family who inspired her self-sufficient fictional characters. They had rhap-
sodized about roasted limpkin. Marjorie was collecting, as it were, for the
sake of literature, so one day she spotted a limpkin, brought it down, and
roasted it according to local custom. It was delicious, she declared. But by
the early s Marjorie was done with collecting and had become ashamed
of her transgressions. She had never killed a deer or a bear, she wrote, but
had participated in hunts, trying to absorb the lives of her hosts and com-
panions in the doing. Claiming to be a poor shot (what of the limpkin?),
she nevertheless helped butcher, prepare, and consume the meat of dwin-
dling birds, amphibians, and mammals. Now she lived away from Cross
Creek much of the time, and the great models for Penny Baxter and other
old-time hunters were gone or quite old. Marjorie swore off hunting, except
for quail and dove—she ‘‘dread[ed] the day when conscience shall triumph
over palate’’—but obviously, this was a question of ethics, perhaps morality,
too, that awaited her answer.^33 Belatedly, she made her peace and became
a part of twentieth-century game restrictions and an informed, wise user
of nature’s bounty.
Yet not quite. Cal Long, a legendary hunter and another Big Scrub friend
and mentor, approached eighty about , and while he may have defined
quaint in every respect, he was by no means dead, not yet. So long as Cal
and others like him lived on, in the few remaining Floridian places still
wild and thinly populated by humans, Marjorie thought, then the Age of
the Commons lived on, too. It would indeed live on in her fiction, and for a
little while, at least, Cal and his ilk remained real,vivant. Such people’s use
of wild game ‘‘is an ancient and honorable and necessary thing,’’ she wrote
inCross Creek. Cal had once killed wildcats and panthers—the former for
meat, especially livers, and the latter for oil to treat rheumatism. Florida
panthers had disappeared from the scrub, and poor Cal gave up on curing
his own aches and pains. To make matters worse (for both Cal and Mar-
jorie), much of Cal’s own land had become a protected game preserve.
‘‘ ‘The law,’ Marjorie quoted Cal, ‘says I cain’t shoot a buck [deer] in my
own potato patch!’ ’’ She observed, nonetheless, that ‘‘venison continued a
staple meat on his table.’’ Cal persistently complained, though: ‘‘ ‘The law
says I cain’t kill me a wild turkey scratchin’ up my cowpeas. The law this,
that law that! Why, I’m too old a man to begin obeyin’ the law!’ ’’^34 Indeed.
Cal would pass. So would the last remnant of preserved venison in her
own larder, Marjorie said; then she would give it up for good. She the
Pulitzer winner and best-selling writer and paid lecturer had no need of the
scrub’s commons. There was plenty of cheap beef for sale, anyway, and it