The boys were near Key Largo when they spotted clouds of birds over a lagoon—herons, egrets, pelicans, and white-crowned pigeons. Eliot, thinking the pigeons might be edible, persuaded Nathaniel to put in and let him have a try at bagging a few. Double Eagle slipped between the north end of Key Largo and Old Rhodes Key and into the lagoon—called Card Sound on the chart—and then cautiously felt her way down a channel marked with a few leaning stakes and decaying posts, the water on both sides brown and in spots barely deeper than mustard on bread. When the channel began to shoal up, the hook was dropped, the tender lowered away, and Nathaniel and Eliot rowed along the western side of Key Largo, past mangroves whose roots humped like gigantic spider legs and whose branches formed galleries over gloomy little creeks that had the look of harboring alligators. In a moment, they saw one, a baby some three feet long, basking on a log. Its mother, or father, appeared next, cruising out of a cove to cross the tender’s bow. Nathaniel backed the oars, he and his brother held breathless, for the gator was longer than the boat by four or five feet, and when they noticed the pointed snout they realized it was not an alligator but a saltwater crocodile, one huge mass of armored sinew, with jaws that looked capable of swallowing either of them whole.

Pigeons cooed inside the mangrove fastness, from which there also came a kind of prehistoric croaking that sometimes swelled into a roar. It was being made by nothing more dangerous than a heron rookery, but it was unsettling, all the same. A flight of pigeons took wing off the bow, and Eliot raised the gun and swung, firing as he swung, and two birds dropped as if they had flown into an invisible wall. Nathaniel stroked to pick them up, but something else got to them first. It was hard to say what—a big fish, a gator, or a crocodile—because there was only a boil on the water before the dead birds vanished. Nathaniel said they might as well give it up, and so they did, rowing back down a wide crimson path made by the sun, a wound in the sky above the saw-grass plains of the Everglades. Long-necked cranes stood fixed in the reddened shallows while ibis and roseate spoonbills skimmed above them. Another crocodile, or maybe it was the very one they had seen earlier, waked alongside the channel in which Double Eagle lay at anchor, looking very lonesome. Nathaniel pulled hard for her, sweating in a heat unlike any he had known before, while Eliot swatted without effect at gnats and mosquitos, both boys feeling as though they had sailed out of their hemisphere and out of the new century, back to some primordial Eden innocent of the tread of man, ruled by reptiles and wild birds.