_When my family moved to  Whitehaven, Tennessee, in 1954, it was an unincorporated hamlet of an uncounted few thousand people, and just beginning to serve as a suburb of Memphis, which lay several miles to the north. We were surrounded by country.

The vast flatlands of the Mississippi Delta stretched away southward, destination of the early morning busloads of black children turned out of their schools each spring to chop cotton and each fall to pick it while we white children stayed at our desks. The Delta was my daddy’s ancestral home, and his kin all still lived there. When we drove down to see them Highway 61 would plunge from the wide bright cottonfields into dark bayou bottoms, and the windshield would be so spattered with bugs that we had to stop to scrape them off. Dead deer and snakes and owls and opossums in abundance lay sprawled on those bridgesides. Ospreys nested in the cypress tops, and there were alligators in the mud.

To the east rose the scrub-and-clay uplands of Fayette County, Tennessee’s poorest, pig country, Klan country, buzzard country. We never went there. West was the River, too huge and too strong to be quite real to a boy of seven.

What was real was closer to home. A big Hereford bull lived in the fields across the road, a chaser of children. Down our side of Oakwood Drive there was a row of seven new houses, and beyond its dead end a deep forest began, with swamps and lakes and mysteries in it; spring nights, the frog chorus there sang loud. In an abandoned barn nearby, mud-daubers built their terrible castles, tube on tube of wasp-brick. Because I was allergic, my mama said one sting could kill me. Anaphylactic shock. I grew to dread all insects, especially the buzzing ones: June bugs, yellowjackets, bumblebees, dragonflies—we had thousands of them, each my enemy.

The hedge, the lawn, the big hollow sweetgum, the maples and dogwoods and pines, even the scruffy bushes that screened our garbage cans were wildlife habitat, the first I ever knew. Hundreds of songbirds squabbled at my mother’s feeders. A family of rabbits every spring, shuffling quails and burbling doves, and countless reptiles and amphibians (my favorites) all thrived around our house, the zealous depredations of dogs and cats notwithstanding. Turtles, lizards, salamanders, and, to my father’s good-humored horror, plenty of snakes slept in the summer shade and came out to prowl at night. At lightningbug time, my friends and I had toad-catching contests— you could capture an easy three dozen an hour. Terrariums, their glass walls slimed with the leavings of mudpuppies, skinks, and snails, were my pride. I also caught and tried to keep box tortoises and various snakes, but they always seemed to escape, sometimes indoors.

Behind our house was a sharecropper’s shack, with an old friendly workhorse. Later, when the shack had given way to the grounds of a big, new, white-columned house, there was another horse, a fancier one, who would eat my father’s Chesterfield cigarettes from my hand. At the bottom of the pasture, a little creek had its source.

I cannot remember when I first began to follow that creek downstream, but I did it again and again, farther and more studiously as the years passed. Like all of its ilk in the lower Mississippi valley, it flowed slowly, opaquely, and by August barely at all, along the bottom of a deep winding gouge cut through layers of the wind-deposited silt called loess. Loess is a very fine and viscid stuff, and it makes one hell of a mud. Where the water backed up, the muck might be waist-deep on a boy, and to fight one’s way out of what we called the quicksand was a heroic enterprise.

Miraculously, there were a good dozen boys within a year of my age all living on one sparsely settled square-mile quadrangle of roads (and only one girl). I was small, and bad at sports, and nearly always last to be chosen for a team, but in the swamps I often led our expeditions, and was usually first to test the footing. My mother always said I was the muddiest boy of all when we came trudging home at suppertime.

The gummiest, suckingest mudholes were the places I loved best. Above a pool far downstream (I mean perhaps a mile), we would swing on grapevines and do cannonballs into water the color of coffee with cream, where the bottom was a bottomless ooze. Snakes swam there, including the dread cottonmouth, and kingfishers laughed in the willows and tall tuliptrees. Catfish took bits of hot dog dangled from cane poles on lines bobbered with porcupine quills. Once, a gang of us blundered on a hobo camp so freshly abandoned that a half-can of beans was still warm on the coals. Often, I went into the swamp by myself. I was a melancholy boy, and sometimes lonely even among my friends. My solitary wanderings began, I think, as flights, from games in which I could not excel, from an uncomprehending restlessness, from the sweat and tumble and per- plexity of social boyhood; but before long my long after-school afternoons alone in the woods had grown into little pilgrim- ages, my weekends and summers rhapsodic quests. I felt with certainty that I was seeking something, and sometimes, I know, I found it, though I still could not tell you what it was.

Beyond the tangled muscadine and honeysuckle jungles, beyond the canebrakes in which whole chattering flocks of birds could hide, and old overgrown fields snarled with blackberries and cocklebur, I would come at last to an even, easy, open floor of dead leaves and low, soft plants, pillared with trees of awesome girth and height. The canopy was far above, punctured only intermittently by the terrible sun. I believe that the trees had never been cut there, although, like some of these others, that memory may be colored by desire. I remember the air as very humid, very hot, very still. I remember hearing the buzzing of wasps not near at all, and, in response, the beating of my fretful heart.

