he became a naturalist explorer, and a scientist. He came to know when the wild azaleas bloomed; which flowers were favored by the dogface sulphur, Gulf fritillary, and other butterflies; which salamanders came to the vernal pools, and when. He knew the habits of the strange creatures hiding in the deep sandy burrows of tortoises. He was privy to secrets of the toad-eating hognose snakes, which are dead ringers for poisonous pit vipers but in reality as harmless for people as a stick of dead wood. Red-tailed skinks and all other lizards were harmless too, he found. You'd never touch one anyway, because they ran from you like the wind to their retreats in piles of fallen tree limbs. Up in the longleaf pine canopies red-cockaded woodpeckers feasted mostly on ants nesting there in the millions. The minnows that schooled in the shallows of the lake had a name and a place in the food chain two links down from the five alligators that patrolled the shores.
Bachman's warblers once nested in swampy canebrakes of the South but were now extinct. The last one had been seen in 1965. Or so it was said. But perhaps they were not completely gone. Raff believed that maybe they weren't really. Maybe a lucky naturalist like him could be rewarded for long hours at Nokobee by the insectlike buzzing of their song and the glimpse of a survivor.
Ivorybills, the largest of America's woodpeckers, were supposed to be extinct too. But who could say for sure? Unconfirmed sightings had been reported in the Choctawhatchee floodplain forest east of Nokobee. Maybe, Raff said to me, he might be the one to recognize the distinct call, like a toy flute, peet! peet! deep in the outflow woodland of Lake Nokobee, then hear the loud double-hammer strike of a beak as the bird peeled the bark back and uncoiled its long tongue to seize a beetle grub lying hidden. Then he would look up through the foliage to see a pair working their way among the dead hardwood trees standing there, their long white beaks working as organic drills, their flashing white feathers on the upper wing surfaces plain to see, like the field guides said. Then he would understand why they were sometimes called the Lord God bird. "Lord God, what is that?" settlers were reported to say when they first saw one.
Raff would tell you if you asked him that the woods at Nokobee were safer than any city street. Yet they were far from being any kind of a real-life Disney World. Nothing was posed in those woods. Nothing present was crafted by human hands. Habitats like this one had existed across the South for many thousands of years before any human being set foot on the continent of North America. No human hand or mind could begin to duplicate even a small part of such a place.
On Raff's thirteenth birthday Ainesley presented him with a Model 1938 Red Ryder lever-action air rifle. It would change Raff's relationship to the Nokobee fauna. The rifle had a capacity of 650 BBs--small rounded metal pellets, powered by air pressure built by working the lever and fired one at a time. From the instant he held it, Raff was enchanted by the very idea of a personal weapon. It was not like his father's cannon-sized shotgun that had so frightened him three years earlier. The Red Ryder was his size, and it belonged to him, Raphael Semmes Cody. He felt a primordial surge of unfamiliar emotion. The gun was power, not earned, not promised, but instantaneously passed from one hand to another.
When Marcia first saw the Red Ryder, Raff was clutching it against his body at port arms, savoring its weight and balance. She clapped her hands to the sides of her head and shouted, "Ainesley, what in God's name have you done?"
Raff turned away to remove the offending weapon from her inspection.
"You promised. You promised me! Do you want to get him killed? Or kill somebody else?"
Ainesley shook his head as in disbelief, while holding up his hands with palms turned up to placate his wife.
"Nonono," he said. "You don't understand. This isn't a real gun. It can't hurt anybody. It don't shoot nothing but little BBs at targets. Even if it hits somebody, it can't do nothing but raise a little welt."
Marcia came right back, "He could blind someone!"
"No, no, that won't happen. Look here, you can hurt somebody with almost anything. Even a screwdriver. Even