turned down (in ) a serious offer from certain citizens in Lee County,
Florida, to drop an atomic bomb on the next hurricane to approach Lee. De-
spite certain disappointments, then, great storms and floods had become
public responsibilities, with forecasting, evacuation protocols, relief, gov-
ernment flood insurance, and appropriate bureaucracies fully in place, by
the mid-s.
Famous storms roiled, still, now with names, all feminine until recently,
the matches for the personable Grady Norton himself and all his successors
as public faces of impending disaster—hurricanes Dora, Betsy, Camille,
and many more, including another ‘‘storm of the century,’’ Andrew, in .
The season of was a horror in Florida and coastal Alabama, when
four hurricanes within a few weeks of August and September sent millions
into retreat and hundreds to their graves. Then came Katrina in late Au-
gust , which must outrank all other ‘‘storms of the century’’: Coastal
Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were deluged, shrimp boats and float-
ing palaces of gambling were blown well inland, public buildings and busi-
nesses were wrecked, and housing new, antebellum, brick, stone, and wood
was demolished. In New Orleans, levees holding Lake Ponchartrain water
in canals throughout the city failed, and much of the South’s oldest great
urban center and largest port were flooded. The National Hurricane Center
had done its forecasting, but other public agencies—now long assumed as
guarantors of safety—failed utterly, from the Corps of Engineers respon-
sible for levees to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. For all the
recrimination against disaster management following Katrina—which was
followed by yet another hurricane, Rita, onto the western Louisiana and
eastern Texas coasts—the awful fate of the Gulf littoral in may have
instructed us once more that technology, expertise, and managerial hubris
cannot control nature’s furies. Penny Baxter likely never entertained such
a fantasy.
tYet Penny faced his own natural nemesis with a name. This is Ole Slew-
foot. He is a huge, aged bear, a justified rogue named for a disfiguring en-
counter with a trap years before. Penny, a principled sporting man despite
his lifelong struggles for existence, despises traps. But hungry Ole Slew-
foot appears at the Baxters’ place one night after the storm and mauls to
death and partially devours the family’s invaluable sow before the dogs
chase the bear back into the swamp. Penny identifies the marauder from
his unmistakable tracks: the deep impressions in rain-softened earth, the
skewed hind paw. Slewfoot is nature primeval, furious over human incur-