"Gator Hole, huh?" Sam remarked. "Well, Number Thirty-Nine was headed that way last week, so maybe you'll have some luck. But I guess you already knew that." Sam was lanky and thin, six and a half feet of skin stretched over a skeleton. He spit to one side without removing his hands from his jeans pockets. The thin brown stream raised a small cloud of dust when it hit. "Sure wish I could go with ya. But the count'll take all week. You could stay and help, ya know. We might even pay ya."

I smiled and shook my head. "You haven't got enough grant money left for chinese take-out, much less pay me. Hell, you still owe me for helping ya'll with the radios." Sam scratched his cheek as I stuffed the small bag of trail-mix into a side pocket of the pack.

"Yeah, well," he said slowly, "We were kinda hopin' you'd be around in the fall. We might get some digital units, and yer the only one around here that can talk to that shit. You know we can't pay ya, but..."

"But." I interrupted. I laughed at Sam's downcast expression and slapped his shoulder. "Hell, Sam, what else have I got to do? I'll be here in the fall. You just get the count straight and get some more grant money so _you'll_ be here in the fall."

Sam kicked my pack lightly, but his expression was brighter. "Ain't no problem with that" he said. "We got the most numbers we ever got this year. Twenty five cats, all accounted for. Woulda been thirty, but." He didn't have to continue. I knew. His face grew serious again. "Anyway, you still got that pea-shooter? Keep it with ya. I still think them cats was poached, no matter what Ranger Prick thinks."

I zipped up the last pocket and hoisted the pack to my shoulder. "I got it. But it was probably a bad collar. I'll see ya'll in three months." I stuck out my hand and Sam gripped it firmly.

"You ain't made a bad collar yet. Watch yerself. Good luck." He turned and vanished into the rusty Quonset hut. A loosely hung wooden sign door clapped against the metal as a spring pulled the door shut with a slam. "FSU/FG&F Panther Project" was engraved into the wood in lopsided capitals. Sam had carved "More Pussy Than You Can Shake A Stick At" underneath it after a few Tequila shots. I straightened the sign out and turned for my truck.

A dark green Ford F150 with a blue light bar on the roof pulled even with the bed of my truck as I heaved the pack into the back. I shoved it forward against the back of the cab before I looked up, wincing at the cloud of dust that followed the other vehicle and blew around my head. Rick always drove like an asshole. Probably because he was an asshole. He squinted at me over the top of a pair of imitation Ray-Bans, sucking on a toothpick stuck in the corner of his mouth. I leaned on the bed and nodded. "Rick."

Rick was what most people thought of when they thought "redneck". Sam was a country as you could grow in north central Florida, which is a lot. He was as much at home with a Pabst and pack of Lancaster tobacco as he was feeding telemetry data into a Mathmatica spreadsheet. I've been known to call him a `neck, usually when I'm exasperated with him. But he was as good a person as one could find. If he was day, Rick was night. How he ever passed his high school equivalency test I don't know, much less survive Florida's 21 week Law Enforcement Academy. His tan and green uniform hung loosely over his body, except where it was stretched tight against an enormous beer belly. You could almost still read the words "Florida Game and Fish Commission" on the grimy patch sewn on the shoulder. I was willing to bet that the equipment on his cracked gun belt hadn't seen a drop of oil or the light of day since it was issued to him. Work was an unfamiliar concept to Rick, who spent most of his day asleep in the back of the truck at the end of a deserted dirt road, or scheming up new ways to scam money without actually working for it. Usually illegal ways. He was, unfortunately, the only Game and Fish Law Enforcement Ranger in this part of the Everglades; and therefore responsible for securing the hut and the rest of Sam and his team's equipment. After a case of grain alcohol for specimens was stolen from the hut, Sam bought his own padlocks. Rick wasn't brave enough to cut the locks in the dead of night. Rick took the toothpick from his mouth. "Goin' campin', huh?" His voice was high pitched, surprising coming from someone with his bulk. No doubt a constant source of ridicule for him. I couldn't make myself feel any sympathy.

"Yeah. Season's over, and they don't need my help any more. Thought I'd go relax." "You don't mind my sayin' so, but spending the night inna swamp full a' skeeters and gator piss ain't my idea a' relaxation." He replaced the toothpick and yanked the truck into gear. I started to turn, used to his full-throttle, tire spinning, dust-cloud producing departures; when he spoke again. "Say. you goin' campin' over by Gator Hole?"

I stopped before answering. His tone was a little too nonchalant. Something in my hindbrain buzzed a warning. I was sufficiently annoyed with him to want to lie, anyway. "No, I thought I'd go up Tamiani to Franklin's Hammock. Nice scenery."

He grunted. "Whatever." The truck slid sideways a couple of feet as he accelerated away, fighting with the steering to keep it somewhat straight. "Pisshead" I muttered to myself, and shook the dust off of my pack.

