42 
WILD WINGS 
openings in the mangroves, and built their crude cottages or 
curious palmetto shacks. Back from the strip of timber on the 
shore is, near Cape Sable, a moderate area of marshy prairie, 
which is flooded in the summer rainy season. Aside from 
this, all the Cape Sable peninsula is a wild, tangled, pathless, 
swampy jungle of red and black mangrove, buttonwood, and 
other trees, extending back a number of miles to the open 
saw-grass marshes of the Everglades. In the embraces of this 
mangrove swamp lie a series of shallow lakes with muddy 
bottoms, connected together by various channels through the 
mangrove thickets, and more or less overflowed by the sea, 
when stormy winds pile the water up into the shallow bays. 
The whole country is as flat as a floor, and hardly above sea 
level. 
Both of our guides lived here with their families in the 
wilderness, where they had taken uj:) government land for 
fruit-raising close to the shore. One of them owned an un- 
comjDleted l)uilding, partly open on one side, which we found 
ideal for a camp and base of supplies. Leaving a guide and 
another settler to transfer our stuff from the vessel, and delay¬ 
ing only long enough to examine the nest of a Florida Red¬ 
shouldered Hawk with its one youthful occupant just able to 
flv, located in a strij) of black mangroves near the shore, we 
struck inland with the other guide — Bradley, the game- 
warden of Monroe County — to visit a lake which lay several 
miles north through the mangrove swamp. There was no 
boat in the lonely lake, but the guide proposed to carry a 
canvas canoe. This we found hidden in the confines of the 
swam]). It weighed over fifty pounds, and, as we pushed on 
hour after hour through the maze of mangrove roots and 
tropical jungle, following a trail so blind that we often lost it, 
I was amazed at the strength of the hardy pioneer who 
carried it, a man of only moderate weight and size. 
