coming down gently on the outside ball of the foot, rolling to the inside, and finally, silently bringing down the heel.
'A Seminole taught me how. I added my own refinements. Up here, they call it the Tom Cat Stalk.'
'What do you stalk?'
'Everything from squirrel to deer. You ever kill a deer with just your bare hands and a knife?'
'Not that I recall.'
He almost laughed. 'You'd remember if you had. Stalking a deer's almost impossible, even for me. You gotta have 'em trapped, nowhere to run. Or you can jump out of a tree, get 'em by the neck. Slice and choke. They'll buck and try to throw you off. You gotta hang on, blood spurting like water from a garden hose, all hot and sticky, covering you, splashing your face, filling your mouth. Squeeze the life out of them, but love them all the while.'
I just let that hang there. I didn't have a comparable story to swap. Once I had shooed a land crab out of a lady friend's kitchen, and she had taken me to her bed in gratitude. Still, it didn't have the same flair.
'Never kill an animal for sport,' he went on. His voice was flat and unemotional, his eyes hooded under the brim of the canvas hat. 'Only for food. The Indians used every last part of the deer. Ate the venison, tanned the hides, boiled the hooves into glue, strung fishing line from tendons, and carved bones into utensils.'
'Complete recycling,' I said.
He nodded gravely. 'I don't expect you to kill a deer…'
'Lucky for Bambi.'
'You don't need that much food.'
'A bacon cheeseburger would do fine right now.'
'Too late for that.'
'Even a turkey on rye, if we're watching the cholesterol.'
He motioned me toward a path behind the cabin. Behind it lay the blackness of the Ocala National Forest. 'There's lots to eat in the woods. Nearly all your furry mammals are edible. Weasels, foxes, bobcats…'
I must have been shaking my head because he kept running down the late-night snack menu. 'Rodents too. Voles, mice, lemmings, rats. In a pinch, I've made a stew out of maggots and earthworms. Loaded with protein.'
'Come to think of it, I should cut down on the meats.'
'No problem. Grasses, cattails, pine needles. You ever drink acorn tea?'
'Does it come in instant?'
He grimaced. 'I'll bet you don't even know how to make a fire out of a spindle and bow.'
We were wending down a rocky trail in the moonlight when I got around to asking him about it. 'They got any women up here?'
He snorted. 'Scarcer than hen's teeth.'
'Not like in Miami. Boy, we got all kinds.'
He didn't bite.
'So what do you do for excitement?' I asked.
He hopped over a fallen log, graceful as a jaguar. 'You either make friends with the palm of your hand, or you get the hell out of here. Gainesville's got the coeds, a horny bunch if ever there was.
Orlando's filled with divorcees from the north, all coming down for a fresh start.'
'A guy like you must wow them with this buckskin bullshit.'
He stopped in his tracks and I nearly bowled him over from behind. I thought I had offended him, and maybe he'd pop me one, but he just put a finger to his lips and cocked an ear toward the darkness.
'Black bear,' he whispered. 'Season doesn't open till November.'
I didn't hear anything and didn't have a license, anyway. A moment later we were moving again, Carruthers doing a brisk version of the Tom Cat Stalk and Lassiter bringing up the rear with a city-slicker shuffle, tripping and cursing over every branch and rock in the darkness.
I got my mind back on track, thinking of the role I had to play. A college drama professor once told me to visualize the character to become him. My mind's eye saw a sweaty-palmed guy in a bar, shirt unbuttoned to the waist, gold chains dangling on his chest. I laid on the sleaze. 'Yeah, in Miami, we got your basic panorama of flesh. Every color and shape. We got your waitress types, your business and professional types. We're loaded with stewardesses.'
My line drifted with the current. Not a nibble.
After a pause I asked, 'You get down to wicked Miami at all?'
'Once in a while.'
'Really?'
'Yeah.'
'When?'
'What?'
'I mean, when you get to the city, call me. We'll go stalk the wild stewardesses.'
'Too many hang-ups.'
'How's that?'
'City women. Too many hang-ups. Too much talk.'
'I know what you mean.'
He clammed up again and we walked some more. It was growing darker under the canopy of slash pine and red maple trees. We emerged from one thicket into a clearing only to enter the woods again a few hundred yards away. Branches kept swatting me across the kisser, and my feet were still stumbling on the rocky ground. The air was moist with the sour perfume of fermenting flora, and little animals could be heard scurrying in the undergrowth. The brush grew thicker until we reached a stream. He led me across a trail of rocks to the other side. I only got one foot wet with a slip on the moss. Lousy sneakers.
'So how long since you been there?' I asked.
'Where?'
'Miami. My home sweet home.'
'Couple of weeks. I give an outdoors class at the YMCA every month.'
The timing could have been right for Mary Rosedahl. I thought of her sprawled on the floor of her tiny house. Serving coffee, tea, and smiles at thirty thousand feet, hungering over the keyboard in the eternal search for Fantasy Man, a kind, sensitive, knowing gent who can fix a leaky faucet and share his innermost thoughts. Searching for love and intimacy and commitment and all the other words that have been Cosmo' ed into them. And maybe she found the deerslayer, a fantasy with a nightmare ending.
We stopped in a clearing and sat down, cross-legged, like Indians in a Western. It was a cloudless night, and I could see his tanned face clearly in the moonlight.
'Okay,' he said, 'what's your best choice for shelter?'
'The Holiday Inn on Route 200-'
'This land's sloped. Figure the angles, so if it rains, you don't have a stream through your bed.'
'— preferably with room service.'
'Start by finding some good, strong branches for your ridgepoles. There's plenty of brush, tree boughs, and bark for the roof. Get some leaves to make a bed.'
I hadn't seen him remove the knife from a sheath on his leg, but now there it was, gleaming in the moonlight. A row of sawteeth on one edge, a smooth bevel on the other, it looked big as a machete.
'You don't seem to be into this, Mr. Lassiter.'
'It just takes me a while.'
He scraped the blade of the knife against a rock. Some people are afraid of snakes. With some, it's guns. With me, it's a foot-long blade of stainless steel. I hate a knife.
'That's some blade,' I said, forcing a smile.
'Combination Bowie and Rambo. Can chop down a tree or field-dress a deer. You wouldn't believe how it can open a rib cage.'
I believed it. I took a breath and said, 'Bet you could slice out a kidney with that.'
'What?'
