Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

treed the coon, Carol was the first to arrive. She saw the glowing, banded eyes of the frightened raccoon, clinging to the topmost branch of a pine.
    Behind her, the bouncing flashlights of the hunters approached. She knew what would likely come next: the men would stand around the tree and shoot at a cornered animal until its lifeless body thudded to the ground.
    Carol quickly climbed up the tree. She could see the parade of flashlights getting closer. The coon inched as high as it could up the spindly pine. Carol squatted a foot below and whispered: “Hey coon. You gotta jump! It’s your only chance!”
    The dogs barked below them. She heard the swishing and crunching of leaves underfoot.
    “Do you hear me, cooner? When you hit the ground, you can’t stumble, or the dogs will be on you. Land on your feet and run. Now go!” She shook the limb until finally the raccoon released its grip, plunged thirty feet, and nearly landed on top of a baying hound. The coon rolled once and then was on its feet, running through the woods again, the dogs close behind.
    The hunters arrived moments later. In the pine tree, Carol held her breath and listened.
    “I thought for sure the hounds had it treed,” her dad said.
    “Them dogs ain’t worth their feed,” said one of the other hunters.
    They shuffled on. Carol waited until their lights crossed the creek before climbing down.
    Despite Carol’s efforts, the coon did not live to see morning. When the hunters served coon the next day for lunch, she decided that the best way to honor the coon would be to eat him.
    “Your flesh becomes mine,” she whispered before tasting her first bite, a daily grace she would recite for the rest of her life.
    Carol convinced her father to bring home one of the hunter’s stray dogs, a male German shepherd mutt that Carol named Catfish. For the first time, Carol had a best friend. She and her partner in grime wandered the banks of the Chattahoochee. She caught fish and crawdads and cooked them over a campfire in an old Cherokee cave she had discovered along the bluffs. The cave became her den, a refuge where she retreated from the emptiness of her everyday life.
    Caves are powerful and primeval places. They were among the earliest human shelters, and the first etchings of human art appeared deep in their bowels. Saint John received revelations in a cave, and Plato used a cave to explain reality. For Carol, the cave was home. She spent most of her teenage years camping in her cave above the river, with Catfish snuggled up beside her.
    On weekends, she carried two inflatable inner tubes down to the river to float the Hooch, which was still wild and unpolluted in the 1950s. Carol watched trout spawn in the cold, clear waters. T he river teemed with beavers, muskrats, and giant pike, and herons and egrets lined the banks, stalking on stilts, spearing fish.
    One afternoon, Carol and Catfish got caught in a downpour. The swollen river became a thundering torrent of roaring whitewater. Carol’s inner tube flipped, and she fell into a rapid. Bubbles and foam engulfed her. She fought for air as the circulating water churned her repeatedly like a washing machine on spin cycle. After nearly a minute, she began to panic, flailing harder against the weight of the water.
    In the frothy chaos, she tried one last desperate option: sink like a stone. Rather than fight for the surface, she went limp and let the current take her. It spun her around once more, then thrust her down to the bottom of the river, below the circulating water. The current flushed her downstream, finally spitting her out 30 yards from the rapid. Purple-lipped and foggy-headed, she swam over to an eddy along the bank. She hugged a boulder, still gasping and coughing up river. Moments later, she felt Catfish’s wet tongue on her forehead.
    Walking back from the river with Catfish, Carol took a shortcut through the woods along a gravel road. Along the way, they passed an old trailer with a