South Moon Under

Night entered the clearing from the scrub. The low tangled growth
of young oak and pine and palmetto fell suddenly black and silent,
seeming to move closer in one shadowy spring. The man told himself
there was nothing to fear. Yet as he walked towards his cabin,
naked and new on the raw sand, darkness in this place seemed to him
unfriendly.

He thought, "Time I get me a fence raised tomorrow, maybe 'twon't
seem so wild, like."

Light still hung raggedly above the hammock west of the cleared
acres. Here and there a palm shook its head against the faint
orange of the sky, or the varnished small leaves of a live oak were
for a moment luminous. There was an instant when the hammock
reared back against the west; when the outline of each tree-top was
distinct; when the clearing gathered about it the shreds of
twilight. Then there was no longer scrub or clearing or hammock.
Blackness obliterated them with a great velvet paw and crouched
like a panther on the cabin doorstep.

The man tested the security of the split rails that formed a
temporary pen about his hogs. The grey mule was hobbled and the
scrub milch cow tethered. The chickens clacked and fluttered in
the coop that must hold them until a proper roost was built. After
the fence was raised, they could all run free. He stood by the
coop a moment. His thoughts stirred uneasily in his mind, milling
like the fowls. He could not be sure that he had done well to move
his family here, across the river. He had not made a good living
in the piney-woods. Only the knowledge of his native Florida wife
and of his neighbours, her kin, had kept him to the few crops that
would yield on that grey shifting land. His family of five was of
an age now to help with the crops. He had exchanged pine-land for
scrub, with a precarious fringe of hammock.

The Florida scrub was unique. The man Lantry recognized its
quality as well as its remoteness. There was perhaps no similar
region anywhere. It was a vast dry rectangular plateau, bounded on
three sides by two rivers. The Ocklawaha, flowing towards the
north, bounded it on the west. At the north-west corner of the
rectangle the Ocklawaha turned sharply at right angles and flowed
due east, joining, at the north-east corner, the St. Johns River
which formed the eastern demarcation.

Within these deep watery lines the scrub stood aloof, uninhabited
through its wider reaches. The growth repelled all human living.
The soil was a tawny sand, from whose parched infertility there
reared, indifferent to water, so dense a growth of scrub pine--the
Southern spruce--that the effect of the massed thin trunks was of a
limitless, canopied stockade. It seemed impenetrable, for a man-
high growth of scrub oak, myrtle, sparkleberry and ti-ti filled the
interstices. Wide areas, indeed, admitted of no human passage.

In places the pines grew more openly, the sunlight filtered through
and patches of ground showed bald and lichened. The scrub was
sparingly dotted with small lakes and springs. Around these grew a
damp-loving hammock vegetation. Or a random patch of moisture
produced, alien in the dryness, a fine stand of slash pine or long-
leaf yellow. These were known as pine islands. To any one
standing on a rise, they were visible from a great distance.