Alabama-Florida border all the way to Perdido Bay.
The shoreline of Lake Nokobee bulged outward into a dozen small inlets. Each was lined with aquatic grasses and sedges and thin strips of hardwood thickets. The largest, located at the lake's southern edge, was Dead Owl Cove--or Dead Owl Slough, as some old-timers still called it. The name of the cove, which, granted, is peculiar even by Southern standards, was widely believed to be just a mapmaker's whimsy--or just as likely an early cartographic misprint of Dale Arle, or even Dale Errol. There had been both Arles and Errols in nearby Jepson County, Alabama, since before what often was still elliptically called The War. Dale Arle (or Errol) himself was a somewhat shadowy figure, who in the late 1700s explored northward by skiff from the Gulf Coast along the floodplain forest of the Blackwater River, running down east of the Escambia and parallel to it. According to oral tradition--any possible written documents were destroyed in the Jepson County Courthouse fire of 1883--he camped for a while at the southern edge of Lake Nokobee. No one knows why he went there, if he really did, or what he hoped to find.
Dead Owl Cove--too late to call it anything else now--was at the end of a dirt road that led out of cornfields into one of the last remaining tracts of old-growth longleaf pine.
One of the most prominent forms of wildlife at the cove, if I may stretch that loose zoological term a bit, was a kind of ant species whose colonies built conspicuous mound nests along the banks of the lake. The species was and remains widespread but very locally distributed across the Gulf Coastal Plain. It could be found associated with longleaf pine in sites all around Lake Nokobee, with the highest concentration at Dead Owl Cove. The lakeside soil, a well-aerated mix of sand, clay, and humus, was ideal for native plant and insect life. The exposure of the nests to the sun's warmth in its open spaces gave the ants an early start in the season and each morning on warm, dry days.
These anthills are special to the history I have chosen to record. They were to play a principal role in the life of Raphael Semmes Cody, and, even more remarkably, in the ultimate survival or destruction of the Nokobee environment itself.
The relative openness of the Dead Owl Cove shore was not due to frequent human activity. It was both ancient and natural. The tract around the cove was a tongue of the much larger stretch of longleaf pine habitat that stretched west from the lake all the way into the William Ziebach National Forest. The grassy high pine woodland was more savanna than forest, with scattered pines of varying girth, the older ones with flat tops and the youngest forming clusters on the landscape. The space between the pines was filled with bunches of wire grass and a veritable garden of ground plants--croton, bluestem, dogfennel, threeawn, beargrass, Florida dogwood, and many more, all bestowed delightful names by English-speaking settlers. Pond pine, myrtle-leaved holly, titi, tall gallberry, and pond cypress clumped together to form occasional low-bottomed, seasonally flooded hardwood islands called domes. Sparse it may seem on casual examination, the longleaf pine savanna is nevertheless biologically one of the richest botanical environments of North America. As many as 150 kinds of plants, almost all located in the ground-level cover, can be found in a single hectare. Many of these species are endemic to this habitat. That is, they are found in no other place on earth.
The Nokobee tract harbored in full array the signature animal species of the longleaf pine savanna. There were the bobwhite quail, beloved of hunters with retrievers and shotguns. Their numbers were declining, ironically not from overkill but by the assault of increasing numbers of coyotes and other predators that flourish around human populations. Also on the list were spadefoot toads, nocturnal cat-eyed ambushers of ground-dwelling insects. They gathered in rain pools to breed during a short season, summoning one another with wailing calls that sounded like a chorus of the damned. Gopher tortoises dug long burrows that were miniature ecosystems all on their own, and were the preferred home of indigo snakes, gopher frogs, and strange creatures such as a kind of ant that feeds on the eggs of subterranean spiders.
Among the inhabitants of the Nokobee tract were species that were rare, even endangered. The most famous was the red-cockaded woodpecker, which built its