pairs, wolves in packs, and panthers in numbers prowled everywhere. So
the range for cattle and swine was really not yet open here. Native vipers
were a considerable inconvenience if not deadly danger to beasts and hu-
mans, as well.
Much, much later, after Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings had moved to Florida,
she was frequently preoccupied with snakes in her fiction, her famous
memoir, and her private letters. Rawlings was terrified of snakes, and to her
great credit she sought out a University of Florida herpetologist, who taught
her respect and tolerance and took her rattlesnake hunting in the Ever-
glades—not to kill them, but to collect. Still, Rawlings had many unpleas-
ant surprise encounters. Once she picked up a coral snake in her garden
before recognizing it. She almost trod on a moccasin lying next to her front
step, and much later, after she had acquired fame, moderate wealth, and
plumbing in her Cross Creek cottage, a four-foot-long moccasin appeared
in her toilet.^11 (The snake had entered through a broken drainage tile out-
side.) Bartram, by contrast, wrote little of serpents, although he must have
seen them every time he went ashore. Still, within hisTravelsthere is a
brief catalog of Florida and southeastern snakes. Here William lingered
more passionately on the appearance and habits of the rattlesnake, which
he rather liked—‘‘a wonderful creature,’’ potentially deadly to be sure, but
retiring, slow of motion, and ultimately ‘‘magnanimous.’’ Once he awoke in
camp to discover that a rattler had slept at his feet. When both were awake,
each simply withdrew. He recalled an earlier encounter with a huge rattler
on Sapelo Island, Georgia, that had permitted him and his companions to
pass close by, in the dark, time and again on their way to a spring. William,
discovering the snake, demanded that his friends not harm it. In Florida, he
only reluctantly killed a large rattlesnake in an Indian town, at the natives’
command.
William was quite fearless, except in the presence of another native, the
alligator, which he also called the crocodile. On this animal his prose be-
came darkly ominous, sometimes almost hysterical and straining credu-
lity (as he himself admitted), nullifying in considerable measure the en-
chantment he usually perceived in semitropical nature. Late one day he
put ashore below Lake George, where a narrow inlet opened into a pond,
or lagoon. Discovering his supply of food low, he set out again to fish for
‘‘trout’’—just as the sun began to set and slumbering alligators awoke and,
as he observed with mounting apprehension, ‘‘gathered around my har-
bour from all quarters.’’ Fearful the animals might swamp or tip his little
bark, with its low gunwales, he unloaded his gun, papers, and specimens