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, button wood, 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 up government land for 

 fruit-raising close to the shore. One of them owned an un- 

 completed building, 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 

 fly, located in a strip 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 

 swamp. 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. 



