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answer no more questions for his own damn good.
    Msyoo had to accept that silent teaching out of his respect for the earth ways of the noble redskin. This foreign feller knew more about our old-time Indins than Indins theirselves, let alone white folks. Hell, some of them Bay people are still yellin how they ought to shoot redskins fast as they show their faces, cause redskins is just as ornery and treacherous as your common Spaniard.
    Msyoo was hissin over the idea that a Indin man could desecrate Indin graves, but we seen he was determined to do some plain and fancy desecratin on his own. I knowed just the kind of mound he wanted, and after that day, one of my kids was always guidin him up the wrong creek to make him happy. Every slough had some kind of small shell mound at the head of it, he could hack his way into a hundred, never hit the right one.
    South and west of Possum Key in them miles and miles of mangrove was a big ol’ hidden mound called Gopher Key, had a Calusa-built canal we called Sim’s Creek that led out to the Gulf of Mexico: we figured Ol’ Sim for a Civil War deserter, hid back in there on that mound huntin gopher tortoise for his dinner, never got word to come out and go on home. The Frenchman got all flustered up when he seen that straight canal lined with white shell—a sure sign, he said, that this mound was a sacred place. Had enough shell on Gopher Key to move around for the whole rest of his life, so that furious old feller was in there diggin every chance he got. No wind back in them swamps and not much air, only wet heat and man-eatin miskeeters that bit up his old carcass somethin pitiful. My boy Webster—that’s the dark one—Webster said, “Time them skeeters get done with that old man, his French blood will be all gone and he will speak American as good as we do.”

    First year he showed up in the Islands, 1888, the Frenchman bought my quit-claim on the Bend. Once we was piled into the boat, ready to go, he told us we could hang around so long as he could run us off any time he damn well wanted. I shook my head. The truth was, I had sign to go. I never liked the feel of Chatham Bend. Dark power there, the Indins told me, somethin unfinished from some bad old history.
    Indin people go by sign, they don’t need no excuse to leave some place that don’t feel right; they just pick up their sorry ass and move it elsewhere. Ownin no more than we could pack into one boat, we traveled light, and where we went was Possum Key, inland and upriver, handy to them big egret rookeries in the Glades creeks. That spring we done some huntin, too, sold our plumes to the Frenchman, traded with the Indins.
    Them Mikasukis back up Lost Man’s Slough was maybe the last Indins in the U.S.A. that never signed no treaty with no Great White Father. Called ’em Cypress Indins cause they hollowed dugouts out of cypress logs. Never paddled hardly but stood up in the stern, used push poles, followed water paths that in the Seminole Wars was very hard for the white soldiers to see. Standin up like that, peerin through tall sawgrass, they most always seen you first, you were lucky to get a glimpse of ’em at all. Down in the rivers, Indins was watchin us most of the time. Watched us when we come into their country and watched us when we went away. Give you a funny feeling, being watched like that. Made you think the Earth was watching, too.
    One dugout that come in to trade at Everglade in the late eighties was the first wild Indins them white folks ever seen, but that band traded with Hardens two-three years before that. Brung bear meat and venison wrapped in palm fans, wild ducks and turkeys, gophers, palm hearts, coontie root and such, took coffee and trade goods for their furs and bird plumes, with a few machetes, maybe an old shotgun, and some cane liquor thrown