ESPN Hunting

DAVIE, Fla. — The multimillionaire comes to his door, clad in snazzy blue sneakers, blue running shorts and, dangling into his chest hair, a gold necklace ornamented with an alligator tooth and a pendant of his initials, RB, in what look like diamonds. This is Ronnie Bergeron, a land and rock mining magnate, and he's been on the treadmill.

He's a native of the Everglades who got hooked on the wilds by his grandfather, a game warden in the wild days before developers — Bergeron prominently among them — helped tug civilization even further from Florida's southeast coast. As a recent appointee by Florida Governor Charlie Crist to a seat on the state's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, he may be the wealthiest and best-connected among the small group of Floridians who call themselves Gladesmen.

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Shake his right hand, and you'll also find half a finger missing, from a rodeo accident. A rope got wrapped around it, exploded it off the end of his hand, and was reattached; but when it happened a second time, the half-digit was a loss. He's also a gator wrestler, and standing outside his massive home, he tells his guests: "Here's how you get your hand out of a gator's mouth: You tap him on the other side of the nose so he tries to bite your hand. That saved my life two years ago when I got hung up with that gator. I was done."

At his doorstep this late spring day, with jaws now hanging open, are a writer and a skinny, bespectacled, self-employed metal fabricator named Frank Denninger. He, too, is a Gladesman, though by habit more than birth. Since he was a young man, Denninger has hunted deer in the prairies, swamps and marshes that define a Delaware-sized swath of South Florida's interior bracketed by nearly 6 million souls on the coasts.

Today, Denninger is one of the most diligent advocates for hunting and access rights in this area. ("You've got to read to deal with this government," he says.) He's the guy who actually reads all the government reports regarding hunting grounds, bothers to attend the meetings, and has worn out his thesaurus writing letters on behalf of guys who like to camp and hunt and get lost in the woods.

They're a study in contrasts, befitting the land they represent: Denninger's house in the 'burbs would fit comfortably in Bergeron's stable, or under the shed where Bergeron keeps five airboats and a stuffed gator the length of a small car. Denninger drove here today in a cranky, 30-year-old Ford truck he doesn't dare push much over 50 mph; in Bergeron's driveway are two black Hummer H2s and two white Mercedes coupes, one bearing the state's deer hunting specialty license plate.

But both Bergeron and Denninger are drawn to the land, and to the fight over how that land will be used — specifically, a 720,000-acre swath of prairie, marsh and scrubland called the Big Cypress National Preserve.

So passionate is Denninger that before Bergeron and family load up for the drive to his ranch (an hour away to the middle of the state, just outside the Big Cypress and a stone's throw from a Seminole reservation by the same name), the old machinist gives Bergeron a DVD of the HBO movie "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," a story of the United States' expansion into the West and its subsequent extermination of native tribes there.

"This is exactly what they're trying to do in Big Cypress," he tells Bergeron. "They did it to the Indians in 1868. Now they're trying to do it to us."

'A poaching preserve'

Forgive Denninger's melodrama if you can. The Everglades have long been prized territory, a land as punishing as it is stunning to witness.

When the Big Cypress was designated as a National Preserve in 1974, the developers were lined up to turn the wilds of Florida, and their unique ecosystem, into the sort of soulless sprawl that would make Los Angeles look like Peoria, Ill. Part of the charter of the preserve was, and remains, human enjoyment.

But seven years ago, citing effects on wildlife and habitat, the National Parks Service restricted off-road vehicle (ORV) access to all but 400 miles of existing trails. Seeing what man hath wrought, some conservation groups would as soon Congress designate a large portion of it — the Addition Lands, a 147,000-acre chunk added to the preserve in 1988 — as wilderness, handing it back to the native species such as the ahinga, huge land snails, sawgrass, panthers and God, if even He would dare brave that dark thicket.

"Both sides of the discussion want the same thing," said Bob DeGross, a spokesman for the Preserve. "They want to be able to access the area so they can enjoy it. They enjoy getting away from the hustle and bustle of the city. They enjoy being able to see the vast night sky."