Dinner was simple; some canned vegetables and a frozen porkchop that I'd allowed to thaw on the hike in. Tomorrow I'd do a little fishing for dinner. I had plenty of freeze-dried rations and ex-military MRE packages. I learned the hard way that I wasn't exactly king of the jungle when it came to living off the land. I sopped up the last juices from the plate with a slice of bread and tossed my napkin into the small campfire. I stretched myself out on my air mattress and watched the flames devour the paper, the ashes dropping into the red heart of the fire; the dancing, shifting cauldron of heat that's captured men's eyes and imaginations since Prometheus dropped the first coal. I thought about my life up until now, and my life in years ahead. Certainly I hadn't fulfilled all of my childhood ambitions; I hadn't even come close to achieving my parent's idea of success. At thirty, I was mostly still an itinerant worker; taking odd jobs where they fell and living in a battered airstream in a central Florida trailer park. I never finished my college degree, begun so long ago. I never married, never raised grandchildren for my parents, never became an executive with plenty of disposable income. But I felt like I was very close to achieving something; something that I'd been chasing all of my rememberable life; a goal as fleeting and elusive as the panther I hoped to sight this week.

I'd left college some years before and headed south on a whim. My parents never understood; they still asked when I called them if I'd settled down and gotten a real job. None of my professors ever understood; they all pointed at my grades and test scores and told me I had potential, if only I'd live up to it. _Up_ to it. The things that enchanted me as a child and teen turned to sour ash in my mouth when I reached college. I used to steal my sister's college biology texts and read them; I used to stare in wonder at a drop of pond water on a microscope slide; I used to sit for hours and count the bright explosions of color that were the birds in the woods behind my house; I used to follow the tracks of raccoons in the mud banks of a creek into the woods. I entered college ready to learn, needing to learn; wanting to be shown the things that my own explorations had only hinted at.

What I learned was that I was to be force-fed facts and figures and information at a hectic pace, shuffled through a mill with thirty thousand other eager faces that would soon enough lose their youthful smoothness. I spooned the gray mush they provided into my brain as fast as I could, until one day I gagged on it. I looked in the mirror and saw my hair turning gray and my eyes perched above puffy bags. My grades plummeted and my advisors merely clucked. You should _apply_ yourself. You have _such_ potential. One night I sat and thought about what I was doing. What was it I wanted, after all? What was I getting this education for? I had always told myself I wanted to research predators; had toyed with the idea of joining a research project chasing clouded leopards or counting wolf packs. I still did, but I couldn't stomach the idea of one more day of mind-numbing recitation in a classroom. I sold what I had and drove south, stopping at the Everglades. I took whatever shit jobs I could and spent my off days slucking through the swamp, looking for the last Florida Panthers in the world. I collected an amazing number of insect bites and learned to identify every living creature I saw. but found no panthers.

I ran across Sam and his motley collection of graduate students in a Lake Okeechobee bar. Sam was going toe to toe with a burly sugarcane plantation worker who had sourly suggested bulldozing the entire swamp and paving it over. Sam had drunkenly suggested that he shove his pavement up his fifth point of contact. It would have been a short fight, even though the plantation worker wasn't drinking with friends; Sam was far too drunk. But even the largest of men have a weak point, and my boot found his. I dragged Sam out of the bar before the man collected what was left of his kneecap and came looking for us.

Sam and his team were working from grant to grant, radio-tagging panthers and studying their movements. They had had very little luck, dealing with the attitudes of the locals and the vagaries of worn out telemetry equipment. I began to hang around their hut more and more often, helping out here and there, gradually confiding in them my need to find a panther with my own eyes. I managed to fix a couple of their balky collars- and my friends said ham radio was a useless hobby- and in return they took me with them on their trap-and-tag expeditions. I was upset at first with their methods; it seemed horribly unfair to chase an animal with dogs and then shoot it with a tranquilizing dart, even if you were doing it to save their very existence. Sam explained that if they had any other way, they'd use it; but that none of his team had ever found a panther without dogs or other assistance. None of them had ever seen one of the cats in its own environment, unmolested. The cats were far too good at hiding.

For all their skill at remaining elusive, they were fast on the downhill slide to extinction. They were only a subspecies of mountain lion; a cougar that made the swamp its home. But there were fewer than a hundred of these swamp cats left; a mere handful in terms of genetic viability. The first time I cradled one of the cat's heads in my lap as Sam measured it, I cried quietly. The cat stared at me with fixed eyes, unable to so much as twitch under the chemically induced narcolepsy. Some of the grad students were uncomfortable around me after that, but Sam understood. This was his third year of tagging cats, and he didn't expect there to be many more in the future.

So now I lay on my side in the middle of one of the largest swamps on the planet, staring at the coals of a fire while planning how I could see a cat in its element, unassisted by radio chips or dogs or support trucks. Sam and his crew were even now collating the endless reams of data we'd collected over the last ten months, preparing his paper to the doctorate committee and scraping for more funds from the state. We both agreed that Gator Hole was the likely center of a three year old male panther's territory; and that he was headed back for it in his never-ending trek around its borders. I planned to plant myself firmly in his path in the hopes that he'd keep heading here. What I would do afterwards, success or failure, I didn't know.

