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animal slung its tail and rolled, taking him under, then bringing him back to the surface, the animal’s eyes not so bright now because the angle had changed but the man still sideways in the thing’s mouth.
    Because the gator had him by the hips, the roll—a death roll, gator hunters call it—had not snapped his spine.
    “ Please. Take my hand!” The man coughed the words, stretching his arm toward me, his voice pleading as if trying to convince me it would be okay.
    I wasn’t convinced. I am neither stupid nor particularly brave. But I also know enough about animal behavior to feel sure that I wasn’t being mindlessly heroic. There are certain predators—alligators, sharks and killer bees among them—that, once their sensory apparatus has locked onto a specific target, ancillary targets cease to exist.
    I have swam at night among feeding sharks so fixated on a whale carcass that my dive partners and I had nothing to fear. I once watched an Australian croc wrestle a feral hog into the water while an infant blackbuck antelope—a much easier target—drank peacefully within easy reach.
    This alligator might worry that I wanted to steal the meal it had taken. But it wouldn’t abandon a meal in its teeth to waste its time attacking me, additional prey.
    I hoped.
    I ducked beneath the water, dug at the muck until my left shoe popped free and then I surfaced as someone belly flopped into the pond next to me and began thrashing the water, racing toward the gator.
    It was Tomlinson.
    I pushed off after him, swimming hard, my head up, focusing on the bright, blurry horror ahead. I passed my friend after only a few strokes, watching as the gator turned and began ruddering toward the far shore.
    The man’s screams became whistled sobs, similar in pitch to the trumpeting of nearby peacocks, dark shapes that dropped from bushes and sprinted toward the shadows. Behind me, I heard a woman yell in Spanish, “Call for help, someone call the police!” but then heard a male voice hush the woman, saying, “Are you insane? Not the police!”
    The gator appeared to be in no hurry now. The animal knew we were in the water—gators possess acute hearing and the night vision of owls—but it didn’t seem to care. Even so, it traveled deceptively fast over the bottom, and I was halfway across the lake before I was finally close to enough to make a grab for the thing. Before I did, I rolled onto my side long enough to find the pistol.
    I took a couple of more strokes to catch up and then lunged to get what I hoped was a solid grip on the animal’s tail. I expected the gator to slash its head toward me, a hardwired crocodilian response. For a few seconds, though, the thing continued swimming, pulling me along—me, an insignificant weight—but then its slow reptilian brain translated the information, and the animal exploded, its tail almost snapping my arm from the socket.
    Because I expected the gator to swing its jaws toward me, I ducked beneath the surface, feeling a clawed foot graze my ear. I sculled deeper until my toes touched bottom, took a look toward the surface—it was like being submerged in tar—then swam a couple of yards underwater before angling up, hoping I didn’t guess wrong and reappear within reach of the animal’s teeth.
    I didn’t. Instead, I collided with something bony and breathing as I surfaced. The gator’s belly, I thought at first. But then I heard a wailing profanity—the voice familiar—and realized I had banged into Tomlinson, who assumed he was being attacked from beneath.
    My friend, I could see, had both hands locked on the gator’s tail and was being dragged. The animal was swimming faster now, probably convinced we were competing gators, employing harassment, hoping it would drop its prey. It’s a common gambit in the animal world, so the thing was trying to get into shallow water before dealing with us.
    As I started swimming after them, I heard Tomlinson yell a garbled sentence, words