Free Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island by Will Harlan Page A

house cat: “They’re full of Friskies, and that can’t be good.”
    Wild animals breathed fresh air, drank clean water, and ate untainted, unpolluted plants and critters. Even when they were a few days old, D.O.R. specimens tasted far better than cellophane-wrapped meat shipped from faraway feedlots. “We smugly think we’re a kind people who treat animals in a more civilized way,” Carol wrote in her journal, “but we’ve simply moved the killing floor out of sight.”
    For 99.9 percent of human history, food connected us to the natural world. When we changed our relationship to food, we changed our relationship to nature, Carol believed. By allowing agribusiness to feed us processed, packaged foods, we cut ourselves off at the roots. With D.O.R., Carol knew where her meat came from, and she cleaned the carcasses herself.
    “There are subtle differences in the tastes of wild animals, but they all basically taste like some variant of chicken or beef. Meat is meat, really.”
    Carol’s roadkill diet was enriched when she began working for Georgia’s Natural Areas Council, a new state agency charged with identifying and protecting the wildest lands in Georgia. She was assigned to work with Sam Candler, a soft-spoken, silver-bearded heir of the Coca-Cola family. Sam didn’t need the job or the money, but he longed for new adventures and direct contact with the wild outdoors. He found both working alongside Carol. They traveled together seeking out Georgia’s most unique and ecologically diverse habitats—swamps, marshes, mountain coves, wild rivers, and old-growth forests.
    Carol was twenty-nine years old when she began working for the Natural Areas Council. The first Earth Day had recently been celebrated. The Clean Air Act had just been passed, and an Eastern Wilderness Act had just been introduced to designate more wilderness areas east of the Mississippi, since 99 percent of designated wilderness was out West. Carol hoped her statewide travels might help identify new wilderness areas in Georgia.
    Driving rural backroads, Carol and Sam collected a trunkload of D.O.R. each day. Sam ate his first weasel, carried a raccoon baculum in his wallet because it made a great toothpick, and learned how to recognize roadkill from a quarter mile away. Tagging along with Carol and Sam for part of their travels was the acclaimed writer for The New Yorker John McPhee, whom they playfully nicknamed “the little Yankee bastard.” McPhee sat in the backseat as they journeyed from the north Georgia mountains to the southern swamps, helping to spot—and occasionally eat—D.O.R. along the way.
    Once, McPhee recalled in “Travels in Georgia,” they came upon a snapping turtle hit on the road. It was still alive even though its shell was broken. Carol nudged the turtle out of the road with her foot, smearing blood across the pavement.
    “I know it’s bad,” she said to the turtle. “We’re not tormenting you. Honest we’re not.”
    “Does it have a chance to live?” Sam asked.
    “Not at all.”
    Moments later, the county sheriff pulled up. He eyed Carol, barefoot, wearing dungarees with a hunting knife strapped to her belt. Carol asked him to shoot the turtle.
    “Surely, ma’am,” he said. He drew his revolver, extended his arm, and took aim. He fired and missed twice. The shots echoed across the sun-baked asphalt. He took aim once more, holding the pistol six inches from the turtle’s head. The third shot finally killed the turtle. The sheriff blew the smoke away from the barrel of his pistol and nodded.
    “That should do it,” he said, tipping his hat.
    Their two years of road trips were not without some tense moments. Often, Carol and Sam knocked on the doors of rural landowners and asked them to consider protecting rare wildlife habitat on their properties in exchange for tax breaks. Doors were slammed in their faces, slurs slung at them, and one farmer chased them off at gunpoint.
    Back in the truck afterward,