Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (6 page)

6

Back in Atlanta, Carol watched thousands of mourners solemnly processing along Auburn Avenue behind the mule-drawn coffin of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1968, King was laid to rest beside Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he and his father had been pastors. Atlanta was a hotbed of civil rights and antiwar activism in the 1960s. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by King, was headquartered in Atlanta, “the city too busy to hate.” Freedom Riders boarded buses in Atlanta, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had organized mass sit-ins at eight lunch counters across the city that inspired a wave of direct action nationwide.

From freedom marches to the feminist movement, Carol was swept up in a rising tide of gender, racial, and cultural civil rights. She fought to include nature in that swell. In the 1960s and early ’70s, Carol joined activists in Atlanta who rallied support for the Wilderness Act and Endangered Species Act, which enshrined permanent protections for wild creatures. Carol also championed campaigns to safeguard the Chattahoochee River and create wilderness in the north Georgia mountains.

But most of her nine-to-five was spent indoors beneath fluorescent lights. Carol had landed a job preparing specimens for an Atlanta museum, skinning elephants, tigers, and ostriches for exhibits. She liked working with animals—even dead ones. But after three years of tediously scraping flesh from bones in a windowless basement, she felt like she was frittering away her life.

Carol began wondering if she would ever escape Atlanta. Amid her daily drudgery, she followed one guiding principle, which kept her connected to the real world beneath the concrete and beyond the city limits: search for the source. Food didn’t come from a grocery store. Water didn’t come from a faucet. Ultimately, everything came from nature.

Even the seemingly mundane items in her everyday city life were derived from the natural world. Each morning, she woke up to an alarm clock, which used quartz crystals—highly compressed sand—to keep time. She brushed her teeth with toothpaste made with the same seaweed that sheltered sea turtle hatchlings. She sat on a toilet made of heated clay and wiped with toilet paper made from trees. She got dressed in clothes woven from sheep-sheared wool and drove to work in a jeep made mostly out of iron—which came from the guts of exploding stars. She filled it with oil made from dead plants and animals decaying on the ocean floor for five hundred million years. After work, she went for a hike in boots comprised of dried cow skin and the milky sap of a rubber tree and, afterward, drank river water from a glass formed by lightning striking beach sand. At the end of a long day, she rested her head on a pillow made of feathers stripped from geese.

She was no different than the caveman in her total reliance on nature. Money enabled her to hire middlemen to mine and refine natural resources for her, but it also distanced her from the source of her sustenance.

“For most of human history, we lived in direct contact with nature. Now we get resources from companies who extract them from nature for us,” she wrote in her journal. “We’ve added a money economy between us and nature.”

Carol sought to cut out the moneymaking middlemen. Outside was the natural economy that kept everyone alive. Inside was the artificial economy that separated us from real sources of things. She wanted a direct, original relationship to nature, where she used her own hands to acquire the food and shelter she needed.

In Atlanta, Carol felt like a confined animal, prowling hungrily around the perimeter of her citified cage. She had been dreaming about her escape for years. Had she grown too comfortable in the trappings of urban life? Was she too scared to fly away?

Ever since her divorce from Charlie, Carol had been living in a dilapidated, one-bedroom house. Her roommates included two tomcats, a gopher tortoise, a raven with a broken wing, two gray rat snakes, a terrarium of field mice, an aquarium of frogs and salamanders, an injured owl, a golden pheasant, and five white leghorn roosters.

Kids constantly knocked on Carol’s door to see the animals. Finally she struck a deal with them: on Saturdays only, the kids could feed the animals and clean out cages. The kids loved petting the birds, holding the snakes, walking the dog, and chasing the chickens, and Carol enjoyed teaching them about animals—and getting a weekly break from cage cleaning.

“Kids reveal an obvious truth: natural wonder is built in to us,” she wrote in her journal. “We are instinctively attracted to nature.” Nature tugs on us like gravity, Carol believed. We travel long distances to stand atop mountains or stroll along seashores for reasons we can’t quite put into words. Nature keeps alive a childlike wonder and enables us to see the world anew through fresh eyes.

