could go so terribly wrong and change your life forever?
Sometimes, when the night was still and he lay awake on his bed of moss, he could still hear her laughter…and her screams.
Seminole women were encouraged from birth to be independent because the culture demanded survival skills, and Maggie certainly was that. Over her parents’ objections she spent two years at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe studying painting and sculpture. She returned to the Big Cypress Reservation to wait tables in order to earn enough money to enroll in an art school in San Francisco. She was working in a little luncheonette off State Road 7 when he walked in one day.
Maybe it was because she was Seminole that made the difference for him. She had no notion of him slinging her over his shoulder and carrying her off, the way the white women he had dated typically did. He was no savage. At least not in the way they thought he was, because he was Indian. If anything, being Indian only tempered his spirit and gave him a sense of his own place in the world and an acceptance of and reverence for the things around him. Being a loner at heart only added to the stereotyping and had made not dating easy. Until Maggie.
Maggie laughed at the white world’s idea of what it was to be Indian. She knew there was nothing savage about him. These days, whatever fierceness he possessed was born out of tragedy, the kind that wounds so deeply it turns a soft heart into a hard one. He wondered if Maggie would even recognize him now.
He never asked her to give up her dream of going to San Francisco. She did so willingly. And together they planned a new dream for the future. She continued to wait tables while he studied for his master’s degree. When he landed a job with the Everglades Research Center, she quit her job at the luncheonette to concentrate on painting and sculpting.
Having been born in a chickee made of cypress wood and palmetto leaves, like most of his people, John didn’t expect much from a world that was decidedly white and hostile. But a hundred years of white influence could not eradicate the one thing he was above all else. Seminole. In his Indian soul he had no wish to be any different or better than he was. He merely wished to be. Working in his own backyard among the creatures and cattails of the swamp, returning home to the reservation each night to be with his wife, was more than he could ever have hoped for. But happiness, like hope, was shortlived, and all because he killed a panther and was unable to come to terms with it.
He’d been tracking the big male cat for weeks, hoping to collar it and monitor its movements through the swamp to determine what was causing a decline in the population of the Florida panther. But the cat only came out at night, seeming to disappear into thin air during the day, the morning rains that were so common in the Everglades washing away its tracks.
One night, camped in a cypress hammock, he heard a rustling in the tall grass. In the next moment the panther was on him, claws ripping through his jeans and leaving a ridge of scars on his thigh. He managed to grab his knife and kill the panther, only to discover later that he’d killed a female.
Sick with guilt, he returned home, only to awaken later that night to Maggie’s screams. A male panther had tracked him to the reservation, and with almost human vengeance, killed his mate just as John had killed the panther’s mate.
Outsiders might have questioned the existence of a creature as smart and vindictive as a human, but in the Seminole world in which he was raised, he learned about the legend of the panther that the old ones told, and he knew how such a thing could be.
There was, they said, a long time ago, a proud and vain Seminole warrior who killed a panther while hunting in the swamp. In his arrogance, the warrior didn’t say a prayer to the Spirit Being for taking the life of one of its children. Angered, the Spirit Being condemned the warrior to wander the earth for all time by day as a man, by night as a panther.
The legend struck a particularly painful chord inside of John. Could it be that the panther he’d been hunting was the one the old ones spoke of? That would explain the clever way the beast eluded him. Some would say he was crazy to even think it, but deep in his Seminole heart, John wasn’t so sure. His curiosity was almost as great as his thirst for vengeance. But if myths and legends were supposed to teach us about ourselves, what was it teaching him about himself? Could it be that he was doomed by fate to follow the same crazy path as the legend, wandering around by day emotionally cut off from the rest of the world, at night adrift in his grief and alone?