Denninger maintains that hunters are the most dedicated stewards of the land, self-policing to the brink of paranoia. "They just make a poaching preserve, when they make a wilderness preserve," he says. And hiking in, for a hunter, isn't always the most practical approach. "There are times you just can't escape the mosquitoes. The rocks, the water, 90-degree heat with 90 percent humidity — it's a lot to go against on foot out here. In our opinion, the places where you can't use ORVs, the average person is not going to venture into this stuff."

Guys like Denninger have been pushing back for years, without the benefit of a legal degree or funds — just with a passion for the outdoors, and simple yet eloquent recollections of deer pursued, panthers glimpsed, gators hunted. "They," he says, referring to the pro-wilderness camp, "don't know why we're so passionate. They won't miss it (if it's gone)."

On the other side of the debate are those who point to the disruption of the soil and hydrology, the ill effects on animals from frogs to panthers, and the blight vehicles bring to the sights and sounds and smells of the outdoors. According to Matthew Schwartz, the political chair of the Broward Group of the Sierra Club, ORVs can't help but degrade the Addition Lands and Big Cypress.

"I think it's unfortunate that there is so much tension and animosity between the two groups, as if people who like to hike out there and look at animal tracks and look at birds and identify native Florida plants are somehow the enemy of people who like to hunt," Schwartz says. "The problem is not the hunting and fishing. The problem is the machines."

The suggested solution, from a guy who leads walking tours into the Addition Lands: Get some good boots.

"There are many organizations that use the Addition Lands," Schwartz says. "They walk in. The idea that they're locked up and can't be used is ludicrous. It's open to everybody. You just have to get your feet wet and walk."

A breakthrough for the pro-access crowd came on June 12, when the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC, to Floridians) sent a notice to the U.S. Department of Interior that sounded fairly like a note tied to a brick. The resolution documents "serious and longstanding concerns" about the Big Cypress and the Addition Lands, according to the letter to the feds. It continues: "Over two decades, the Commission and a large segment of the public have expressed sincere disappointment and frustration with the delays and lack of progress toward broadening public access and use."

Considering the usual conversation from a state agency to a federal agency, "serious and longstanding concerns" is fightin' words. The state's official voice, for what it's worth, is pro-access.

The commission was telling the feds that it wanted to be included in the Parks Service's general management plan that will dictate, likely for about the next 20 years, just how the Addition Lands portion of Big Cypress is handled, and how people may access it.

It's perhaps not a terribly shocking result that the FWC (including Bergeron) supports access. But it's still worth trying to understand the Floridians who actually consider it a birthright to access this gator-infested, mosquito-choked, flood-prone, thorn-riddled, disorienting, foreboding and altogether glorious patch of swamp and marsh and scrubby prairie. To do so, you must look backwards, and then clamber through the thick of the preserve with some of these self-described Gladesmen.

Eat what you kill

Green Glades West turns out to be almost impervious to maps. As the bird flies, it's not more than a couple of clicks from Alligator Alley, the toll road that turns the formerly treacherous journey across the state into a 100-minute cannonball run from Fort Lauderdale to Naples, a sure way to splat some bugs on your front grill. But mostly it's that rare 5,000 acres that manages to feel secluded even as the oceanic echo of 80 mph traffic wafts through the trees.

At the ranch, Bergeron and Denninger pile into a gutsy little ORV that bounces down some trails that resemble roads, leading to a clearing where Bergeron maintains one of several corn feeders spread around his property.

There are no fewer than a half-dozen young deer in the distance, mostly flopped in the late-day shade. They regard the humans with only the remotest sort of concern.

"Those look like some happy, contented deer," Denninger says.

"We don't harass 'em, we don't bother 'em," Bergeron says. "My kids are allowed one buck a year. There's no point in killing more than you can eat."

Bergeron's disorienting route around his land followed more deer near a feeder; past an apparent mother turkey and her chicks scampering into underbrush; a field of cattle Bergeron raises "to keep the taxes down;" near some feral hogs; the century-old, rusted-out remains of a massive mechanical lathe left over from the days of clear-cutting.

"Everything that lived in Florida before man arrived lives here," he says, omitting, perhaps, the once-upon-a-time mastodons that roamed the peninsula.