Carol’s animal house eventually prompted a visit from the landlord, who was receiving complaints from neighbors about unusual noises and odors. The landlord had planned to evict her months prior. But then he saw what Carol’s zoo was doing for the kids in their run-down neighborhood. Many of them had never seen a wild animal other than a rat. “You can keep your critters,” the landlord told her. “But there’s no way in hell you’re getting back your deposit.”

Her animal house was not much better than a zoo, Carol realized. At least she released her animals back to the wild. Still, there were cages and food bowls.

Carol hated zoos. Confining wild animals in concrete cages was a cruel expression of human pride. She saw the sadness and frustration in the animals’ eyes. What was the value in gawking at miserable, tortured creatures imprisoned behind steel bars? Zoos’ captive breeding programs were commendable in trying to save endangered species from extinction, but beyond that, she found nothing redeeming about them.

Sure, animals in the zoo had it easy: free food, no predators, and a warm place to sleep at night. Life in the wild was far less safe. Danger lurked everywhere, at every moment. Food was seasonal and unpredictable. No nest or territory was completely secure from fire, famine, or flood. Even sleep was a gamble. Birds and rabbits rested with one eye open, shutting down half their brain for a few hours at a time.

Though wild nature wasn’t safe, it was real. For millennia, animals had lived and evolved embedded in a web more intricate and delicate than humans could ever replicate. Comfort could never fully replace connection, Carol maintained. Animal and habitat were as inseparable as turtle and shell. When zoos severed this connection, they created different species. They housed artificial animals dependent on dried food, daily cleaning, and antibiotic injections.

Along the way, we humans had also cut our connection to the wild, Carol believed. Cities were zoos for people. Artificial food was manufactured for the masses. We built for ourselves climate-controlled cages and produced pharmaceuticals that helped us live longer, but what exactly were we living for? We had become zoo humans. We had stripped life of its wildness and incarcerated ourselves in picket-fenced pens that left us depressed and disconnected.

In 1969, Zoo Atlanta’s resident female bobcat gave birth to two sister cubs, but one of them was sick. When her mother refused to let the sick kitten suckle, the kitten was moved to a windowless concrete cell where she was scheduled to be euthanized.

Carol knew the groundskeeper at the zoo, an old friend whom she had worked with at the museum.

“I gotta put her down tomorrow morning,” he told her.

“Not if I take her with me tonight,” she replied.

Carol began bottle-feeding the frail, feeble cub, whom she
named Bast. Her fur was fluffy oatmeal, with flecks of honey and a dollop of stunted cottonball tail. After a few days, her mane thickened and her checkerboard spots deepened in color. Slowly, Bast gained weight and strength. She grew into her oversized paws. Carol built a forty-by-forty-foot pen in her backyard with elevated ramps, jumps, and ledges, surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence. She walked Bast twice a day on a leash through the pathless forest behind her house. At home, Carol crouched low, hands beneath her chin, and played pouncing games with her feline friend. They slept together on a single mattress on the floor.

Eventually, however, Bast outgrew even her backyard jungle. Carol convinced a friend to let her release Bast on his forested property south of Atlanta. Carol said her goodbyes, snuggled her one last time in her arms, and then set her free. Bast excitedly dashed about for a few minutes, but when she heard Carol’s jeep engine, she chased her down the gravel driveway.

Carol couldn’t sleep that night, worried that Bast was not yet acclimated to the wild. She returned the next day with food and water bowls. Bast was waiting for her at the end of the gravel driveway. She tackled Carol as soon as she stepped out of the truck and licked her face.

For several weeks, Carol drove down to feed Bast. It was a two-and-a-half-hour round-trip each day. Bast waited for her every evening. Then one night, she arrived to an empty field and a food bowl still filled.

“Bast! Here, girl!” she called. No response came from the darkening woods.