My little creek (did it have a name? I never wondered) fed a larger one that fed Nonconnah Creek, which in turn fed the Mississippi. Nonconnah was occasionally so audacious as to flood its own flood plain, and the Army Corps of Engineers dealt severely with such impertinence. The Corps’ contractors’ basic instrument of correction was the dragline, a great toothed scoop on a crane that could rip out a ton of root-riddled earth in one bite. Accordingly, the messy, inefficient eccentricities of Nonconnah Creek—the oxbows, the riffles and pools, the braided channels, the islanded swamps, the tupelo bottoms—were chastened into an orderly, straight-running ditch. The rate of flow was thus increased, and flooding obviated, and development of previously unusable land now made possible. That thousands of such acts of discipline in our part of the Mississippi Valley would bring on anarchy downstream was not particularly a worry: quelling the River’s rebellion farther south would mean more contracts for the contractors (one of whom was the father of a friend of mine on Oakwood Drive). Indeed, racing ever faster, fuller than ever of the sediment which the old meandery flood-bottoms used to retain, the Mississippi today seems very much to want to crash through its old banks down Natchez way and pour into the Atchafalaya basin—and leave New Orleans sitting on a mud flat. To prevent this, I am told, will require one of the most expensive public works projects in the history of the United States.

The dragline first came to my creek when the old one-lane wooden bridge at Mill Branch Road was to be replaced. Growling and grunting, it chewed out a bridge pool and left on the bank two Alps of mud. They were the only hills we ever had, and a splendid place for dirt-clod fights—just the kind of thing my friends loved and I hated. The fishing improved, but where once a boy could sit all day undisturbed but by an occasional truckload of cotton banging over the planks toward the gin, now there was concrete, and traffic—workers and materials for the tract-house subdivisions springing up to the south. I took my cane pole farther now, to the lakes.

My prey was mostly smaller here than the catfish of the creek, but better eating—the little sunfish we called bream (pronounced brim), and crappies (we said croppies), and, once in a while, a large-mouth bass. No matter how early I might come or how late I might stay, the best fishing spots always seemed to be occupied by an elderly black man or woman with little to say to a white child. I wonder now, did they fear that I might be the landowner’s son? And who did own that land? I had never seen a No Trespassing sign, and the thought never crossed my mind. They would nod, and keep on fishing in silence, catching ten fish to my one, day after day. For them, of course, it was not sport.

There was a place on the creek we called the rapids—it was just a gravelly riffle, really—and there, one day, my best friend, Bobby Towery, and I came upon the most stupendous wild animal we had ever met outside of the zoo. I knew at once, from my avid reading in field guides, that this was the mighty Alligator Snapping Turtle (you could tell by the three mountainous keels on his carapace), the largest species of freshwater turtle in the world, sometimes surpassing two hundred pounds. I knew too that he was very far from his home, which ought to have been the Mississippi River.

He seemed, indeed, to be grounded. (Snappers are swimmers, not walkers.) A gingerly probe with a long stick elicited only a slight drawing-in of his huge plated head. We agreed that there was only one thing to be done with this incredible discovery— only one way to make it credible. We had to capture the turtle. With my trusty Boy Scout hatchet we cut down a small tree, perhaps two inches thick, and laid it across the gravel shallows to block him from possible escape into the deep and opaque pool below, and while Towery stood guard I ran all the way home for my green coaster wagon and dragged it back through the mud and the brush. The turtle had not moved a muscle.

We had the idea that if we could get him to bite the pole he would not let go, and then we might haul him to land. How to get him into the wagon we’d worry about later. But even with some pretty rowdy poking at his great hooked beak the snapper could not be tempted to do more than flinch.

We sat on the bank and considered waiting him out. Once he began to move, surely then he’d bite. We watched him awhile longer. How hideous, how beautiful, how fierce, how still he was! How primitive, how ancient. What was time to a creature like this? Two boys could never outwait such a turtle.

We decided we would try to flip him onto his back. And then what? We’d see. At least he would be immobilized. With much prying and pushing and sweating and slipping—and much fear, not unjust, that one more slip might tumble us in on top of him—we got our pole beneath the turtle, and started to lift. And at last the Alligator Snapper came to life. He whirled—I know, turtles aren’t supposed to whirl, but this one did—and bit our two-inch pole in half. And clawed his way into deep water and was gone.

