Again, the government should have better things to worry about. Christ! Using the beam of a heavy-duty flashlight, Boomer scoured the water, hoping to see eyes emerge from the darkness, just over the inky water’s surface. The gators were sluggish this time of year, most dormant, but not impossible to find.

He had his traps set and come morning he expected to have at least one of the fuckers, maybe as many as five or six if he got lucky. For now, he’d troll, check the bait he had strung up a couple of feet above the water, hoping to lure a gator into propelling himself to leap up and snag himself on the hook.

He saw their eyes in the darkness, realized they not only saw him, but sensed him, as they did any movement in the water. Big dang toothed lizards. He heard a splash, saw one slide into the water not far from a nest where the grass had been beaten down, noticed the mound of mud and grass that indicated where the eggs had been laid.

“Come on, Mama,” he said in a cooing voice. “You all come over here to Daddy.” He waited, searching, his twenty-two pistol in his hand. But the she-gator hid in the shadows, away from the beam of his light, and he moved on, slowly, one hand on the tiller, the sounds of the night filling his ears: the whirr of bat’s wings, the hoot of an owl, the croak of bullfrogs, the hum of a few insects over the rumble of the boat’s small outboard motor. Every now and again he heard a splash, a fish jumping or a gator sliding into the still water.

He spent long hours trolling, not getting close enough to shoot a damned gator and haul him into the boat, but scouting out the swamp. Through the hours, he downed a six-pack of Lone Star and two of Mindy Jo’s fried oyster po’boy sandwiches.

Finally, as the night waned, he checked his snares. The first was empty, the bait stripped clean.

“Shit,” he said, steering his boat further to the next trap, and there, hanging partially in the air, was a gator. Eight feet if he was an inch. “Hallelujah, brother,” Boomer said, moving close enough that he could raise his pistol to the critter’s small brain. He fired, the sound a sharp report. Had to make sure the reptile was good and dead before cuttin’ him down. Boomer sure as hell didn’t want any four-hundred-pound gator thrashing around in the boat. It was tricky enough dealing with a dead one.