In the dusky halflight, she searched the edges of the field for tracks or scat but found none. Could she have been shot by hunters? Did a bear or cougar get her? She called again for Bast but heard only the echo of her own voice.

The sky was sprinkled with stars when she finally returned to her jeep. She started the engine and flipped on her headlights. At the forest’s edge, a pair of glowing yellow eyes appeared. Bast watched her drive slowly down the gravel road, but this time she did not follow.

Carol ate her first bobcat a few months later. She spotted its carcass along a rural mountain road on a cool autumn evening, the sinking sun bathing the bare trees in tangerine twilight. Carol parked her jeep in the grass and climbed down, her boots crunching the cold gravel.

“I hope it went quickly,” she said, kneeling beside the cat. As she removed the pelt around the haunches, she moistened the skin with canteen water to make the slices easier. All the while, she talked to the bobcat soothingly and reassuringly, nurse to patient, mother to child.

The cat’s stunted tailbone was still in its skin, so she tugged at it with her teeth. After a half hour, she had the bobcat disassembled, laid out on the ground in cleanly dissected parts. Next, she sliced into the intestines. Warm steam hissed from the stomach, and a bilious black fluid spilled out. Carol sorted through the offal with her bare hands to find the crushed bones of a rabbit and leathery pieces of deer skin.

“You’ve been living high on the hog, big fella,” she said.

Then she sliced away dense red meat from its shanks and placed them in a plastic bread bag. Carol ate the bobcat that evening for supper. As always, she thanked the animal before eating it. Sizzling in fat over the fire, the bobcat meat was rich, gamy, and delicious.

“We don’t have a good reason not to eat cat or dog. The Indians knew that,” Carol wrote in her journal. “We euthanize tens of thousands of cats and dogs each year and then dump their carcasses. We’re so wasteful and ungrateful.”

Carol had first discovered food stigmas at age six. Wading barefoot in a shallow creek, she saw a fish swimming upriver. She grabbed it with her bare hands and brought it to her father, who was fishing on the bank.

“Look, Dad. I caught us dinner.”

He frowned. “It’s a sucker fish. We can’t eat that.”

Later, she was told not to eat mullet. Only blacks eat mullet, her father said.

Carol was confused: why could you eat some fish and not others? There was no discernible difference in health or taste. The rules were arbitrary and absurd.

“Human stigmas around food are absolutely nuts. What difference is there between a cow and horse? Pig and dog? We eat millions of cows raised in confinement, standing in their own excrement, and ignore the abundance of wild meat all around us.”

Carol rarely hunted. There was no need to spend hours hunting squirrels when freshly killed ones could be found freely around every bend in the road. Deer, possum, and coon carcasses were also plentiful along country highways. Even dead birds were morsels of nutrition.

Carol had shot her first animal—a sparrow—when she was ten years old. She had heard it rustling the leaves, scratching and pecking for grubs in the forest floor. She crept closer, sighted the bird in the crosshairs of her BB gun, and pulled the trigger. The gun popped. Four other sparrows burst from the brush and flapped away. Her sparrow tumbled and was still, shot squarely through the sternum.

“Instantly it felt wrong,” Carol recalled.
“
‘Why did I do this?’ I asked myself. Nobody taught me that feeling. It was just built-in. I think it’s that way for most people—though maybe not all. I had taken life unnecessarily, and instinctively I felt remorse.”

The best way to alleviate her guilt, she decided, was to make use of the bird. So she skinned it and cooked it over a campfire, whispering thanks before tasting its tender, mild, juicy flesh.

“Eating an animal is a kind of communion with nature,” Carol explained. “I know it sounds trite, but I feel more connected to the web of life by honoring animals and making them a part of me. Their death is not wasted.”

For Carol, dead on the road specimens—which she abbreviated D.O.R.—were especially valuable both nutritionally and scientifically. Wild meat was far tastier and healthier, free from the synthetic hormones and antibiotic injections of factory farms. Roadkill also provided free specimens for scientific study. Carol had taught herself advanced anatomy from D.O.R. specimens.