I developed a passion to possess wild creatures. Where once I had collected them live and didn’t mind when they escaped, now I wanted them dead and forever. Corpses of frogs, fish, snakes, and crawdads were ranged along my bedroom bookshelves in mayonnaise jars of denatured alcohol. Then my wild bachelor uncle from the Delta, to my mother’s profound dismay, gave me a BB gun, and killing became more important to me than keeping. No songbird was safe. The first shot usually only knocked them senseless from their perch, and I would seek them out in the brush to administer the coup de grâce to the brain. By now I made no pretense of collecting: I never considered skinning out those birds—yuck—and my mother would have been horrified to know the extent of the carnage, so I left my victims where they lay. My favorite target was the mockingbird, the Tennessee state bird, illegal to kill.

What could have possessed me? Remembering this makes my throat even now clench with shame. The pursuit of Eagle Scouthood obliged me to gentler concerns. To take plaster casts of animal tracks for the Nature merit badge, I travelled deeper into the old forest than I had ever gone. I looked more closely too, and relearned some of my old humility there. The tracks led me to questions about the animals’ lives. Why did the mother raccoon and her family stop here? What made the heron take flight? Fox prints at the edge of the water: Did it swim, or leap? Hence, slowly, empathy.

In a little pasture hemmed on all sides by the woods I found a dead calf. The head was twisted weirdly half around, the open eyes staring into the sky. Its black and white skin was peeled back from the rib cage, where flies were walking up and down. One leg had been eaten away, down to the bone. There was another wound at the base of the calf’s neck. The day was hot, but the flesh had not yet begun to stink, so the kill must have been very recent, and the predator was probably nearby. Watching me? Crows called from the margin of the forest. A sharp hind edge of cloud shade raced across the grass, and in the sudden summer brightness there seemed a clarity I had never seen before, as if a veil had been lifted from the face of the world. I looked for tracks, found one, and took its cast. It was very big, three inches across. My field guide said, unbelievably, cougar! Mountain lion! Panther.

Not until years later, when the plaster cast was long lost, did I realize what a find that may have been. Felis concolor is almost certainly extinct now in the Mississippi Valley. Indeed it may be gone everywhere east of the Rockies, but for the minuscule and dwindling population of the Florida panther. Could this have been one of the last Eastern cougars? Or was it, as a wildlife biologist suggested to me recently, the hybrid of a calf-killing dog and a boy’s eager imagination?

I vote cougar, of course.

The virgin forest was cut down. Not even for lumber: the great trees were bulldozed into piles and burned. The earth was scraped literally bare. Most of the topsoil washed away, and the red clay beneath re- quired laborious cultivation to sustain the newly unrolled swaths of zoysia and Bermuda grass. Saplings were planted, wired upright. The lakes were drained, and the black people moved out. The last hobo known to have visited Whitehaven was found dead beneath a hedge. (Towery’s father, publisher of the weekly Whitehaven Press, photographed the late vagabond with his big Speed Graphic bellows camera; the eight-by-ten glossy print of that corpse oozing maggots was one of the horrid treasures of our youth.) We got a shopping center, and an Interstate highway. Fluoridation of our drinking water was fought, thought to be a Communist plot to curb the birthrate. I had my first summer job as a carpenter’s helper, putting up sheet rock in new houses.

Improved pesticides came onto the market, and the cotton crop boomed, and it was possible now to drive through the Delta bottoms with no more than an occasional sweep of the windshield wipers. My wild Mississippi uncle, who had given me my BB gun and kept bongos and a conga drum in his den closet, got married. The ospreys disappeared from the cypress top nests, and the alligators from the bayous.

On the pastures across the road and behind us new houses were built, close together. The only pond left was appropriated by tough teenagers as a beer-drinking hideout; there was a rape there. Quails no longer shuffled in the fallen leaves on our lawn.

What had been done to Nonconnah Creek was done now to its tributaries and their tributaries, although none of them had ever flooded. The upper reaches of my creek were dug out and straightened first, and culverts were run beneath the new road crossings. One branch was buried altogether—it was a test of daring to splash through the low concrete tunnel in the darkness. We feared snakes there, but of course there weren’t any, in such sterility. Our neighborhood’s septic tanks were replaced with modern sewers, which leaked their contents into the stagnant trench which was all that remained of my creek’s headwaters. Farther downstream, our old grapevine-draped swimming hole and the alligator Snapping Turtle’s gravel riffle lasted longer, but we could get there on bicycles now. Sometimes, in fact, we never made it that far, having stopped off to chew gum and laugh in some pretty girl’s back yard and lost track of time. When the last of my creeks was ditched out, I believe I didn’t notice.

Twenty years later, home one Christmas from New York with my wife (a Whitehaven girl), I saw a dragline working in the parking lot of the cabana apartments that stand where my old creek crossed Mill Branch Road. I was astonished to see that there was still some life in what the people there now called the drainage ditch: each time the great machine took a bite, the muddy water boiled with creatures forced downstream before it. The V-shaped ditch was being made into a box-shaped one. A chain link fence was being built along both sides of it, no doubt to keep children safely out. The walls and floor of the box were being lined with concrete.