There were no bear sightings, unfortunately, but still a curious menagerie of beast and machine. Still, it's a veritable museum tour compared with the Everglades of his youth.

"When I was about 3 years old," Bergeron says. "I asked my grandfather to go in his airboat. If he had said, 'Son, that's a wilderness area — nobody can go in there,' I would not be spending half my time today trying to save the Everglades, because I wouldn't have known what it was, and I wouldn't have fallen in love with it. If you can't have access and enjoyment, kids won't fall in love with it in the future."

Nor could they undertake the sort of derring-do that two years ago made Bergeron internationally famous as the county commissioner who got hung up with a gator. Actually, he was giving a tour — something he does regularly, and at great cost to the visitors, who pony up thousands for charity to see Florida in the raw.

According to later press accounts, he spied the gator in a pond and decided to give a demonstration of some good 'ole-fashioned' gator wrassling. That's when (as Bergeron mentioned on his porch) the beast wrapped his leg, chomped his hand and yanked him to the bottom.

When he drives past the pond on this day — with the same gator in it — he can't help but retell the story.

"I jumped on him, right on the edge of this damn thing, and missed his mouth," Bergeron says. "He wraps his tail around my left leg, and I'm on top of him. He hooks me right out. I was in the middle of that sucker!"

"Buddy," Denninger replies, "I was on the lake and I've seen 12-footers jump, cleared their body out of the water, a whole 5-, 600-pound animal just whooom Out of the water."

It's a little later when Bergeron finally gets in a summary of rural life. Back at the lodge, with massive steaks grilling and Bergeron drinking Michelob that he drops peanuts into, he recalls a couple of other encounters with animals on the trails where he jogs. A bear here, a boar there.

"I'm not scared of anything out here," he says. "I feel like an animal myself."

Into the Fakahatchee

Night falls. There's a long drive south — during which the writer has to swerve to keep from splattering a small gator near Alligator Alley — and then a cold, dead sleep on a cool, pillowy couch.

And the next morning, a hunter named Ralph Bellman, who could have been Einstein's stunt double, prepares to take his friend Drew Osceola, a soft-spoken but intrepid Seminole not yet 20, to get his federal license for ATV use on the designated trails inside the Big Cypress.

This is, of course, a formality, and yet something of an irony. As a Seminole, Osceola can still hunt and travel as he pleases through the land where his ancestors (led by the warrior Osceola, no less) burrowed when the U.S. Army attempted to oust them by force.

(Journalist Michael Grunwald, author of the Everglades history "The Swamp," wrote of that conflict: "The Second Seminole War was America's first Vietnam.")

The heat, mosquitoes, leeches, ambushes, mosquitoes, dampness, rocks, trees, snakes, gators, mosquitoes, horseflies, dysentery, mosquitoes, malaria, storms and general hellishness (punctuated as it was with moments of remarkable natural splendor) was too much for the white soldiers. Even their horses starved. That the U.S. government would later limit people's access to those same areas would have seemed downright insane to soldiers in 1839.

What followed was 150 years of subsistence poverty for the hundred or so Seminoles who resisted musket and treaty alike. But to this day, they refer to themselves as "unconquered," the only Native Americans who resisted subjugation.

Of course, in the past three decades, the Seminoles have slowly built on their reservations a gambling empire so lucrative that for years, virtually each man, woman and child has received stipends amounting to a decent middle-class income. Tradition has been a casualty of comfort. Drew Osceola's family wants him to follow the traditional path to manhood — which includes the killing of four deer. But with many of the Seminoles who still maintain that tie to the land aging, his mother asked that Bellman, the white hunter, show him how to stalk and kill deer.

It's not deer season on this day, but the men are venturing into a jungle-like area adjacent to the Big Cypress called the Fakahatchee Strand. Realistically, this requires wheels. At the ranger station, Bellman asks a supervisor whose nametag reads Doug Gilmour, "Does he," indicating his Seminole friend, "get a different rule book?"

"Yeah, probably," the supervisor replies. "The blank one."

"I'm not making myself the exception to the rules," Osceola maintains. So it's by the book that a short while later, he, Bellman and Denninger (with his pants prudently tucked into his socks) clamber aboard ATVs packing machetes and axes.

