The longleaf pine savanna, renewed almost continuously by lightning-sparked ground fires, has existed as an ecosystem for thousands, possibly millions of years. Its stability and equitable conditions have allowed the evolution of an abundance of ground flora and animals closely adapted to it. Once the cycle of ground fires and regrowth is broken, however, it is lost and cannot be easily restored. It is fragile, and the last of it might easily be wiped away.
12
THE BONDING OF Raphael Semmes Cody to the Nokobee tract began when as a small child he came to Dead Owl Cove with his parents for their weekend picnics. There at the water's edge Ainesley and Marcia would sit and talk, smoke cigarettes, and occasionally fish for bream and large-mouth bass. Little Raff was turned loose to wander about on his own. His mother let him go, but each time with the same sensible command.
"Stay in sight. And you come right back when you're called, you hear? Keep away from the water and don't go in the bushes. Watch out for snakes! Come running if you see a snake!"
Raff, as best he could without getting caught, disobeyed all of these injunctions, as he later admitted to me and Alicia. He undertook what small children do when stripped of mechanical toys and playmates and placed in a natural environment. They explore. They become hunter-gatherers. If they are fearless, and Raff was innocently fearless, they discover a multitude of creatures of kinds they have never seen in a zoo or picture book or on television, and for which there is no name. Each kind of plant and animal, because of the immediacy and its novelty and strangeness, is for a small child an entity of boundless possibility.
Raff began a rich self-education in natural history by happenstance at Nokobee. While still little more than a toddler, he spotted a velvet ant running swiftly in a straight line over dead leaves at the woodland edge. The insect was the size of a hornet and wore a thick red and yellow coat of hair. Unknown to him, it was not an ant. It was a wingless parasitic wasp, a female searching for beetle grubs to serve as hosts for its own larvae. Raff dashed to this prize, bent over, and grabbed it with his hand. And was instantly shocked by the velvet ant's quarter-inch-long stinger. He dropped the wasp, which continued on its way as though nothing had happened. His stung hand felt on fire. He sat down and cried from the pain--but softly, so he could not be heard. When he rejoined his parents an hour later, the hand still throbbed, but he said nothing. He knew that if he did tell the story, his parents would make him stay put with them on future visits.
The velvet ant taught Raff an elemental principle of natural history: don't mess with colorful creatures who show no fear of you. On a later occasion, the Cody family terrier learned the same lesson from a self-confident skunk that passed through their yard clad in a loudly striped pelage of black and white. These rabbit-sized animals snuffle along the ground in daylight, searching for food in grass and fallen leaves. They move very calmly for a wild animal, as though oblivious to enemies. If a dog tries to seize one, the skunk doesn't stab it with sharp canine teeth, nor does it rip the dog's skin with razorlike claws. Instead it lifts its long tail and sprays the dog with a musky mercaptan from its anal glands. The stench lasts for days. Some dog owners say it can be removed by washing the dog's fur with tomato juice. I don't know. Never owned a dog, and I always stayed a good distance from skunks.
One summer day when he was a little older, as both families sat in a circle of chairs for lunch, Raff asked me an interesting question about the velvet ant.
"Uncle Fred, if pretty colors tell you an insect has a sting and you should stay away, why don't butterflies have a sting?"
It was a strain to come up quickly with an answer for that one.
"Butterflies can fly away when you get too close," was the best I could manage. "Velvet ants can't fly; all they can do is sting you and teach you a lesson. Birds can catch butterflies, but then they learn the lesson a different way. Some kinds of butterflies taste terrible, they're even