Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (30 page)

“Decades of Carol’s fieldwork are now available to the public and to science instead of rotting in a Park Service closet,” he said.

When Bob returned for the summer in 1992, he and Carol sat beside Lake Whitney, backs pressed against each other, listening to the evening symphony. Bats flitted and clicked overhead. The high ringing of cicadas and crickets was rounded by the steady soprano of tree frogs and the bullfrog’s tenor. The alligators’ bass bellows boomed across the water.

“Yes,” Carol said.

“Yes,” she said again, turning to Bob. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

He tackled her in the sand and kissed her.

They quietly exchanged vows in the shadows of the First African Baptist Church. Carol and Bob lit a candle and promised to love each other for the rest of their lives. Moonlight shone through the whitewashed windows. The faint roar of the surf seeped through the cracks in the clapboard.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” Bob whispered. “You realize you’re stuck with me for good?”

“I do.”

19

More dead sea turtles were washing ashore than ever before. Carol woke before dawn and spent the entire day cutting open their smelly carcasses, as she had done for decades, even though no one paid her to do so, even though few people knew about her research and even fewer actually cared.

“Do you ever lose hope?” Bob asked her that night on the porch, sipping his grapefruit moonshine.

“We’re not saving anything here,” Carol said. “We’re just slowing down the rate in which things get worse. We live on a sinking ship. Get used to it.”

“There’s still a chance to patch the holes,” Bob said.

“Not likely,” replied Carol. “We’re breeding faster than feral hogs and consuming more than the richest monarchs of the past, she pointed out. We’ve occasionally been able to rally together during war or natural disaster. “So far, though, we haven’t looked beyond our own lifetimes—or even the next election cycle—to squarely face the worst extinction catastrophe our planet has ever faced.”

“The Permian extinction was worse,” Bob said.

“This one is worse because it could have been avoided,” Carol replied. “We could have saved the earth—and ourselves—but we were too damn lazy and cheap.”

“If it’s pointless, then why bother to keep at it?” Bob asked.

Carol rubbed her finger around the rim of her empty glass.

“At least I’ll go down fighting for what counts,” she said. “Someone has to carry the fire. Someone has to hold the light that has gone out of the world. Someone has to fight for life as if it mattered.” She looked out at a smudge of stars glowing through the clouds. “The world is larger than us. We weren’t always here, and we won’t always be. Ma Nature always bats last.”

Carol wasn’t the only woman to wander into the wild and defend it against seemingly impossible odds. She was part of a tribe of legendary female misfits who fiercely guarded the creatures of their wilderness nests, often blurring the boundaries between animals and humans.

The leader of the clan is Jane Goodall, the primatologist who showed the world that a female scientist could work alone in the wilderness. Though she had no scientific training or even a college degree, she convinced legendary anthropologist Louis Leakey to hire her as an assistant at Tanzania’s Gombe Chimpanzee Reserve in 1960.

She eventually won the trust of a single male chimp whom she named David Graybeard. Naming chimps was frowned upon by the other scientists, who warned her not to allow emotions to interfere with scientific study. However, Goodall believed that understanding animal behavior required the observer to see the animals as individuals, not interchangeable specimens. “It was not permissible to talk about an animal’s mind. Only humans had minds,” Goodall recalled in her autobiography. “Nor was it quite proper to talk about animal personality. Of course, everyone knew that animals did have their own unique characters—anyone who had ever owned a dog or other pet was aware of that.”

She soon discovered that chimps hugged, kissed, and tickled each other. She even observed an adolescent chimpanzee adopt a three-year-old orphan who was not a close relative, a demonstration of altruism that was long thought to be beyond the capacity of animals.

“It isn’t only human beings who are capable of rational thought and emotions like joy and sorrow,” Goodall wrote. Chimps developed long-term affectionate bonds, used symbols to communicate, and even had a concept of self. She also watched David Graybeard use sticks to dig for termites—the first time another animal had been observed using tools.

Also working in Africa to protect wild primates was Dian Fossey, a zoologist who studied and lived with wild mountain gorillas for eighteen years. She bucked the established scientific tradition of observing from a distance. Instead, she gained the gorillas’ confidence and curiosity by acting like one of them. She thumped her chest, munched on stalks of wild celery, and mimicked their deep belches.

