Excerpt from Gator Country by Rebecca Renner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1
THE CHASE

It was nighttime in the orange grove, and the sound of helicopter blades beat overhead. Otherwise, it was dark, and the dark was quiet. No frogs chirped. No crickets sang. Not even a mosquito whined through the open windows of Jeff's patrol truck. He blamed the smell for the quiet. The grove exuded the sickly-sweet scent of acetone. Pesticide. Of course it was quiet here. When the chak-chak-chak of the helicopter blades faded, it left only the hum of his idling engine and the sigh of his K-9 in the back seat.

Jeff's CB radio crackled. He sat up straight, and so did his dog, a Goldador named Mack, dressed in his working vest and looking very official. They were ready to track down the poachers whose flashlights the chopper spotted from the air. But it was too soon, the crackle just radio chatter. Mack rested his chin on his paws.

This wasn't Jeff's first time on a detail, where a group of Florida Fish and Wildlife officers like himself would spread out on the edge of the Everglades and wait. When the time came, an alert would snap over the airwaves, and the trucks would come to life all over the county and close in around the suspect. Sometimes it was a small-time hunter bagging deer out of season. Other times, they were something more, endangered fern thieves, turtle smugglers. Jeff never knew what they were going to flush out of the swamp until it came.

But first he had to wait.

Jeff was fifty-three years old and coming to the end of his long career as a wildlife protector, so he knew there was no such thing as a usual day on the job. A lifetime ago, his family had moved from Guam to Colorado then down to the Everglades, replacing one kind of big sky for another. There in Homestead, the southernmost town before US-1 hops the southern glades and Blackwater Sound to become the Overseas Highway, he became a short-order cook and fell in love with the waitress who would become his wife. He fell in love, too, with the glades and the swamps, with the untamable backcountry that most people who don't know any better revile, mistaking the grasses and tangles of cypress domes for wastelands when in reality they are the most abundant tracts on Earth, paradise within paradise. It called out to him. Soon he joined the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission as a fisheries technician. His career evolved from there into game warden then patrol officer. For nearly thirty years, Jeff ventured out into that rough land determined to protect every scraggly inch, from the most charismatic flora and fauna—your orchids and your panthers, your sugar gliders and your black bears—to the crawling things and the slithering things, the fearsome, the slippery, the bug-eyed, the things it seemed no one loved except for him. He saw the beauty in them. He often wondered, Why can't everyone else?

No matter how much he loved the wild, he was glad that his time as an officer was coming to a close. His black crew cut was beginning to salt. Smile lines touched the corners of his eyes. He had kept in shape, his five-foot-eight frame maintaining a martial boxiness. He ran, lifted weights, practiced tae kwon do and karate. Yet the aches of age had come all the same. He was anxious, too, for a chance to enjoy the wilderness he had fought so long to protect. Still, he knew he might have to move. As the only Pacific Islander on the force, he was recognizable, though no one could ever exactly place him. Hawaiian? they would guess. Māori? Never Guam, but that was okay by him. The better for his anonymity. Unless they had been in the military, most people whom Jeff talked to had never met anybody from Guam before. He worried that the men he had put in jail would come back to take their revenge. Retirement, and the choice to move or stay, was three years away. There were days when it couldn't come soon enough.

Jeff sat with his thermos full of coffee, windows down, glad for the humid chill in the air and the lack of mosquitoes, even though he found the void of sound and the reason for it unsettling. While he waited, he contemplated the future, perhaps a cabin in the mountains, time to spend with his wife and son and his dogs, a stream where they might fish, the wild duck that would be their dinner, the trails they would hike, winding up through the oaks and hemlocks to a rocky edge overlooking the misty uplifts of the Blue Ridge and the valley below where the setting sun hit reservoirs and rivulets, turning them into molten gold.

Excerpted from Gator Country by Rebecca Renner. Copyright © 2023 by Rebecca Renner. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.