I began to drift into sleep. My mind, semi-conscious, began to return to a very familiar place; a place I'd been many times before in fantasy. A place very much like Gator Hole, but without the intrusion of mosquitoes or airboats. A place where I was met by a lithe female panther-human; a cat who walked erect on two legs and whose eyes sparkled with mirthful intelligence. Her fur was grayish-tan, and creamy white on her chest and loins. She sat on my chest and let me play with the pink nipples that pushed through the thick fur; her crotch growing moister on my chest as my own erection grew. Presently she lay across me, slowly dragging her body across mine; inches from my face. She stopped with her hips suspended over my head. The lips of her vulva were black and hidden in the dense white fur; but my tongue found its way inside to the damp pinkness, tickled her clitoris and probed further before returning. Her musk was thick in my nostrils and my own hips were making small, involuntary thrusts. She sensed that I was about to lose control of myself and moved sensuously away. I pushed myself up and followed her around the pool; she slowly let me catch up with her and until we were both on our hands and knees, one behind the other. I nuzzled her soft vulva until she began pushing back with her hips, and then grasped her waist. My penis slid into her vagina slowly; I was blinded by the sensations as her body swallowed my member. We remained completely still for a few moments, both of us awash in sensation, and then began a slow, rhythmic dance.

They were half a mile away, and I caught up with them as they were closing in on their dogs. There were three of them; one grizzled, cadaverous old man and two portly middle aged ones. They had stopped the 4-wheelers some distance back, and I followed them from a distance as they pulled out powerful hand-held spotlights and walked towards the baying hounds. Each one of them carried a scoped rifle, and the larger of the two younger men had a chromed revolver holstered at his hip. The dogs were jumping around a huge live oak, baying and crying at the panther that was perched in a high branch, scowling and hissing at the intruders. The smaller younger man clipped a lead on the dogs and began dragging them back towards the vehicles while the other two speared the cat with the beams of their lights. I stayed about thirty yards out, clutching the carbine with one hand and the scaly bark of a cypress with the other. I was frozen, unable to interfere with what I knew was about to happen. But they just stood there, staring at the cat.

"Well, that ol' shitheel was right" the old man said. "He ain't worth tha time it'd take to spit on him, but I'll be fucked if he don't know how ta find a painter." He spit on the tree and wiped his mouth with the back of his free hand. The other man snorted.

"Shit, he ain't nothin'. He goes and farts around with them college kids that're puttin' them radio things on `em, and finds out where the cats `re. He come cheap, too; all I hadda do was tell `im I'd tell the districk ranger what he was doin' and he told me every'thing for fitty bucks. Ya know what them kids call `im? Ranger Prick." Both men guffawed at that. My limbs went icy, remembering this morning when Rick had asked me where I was going. He knew the poachers would be here, and didn't want me in the way. I was still sorting through it in my mind when the rifle shots startled me back to attention. I looked up in time to see the body of the panther fall from the tree and hit the ground near the men with a thud. The younger man shot it again with his revolver. The old man batted at the gun, angered at the additional damage to the valuable pelt. The younger man just shrugged. "He was still movin'."

The carbine came to my shoulder of its own volition. The head of the younger man was framed in the rear peep, perched on the front sight post. I fired twice, the gun barely moving under the light charge of the rounds. The man dropped his pistol and swatted at his face, but the small copper rounds had already done their damage. I swung the rifle around to the chest of the older man, who was looking wildly around at the trees as his partner dropped lifeless to the hammock floor. He flinched as three slugs tore through his chest; hunched over himself and began to run towards the 4-wheelers. I continued firing into his back until the bolt locked back on an empty magazine. He was laying motionless on the ground in any case.

The third man stared at the body of the old man, his jaw agape. He stood there for a full minute, more than enough time for me to cross the intervening distance. He flinched when he saw me running for him, carbine held high in both hands for a buttstroke. He forgot completely about the rifle slung on his shoulder and turned to run for the closest 4-wheeler. The metal buttplate of the carbine struck him just behind the ear, causing him to stumble to his knees; the second stroke landed on his shoulder and knocked him onto his back. His hands raised to protect his face, but soon fell feebly to the carpet of cypress needles. I stopped only after the wooden stock splintered and broke, but by then the ground was thoroughly soaked with his blood.

I walked numbly back to my campsite. I retained enough sense to go back with my flashlight and collect the empty .30 cases from the carbine. I couldn't make myself look at the body of the panther, but I saw it clearly enough as it fell; saw the bright orange collar with "39" in blocky black ink. I collected my gear and threw it in the back of the truck; soon I was jouncing along the track towards the paved secondary highway and the trailer park. I had a box of ammunition in the airstream, more than enough for Ranger Rick. More than enough.