Fossey became the world’s leading authority on gorillas and dispelled King Kong stereotypes by photographing them snuggling with each other, playing tag, and sliding down muddy mountain slopes. Her most famous photograph shows a gorilla she named Peanuts touching Fossey’s hand, the first recorded peaceful contact between a human being and a wild gorilla.

She fought hard to safeguard the gentle giants from poachers. Government officials and local tribes wanted to convert gorilla habitat to farmland. In 1977, Fossey’s favorite gorilla, Digit, was attacked by poachers. Digit took five spear wounds and fended off their dogs in ferocious self-defense, enabling the other thirteen members of his family to escape. Digit, however, was decapitated and mutilated. His hands were cut off and sold as ashtrays.

After Digit’s death, Fossey became even more aggressively outspoken in protecting wild gorillas. Her 1983 bestselling book
Gorillas in the Mist
brought international attention to the poaching of mountain gorillas. She also became increasingly militant in her defense of gorilla habitat. She captured and humiliated poachers, destroyed their traps, held their cattle for ransom, and even burned their hunting camps.

Then, on the day after Christmas in 1985, Fossey was found hacked to death on the misty slopes of her Rwandan forest camp. No one has ever been prosecuted for her murder.

Protecting wildlife is dangerous work. Daphne Sheldrick, who has spent most of her life safeguarding wild elephants, has always understood that. Once, a startled four-ton elephant tossed her in the air and hurled her against a boulder with the swish of its trunk.
Her shattered body lay in the dust, her legs broken and bleeding, as the elephant lumbered toward her. Its shadow loomed over her, and she braced herself for its final bone-crushing blow. The elephant lifted its giant foot, but instead of trampling her, it “began to feel me all over, barely touching me,” Sheldrick wrote in her memoir. The elephant “contemplated me lying helpless, merely inches from the tip of two long, sharp tusks. I knew then that [it] did not intend to kill me. It was at this moment I realized that if I were to live, I needed to fulfill the debt I owed to nature.” For thirty years, she dedicated her life to rescuing orphaned elephants and other wild animals in Kenya’s national parks.

Each of these pioneering women struck out into the wild to deepen her understanding of nature and find her place in it. They have inspired a new generation of wilderness women, among them Biruté Galdikas, who established Borneo’s first national park to protect endangered orangutans; Eugenie Clark, who has studied and swum with sharks in Florida; P. Dee Boersma, who has devoted her life to defending penguins in Argentina; Eriqueta Velarde, who has spent thirty years on an island in the Gulf of California studying and saving rare terns; and Nobel laureate Wangari Matthai, who helped plant forty-seven million trees in rural Kenya despite death threats and torture. Another recent incarnation of the wilderness woman is Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived alone on a teetering, wind-blown platform in a 180-foot redwood tree for over two years to prevent an old-growth forest from being cut down by loggers.

But none of these wild women—not even Jane Goodall—has
lived with the subjects they study as long as Carol Ruckdeschel, who has spent forty-one years immersed in sea turtle research on her wild island. She has necropised over four thousand turtles on Cumberland. Through hurricanes and hundred-degree heat, Carol has been gutting sea turtle carcasses, studying death to better understand life.

Decades of her detailed data pointed to one obvious conclusion: turtles were in trouble. In the water, turtles dodged boats and nets. And on land, beachfront development was razing turtle nesting sites. Even on wild, undeveloped Cumberland Island, turtle nests were being destroyed—mainly by feral animals.

Ferals are once-domesticated livestock that have reverted to a semi-wild state. Island families had brought horses and hogs over to the island and then abandoned them. Now, over 250 horses and at least two thousand feral hogs were roaming Cumberland Island: feral hogs routinely dug up and devoured sea turtle nests, and horses ate the dunes’ fragile sea oats, whose roots held the island together.

Carol loved the horses. She rode them bareback on the beach and tracked the herds grazing in the forest behind her cabin. She filled a rusted bathtub with water for them during dry spells.

But she knew they were starving, diseased, and worm-ridden. Because they weren’t native to the island, they weren’t adapted to its harsh environment. Though galloping wild horses seemed romantic from a distance, up close they were malnourished and miserable.

Often, stallions fought each other over limited freshwater and food. One battle broke out behind her cabin. It was like a beer commercial: two stallions on their hind legs, biting and kicking.

