Free Skink--No Surrender by Carl Hiaasen

captain sounded his horn.
    My shoulders were shaking, I was so amped. “This must be it! The bridge she called me from!”
    The shrimper was eyeing us from the cockpit as his boat rumbled past. Skink pulled off his shower cap and shoved it inside a pocket. The gash on his scalp was purple from iodine, and I could see a cross-hatching of black threads. He must have pulled the car over and stitched himself up while I was asleep.
    “So, what’d you tell your mom?” he asked.
    “I told her I trusted you.”
    The governor smiled. “Does that mean you don’t want a ride to the airport?”
    “No airport,” I said.
    “Outstanding.” He unknotted his snake-rattle necklace and presented it to me.
    I wish I still had it.

EIGHT
    Scientists search for ivory-billed woodpeckers with the same fanatic determination that some people hunt for Bigfoots.
    The difference is that those woodpeckers were real. They lived in old hardwood forests throughout the southeastern United States until after the Civil War, when the timber industry moved in and started chopping down millions of trees. Eventually the birds had no more bark beetles to eat, no old dead trunks for pecking out their nest holes. Once it became known that ivorybills were disappearing, they were stalked and shot by hunters who sold the bodies to museums, so that they could be stuffed and put on display like dinosaurs. Pitiful but true.
    The woodpecker was crazy beautiful—tall and long-beaked, with pale yellow eyes and bluish-black feathers. Bright white streaks ran down each side of its neck, spreading to the wings. The bird’s most striking feature was a sharp crest on the back of its head—black for females, bright red for males. The ivorybill’s appearance was so dramatic that it was nicknamed the “Lord God Bird,”because “Lord God!” is what people supposedly exclaimed when they first saw one.
    There hasn’t been a one hundred percent documented encounter with the species in something like eighty years. Random sightings are reported, but, like Bigfoot, not a single ivorybill has been positively located and identified. What people often see (and get excited about) is really a pileated woodpecker, which also has a vivid red crest. That bird is smaller, though, with brownish feathers and a shorter beak. It also has less white on the wing markings.
    I know all this from doing my science fair project, which won an honorable mention at school. I wouldn’t call myself an ivorybill expert, but I did a ton of research. Because ivorybills vanished so long ago, no color photographs of the birds exist. Malley helped me draw a likeness on my poster board. To be accurate, we studied century-old illustrations and also a painting of three ivorybills by John James Audubon, the famous nature artist who spent lots of time in Florida.
    Unfortunately, Audubon usually shot the species he wanted to paint, in order to examine them up close. This was back in the 1820s, when there were still plenty of ivorybills around, but I bet today he’d trade that painting for a glimpse of a live one. The last known population was wiped out in the 1930s when a Chicago lumber company clear-cut an ancient Louisiana forest. Lots of folks, even some politicians, pleaded with the loggers not to saw down those trees, but the company refused to stop.
    And with that, the ivory-billed woodpecker became a ghost. In Florida the legend lives on in the deep woods along the Choctawhatchee River, which winds down into the Panhandle from southern Alabama. Malley also worked with me on my habitat map. That’s how she was able to get on the phone and tell me where she was without alerting the fake Talbo Chock. All she had to say was that she’d heard an ivorybill. Only a bird geek like me would put two and two together.
    Not so long ago, researchers from two big-time universities published a study listing fourteen reliable sightings of the ivorybill in the Choctawhatchee basin, as well as three hundred