mission recorded alligator attacks upon humans. These included bites
from foot-long babies imprudently picked up, but also fifteen fatalities (six
of whom may have been dead before opportunistic alligators arrived). The
s average of about eighteen reported attacks annually seems smaller
than one might expect, actually. But after all, alligators (like snakes) are re-
clusive animals. They become trouble for humans usually when humans
effectively invite contact by feeding them.
Then there is the large, unmeasurable matter of domestic serenity as-
sociated especially with suburbs, and dogs and cats. New settlements of
people that are neither rural nor urban occupy a middle landscape dear to
Americans since the nineteenth century. Here one lives quietly in nature
but certainly not wild nature. Slewfoot is gone, forgotten in the household
and neighborhood idyll. Alligators, at least potentially, are a threat worse
than Slewfoot, though, since Slewfoot was a menace with reasoned (as it
were) cause for his antipathy to humans. Alligators better resemble Faulk-
ner’s Bear, representing the fiercely primeval, that which must be destroyed
if human supremacy and security are to be maintained. If loathing for alli-
gators is mitigated, however, by education in the creatures’ remote threat
to humans, loathing seems justified, maybe heightened, by the creatures’
presumed threat to pets. Suburbanites’ domestic companions, cursed with
curiosity about the contents of swamps and waterways, are the vulnerable
ones, a potential feast, it is thought, no less tantalizing that William Bar-
tram’s ‘‘trout.’’
Alligators may indeed kill pets, although imaginative talk doubtlessly
overwhelms statistics that seem dubious anyway. At the Okefenokee State
Park in southeastern Georgia, a short distance from the mouth of the
mighty St. Johns, unfenced alligators small and very large lounge about
in broad daylight near the entrance to the reception center, in the gar-
dens, in the water near the reconstructed pioneer farmhouse, and among
the verdant tangles of adjacent swamps. A strange landscape, indeed, for
ranger-conducted tours for crowds of visitors, a few of whom have brought
their dogs. The dogs may not tour, and rangers advised me several times
(in March ) to mind Nando, my collie-sheltie. He must absolutely re-
main on leash because (I heard variously), since the park’s opening, twenty,
twenty-three, forty, or sixty dogs had been gruesomely minced. Nando,
meanwhile, who was programmed to encircle, trap, and control other mov-
ing creatures, never pulled his lead, expressing no interest in a close in-
spection, much less a dashing charge upon the lazing monsters. Smart dog.