One of the feuding horses was a strawberry roan that had gone a few rounds before with other stallions, and he had a slash across his snout and other battle scars to prove it. The other was a brown-speckled juvenile Appaloosa.

Carol watched the horse fight from her porch. The two rivals sniffed each other’s muzzles and testicles, braying loudly to intimidate the other. Then the roan reared back and lunged with his forelegs, knocking the spotted Appaloosa off balance. The roan ripped a gash in the Appaloosa’s neck and kicked him until he collapsed to the forest floor. The wounded Appaloosa whinnied to his mother and sisters, who were part of the onlooking harem. But they turned and followed the victorious stallion into the woods, leaving him behind, broken and bleeding. Carol nursed the Appaloosa back to health, but he never was able to rejoin his herd.

Carol began tracking the herds to learn their leaders, trails, and territories, and she observed their breeding and feeding habits. Foals are usually born between March and June on Cumberland. Each band of horses claims a home range of roughly one thousand acres, and their diet consists mainly of sea oats and saltmarsh grasses.

Carol even named a few of the horses. Her favorite was Pretty Butt, named for the white markings on his chestnut rump. After his mom died of encephalitis, Carol noticed Pretty Butt wandering the woods alone. He was gaunt, and ribs showed through his ragged coat. Finally, one afternoon, she herded Pretty Butt into her fenced pasture, where she had built a small stable. He nibbled at stubbly patches of timothy, and gradually, he put on weight and gained strength. Carol broke him and rode him bareback around the pasture, then took him out to the shore at sunrise one morning.

“We galloped across a glowing, molten beach,” Carol wrote in her journal. “Then Pretty Butt started to canter, and I knew I was in for it. He was tearing down the beach with me hanging off his side, but I wasn’t gonna let him throw me. When he finally stopped, I was holding on with only one leg and a fistful of mane.”

Another time, she and Bob were riding Pretty Butt through the woods when Pretty Butt froze suddenly in his tracks. Ahead of him was the fresh carcass of a palomino mare. The horse had become tangled in barbed wire and starved to death. Carol cut the horse loose and circled the carcass, deciding how to perform the postmortem. Intestinal fermentation had already set in, inflating the horse’s belly into a giant balloon.

“The thing to do is to shoot her belly with a gun and let it blow,” Carol said, but she had left her pistol at home. She’d have to do this by hand.

She crouched behind the horse’s back and reached one arm over the belly. If the knife went in at this angle, she thought, maybe the stomach contents would blow the other way. Instead, they exploded in her face. A splattering gush of putrefying liquid and gas erupted from the horse’s swollen belly and knocked her backward.

“Ugh,” she muttered, wiping fusty sludge from her eyes. She mopped her face with her sleeve.

“What are horses doing on a muggy, buggy barrier island with very little freshwater?” Bob said. “It’s unthinkably cruel.”

Bob knew horses. He had grown up in Amish country and worked in a stable as a teenager saddling and shoeing horses. As both an equestrian and a scientist, he was outraged that stray, starving horses were roaming the island.

“Yep,” Carol replied, “but the tourists want to see them.”

Horses and humans have a long history together. Tens of millions of prehistoric horses once roamed North America, but they were likely hunted to near extinction and disappeared from the continent ten thousand years ago.

Surviving herds migrated across the Bering land bridge into central Asia, where they were first domesticated around 6,000 B.C.E. Initially used for food and even milk, horses were eventually employed in agriculture, transportation, and warfare. Horses played a pivotal role in the ability of Alexander the Great to conquer the Middle East and create the ancient world’s largest empire in 330
B.C.E.

Spanish conquistadors reintroduced horses to the Americas in the sixteenth century. Most of the horses shipped across the Atlantic didn’t survive the voyage. Their carcasses were thrown overboard in a becalmed stretch of sargassum-covered ocean that became known as the Horse Latitudes. To lighten their loads in the maddeningly still doldrums, beleaguered ships often threw live horses overboard, too.

Hernando Cortés used horses to vanquish the Aztecs in 1521. The Aztecs were awestruck when Cortés’s soldiers arrived on horses, which they perceived as supernatural beasts. Cortés exploited their wonder to loot their gold and wipe out their civilization.