They motor down a path that once carried loggers back into the forest. It's raised, built with the dirt scooped out of the canals that flank it. Maybe a hundred people a year make it down this trail, Bellman guesses, adding, "and it's getting fewer and fewer."

"We've got to be careful," he says. "Remember, the male gators are killers. They'll also eat the babies."

No telling how far back the men motor before an old canoe catches their attention. While Denninger stays at the trail, Osceola and Bellman tromp across the soggy canal bed — which, like the rest of the low ground, will be under several inches of water throughout the wet season. And they plunge into the trees, following a series of markers that seem spaced at no shorter distance than the greenery will reveal.

It's rough going. Branches cling, grasses scrape. The landscape, flat as it is, grants nothing like a landmark or orientation point — until the markers give way, and Bellman and Osceola find themselves in a clearing the size of a soccer field. At one end is a puddle imitating a pond. The ground is spongy mud with grass like fine hairs. A flood gauge staked by the treeline shows that the water rises 5 feet in wet times.

As the men tramp around, as carefully as possible, they speak in whispers. For one, Bellman has found plants ripped apart, and bear tracks between them, suggesting a large thirsty mammal nearby. But for him, finding this patch so close to a trail he's traveled so often is a borderline spiritual experience.

He looks to a long, muddy gash in the muck on the far side of the little pond, the sort of groove a large gator would scrape into the mud.

"Something big might have grabbed him and dragged him off," Bellman says.

"In his element, he's king," Osceola says. "Out of it, he's just as vulnerable as we are."

They turn back to their vehicles and find once again that while it looks like trees and grass, this area is really choked with wrong turns. Even with markers dangling from branches, we tromp in zigs and zags, marveling at how disastrously lost we could so easily get.

Denninger, it turns out, has pressed ahead to hack branches and trees out of the path with his machete. When the group re-gathers, Denninger says he actually tried tromping in after his friends, before giving up.

"I went in a hundred yards," he says. "I came back out, and I was 70 yards away from the ORV. I said, 'What the f--- is this?' I have sat down in six inches of water and cried from being lost out here in deer season."

His big news: He saw a 12-foot gator camped out on the middle of the trail. The beast let him get close enough that Denninger is convinced is was lying in wait for him. Gators are fans of the trails, he believes, because in the wet season, deer use them for dry passage.

But even with his efforts to hack a hole through the middle of the trail, it quickly becomes impossible to move with any sort of swiftness. Branches hang low from overhead while smaller trees nudge up from the trail itself.

It takes no imagination at all to picture this path totally overgrown.

"A lot of people say the Everglades are sensitive," Denninger says. "'The Everglades is the most endangered place on the planet. And everything in it is on the edge of catastrophic collapse.'"

"What?" Bellman gasps. "What a joke. This thing was logged. This is a railroad tram we're on. This ditch is a drag line. I want them to walk through this. And I want to see what they think is being damaged.

"I want to take you to my first camp," Bellman continues. "It looks like an Indiana Jones movie. Nature took it back over, just in my lifetime. In another 20, 30 years, maybe they'll find some metal in the ground. And in 10,000 years, those nails will be worth something."

Cat crossing

The next day, improbably, driving with Denninger just before 8 a.m., we see a panther.

Actually, I spot it first. A big cat on the two-lane Tamiami Trail, prowling near the guardrail on the north side.

"Frank," I say, as I ask a question I know the answer to. "What is that on the road?"

Not even 200 of these suckers in the wild, and here's one now. No cars ahead of us. Or behind. So he stops the truck.

The cat isn't large, by panther standards — maybe a year or two old. It loiters by the rail, then slinks back across the road and into the trees.

Fifty years of climbing around these swamps, and Denninger has seen a panther only a half-dozen times, usually obscured. "I've never," he says as we drive away, "seen one clearer than that."

Before it slipped into the woods, I managed to snap the picture on the bottom of this page. The settings were all wrong for shooting into a sunrise, and with just a 40 mm lens attached, it looks like it belongs in a scrapbook between grainy shots of UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster.

At least you get the idea — the shock of unexpectedly encountering nature, a feeling of profound awe, a sense of providence, blah blah blah.

Then again, maybe you have to be there.