Going Dark

ONE





FOR AN HOUR THE MOTHER has been toiling through the tall grass searching for her newborns. The tropical night is sweltering. A lazy breeze off the Atlantic gives no relief. In a small clearing, the mother halts, surveys the landscape, changes direction. She is focused on a hump of earth overgrown with weeds.

She’s forgotten where she buried them back in April. After two months of rain and erosion and the powerful ocean winds, the contours of the terrain have changed, confusing her.

But this hump seems promising. She climbs atop it, pressing her belly flat against the earth. This feels right. This, she believes, is the spot.

She gathers herself, lifts her body off the ground, fully extended as if attempting a push-up. She holds that position, then lets go, dropping all her weight against the earth. A thump echoes across the surrounding waters.

She waits a moment, then presses her jaw to the ground to listen for their cries below the surface.

A breeze flitters in the leaves of the Brazilian pepper, frogs screech, out in the darkness two owls compete with whoops and howls, and there’s the endless slosh of water against the bank. But through all the night clamor she detects their voices inside the earth, their distinctive cheeps, their throaty squeaks. It’s them, her offspring.

She begins to dig in the sandy soil, a few inches, a few more, clawing precisely until she exposes them to the hot night air. Two of them have already squirmed out of their shells. Ten inches long. Black and tan with gold bands. Eyes green and liquid. Immediately mosquitoes and other night bugs circle, land, and begin to track up and down their length.

All this, the unfolding drama of the American crocodile locating her hatchlings, is lit by the video camera’s spotlight, which Cameron Prince operates from the bow of the airboat fifteen yards away. Onshore, crouched in the shadows only a few feet from the crocodile nest, is Leslie Levine.

Leslie shouldn’t be on land so close to the nest. It’s risky at a moment like this, but it happens from time to time and there’s nothing to do but tough it out. A minute ago, she ducked ashore to search for drag marks, the distinctive trails crocs leave as they haul themselves across the sandy banks. Seconds after she’d climbed the slippery berm, the mother croc surfaced in the canal, swam to the bank, and trundled up the steep edge.

Cameron called a warning but Leslie raised both palms to tell him to hold steady. No worries. All she had to do was hang back, be still, watch. Sure, it was dicey, but nothing she hadn’t handled dozens of times before.

Now in silence she and Cameron watch the scene unfold. The glare of the spotlight doesn’t alarm the croc. With such a dominant sense of smell and keen hearing the creature relies little on sight. As long as she and Cameron are quiet, the mother will go about her business oblivious to their presence.

This is a big one, twelve feet, almost half a ton, but she digs into the mound with delicate strokes, pushing aside the mud and marl without harming the fragile shells. An amazing creature: covered in bony plates, with jaws so strong it can crush cast iron, so hardy and resilient it can survive the loss of a leg or its entire tail, yet it’s capable of such deftness.

In the bright camera light, Leslie smiles. For years she’s been watching scenes like this unfold, hundreds of them, but she’s still as stoked as the first time. The American croc laying its eggs months before, then tracking down the right mound, doing her belly flop to see if there’s anything alive inside, anything worth digging for. When she hears their cries, she begins the careful excavation, followed by the swim to a nearby freshwater source to safely deposit her offspring. A thousand times she’s seen it, maybe more.

Oh, if she wanted to, she could drag out her notebooks, tally up the other nights like this, get the exact total. Everything was in her spiral notebooks. All penned in neat script just minutes after each event. Later on tonight, she’ll dock the airboat at the lab and take an hour or two to transfer the data into the computer and fill out the spreadsheets. Every croc they encounter will be identified, sexed, weighed, injected with a microchip, its activities listed with signs of health or battle scars, the GPS coordinates of its active nest, number of hatchlings, and all identifying markings on the mother crocs.

The two of them watch the mother finish opening the nest, revealing it to the camera’s light. After a moment’s inspection, the big female plucks two hatchlings from the nest, holding them lightly between her jagged teeth.

Next she will turn and crawl back down the bank, slide into the water to begin her swim across the canal to a freshwater pond she discovered earlier. That small, rain-filled pond was Leslie’s creation. A month ago it didn’t exist. But to be ready for hatching season, Levine requisitioned the plant’s maintenance team to use their amphibious backhoe to create the pit so the crocs in this part of the canal system would have a crucial freshwater supply.