He submerged under water and then rose up until only his snout and beady eyes showed, fixed on us. A growling, hissing sound started, and we all jumped as we realized it was coming from him. “What’s he doing?” Gaëlle muttered behind me. “Why is he coming this way?”

As the tough American in the group, I couldn’t stoop to a mutter, but I was wondering that, too. Without a pause in his hissing growl, the alligator headed directly toward us, his beady eyes fixed.

Ten feet from us. Five feet. Soft, suppressed screams began to eek from the canoes. It was now only two feet from Claudine, having fixed on her canoe as the closest. “Laura!” she whispered. “Help!” See, that’s the problem with the tough American act. At the first sign of trouble, people expect you to wrestle alligators. The alligator made another growling, hissing noise, its loudest yet, and dove.

Dead silence. “Is that good?” someone said.

“Where did it go?”

Under our canoes was a sure bet, given its direction. We all peered down into the black water, which reflected back our own faces like a crystalline mirror. The canoes suddenly felt extremely flimsy. I’d heard of whales turning boats over by emerging under them, why not alligators with canoes? And whales were nice; they swallowed people whole and let you come out again in three days, like Xena and Jonah and Nemo. I was pretty sure alligators didn’t have that kind of attitude. I hadn’t watched Crocodile Dundee and Tarzan for a long time now, so I was fuzzy on the details of death-by-alligator, but I bet it involved a lot of teeth.

We all glanced over at the giant tip of tail at the other end of the pond. It still hadn’t moved. It might, though, if people were upended into its pond. That would be two alligators with teeth against eight people with paddles. That didn’t seem like good odds.

The smaller of the two alligators resurfaced on the other side of our canoes and turned to face us again. Deep breaths were drawn all around. “Maybe we should leave,” someone suggested. “Aren’t alligators an endangered species? Horrible to disturb their habitat like this.”

“Right,” Jean-Charles said. “Right. They probably wouldn’t let me take new alligator skin boots through customs anyway.”

We fled and regrouped with the yellow flies at a safe distance. I sighed, gazed at my own hand totally mottled with blood from oozing yellow-fly bites, and accepted the failure of my cultural gift. “Do you want to go back to the dock now?”