"The Wild Tread of God"

By Martha Duffy

KILLING MISTER WATSON by Peter Matthiessen

Random House; 372 pages; $21.95

Events of this rangy, ambitious novel are seen through the scrim of the author's wrath. Long before terms like environment or ecology came into common use, the rich, fragile jungle of the Everglades was destroyed, its birds and beasts annihilated, its waterways choked. The men responsible might never have heard of the word habitat, but they knew what they were doing, and for some, at least, hardness was tinged with a mute regret.

The ruin of the Everglades between 1880 and 1910, especially by hunters of egret and flamingo plumes and alligator skins, is a likely topic for novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen (Far Tortuga; The Snow Leopard). Matthiessen has made the despoliation of the planet, as well as the ways in which men who work close to nature survive, his main concerns. Lord knows he has done his homework, and he details the destruction repeatedly and with bite. Here is how Bill House, a hardy plume hunter, sees the history of the region: "The Injuns was taking some egrets, trading 'em in with their otter pelts for gunpowder and whisky. The rookeries over by Lake Okeechobee, they was shot out in four years . . . If you recall that plumes would bring exactly twice their weight in gold, you can figure out why men fought over rookeries, and shot to kill."

Ed Watson was great in local myth, a man who shot up the best rookeries during the breeding season -- something that other hunters would not do. Watson had made two or three modest fortunes, lost them, collected women and offspring along the way, and killed any number of people, though no one knew how many murders were real and how many tall stories. The book's opening scene describes Watson's execution by a band of his Chatham River neighbors who ambushed him from the banks as he put-putted up to his dock in one of the first motorboats folks had ever seen. Thirty-one bullets were used to lay this legend to rest.

In this novel, based on a true story, Matthiessen is pretty good at mythmaking himself. From the evidence he gives, there is no reason to think the real Edward J. Watson was much more than a serial killer with trading smarts that were offset by lethal outbursts of meanness. But the reader doesn't see much of that side. Oh, Watson beats his son every Sunday and throws a half-caste mistress off his land when she becomes inconvenient. But the narrative, which is told in 36 short chapters by ten locals, mostly mixes awe and dread, along with a certain aw-shucks accommodation. Outsize characters, Watson's workmen and neighbors seem to think, have their little crotchets.

What a man among men! Sammie Hamilton observes, "Ed Watson were . . . as good a farmer as has ever cleared a piece of ground; he could make anything grow." Henry Thompson marvels at his skill on the waters: "One of the best boatmen on this coast." And lest anyone get the idea the man's skills were laboriously acquired, Thompson adds, "Mister E.J. Watson could hear a frog fart in a hurricane."

The process of making Watson larger than life somewhat undermines the larger, tougher themes of the book. Elsewhere the author's moral anguish is inescapable, and he can write like an avenging angel. His human sympathies range widely, from blacks who count neither as men nor animals, to Choctaws who are just slightly higher on the scale of outcasts, to Watson's pretty daughter, who at 13 is virtually sold into marriage and three years later still plays skip rope in the streets of Fort Myers, Fla.

Matthiessen frames his story in the buffetings of tides and storms. Not for nothing is Watson slaughtered shortly after the passage of Halley's comet and a mighty hurricane. The weather is always restless, "the wild tread of God" often heard and felt. Occasionally the terrain gets cluttered. But Matthiessen is a man who can write his way out of any storm. What an old-timer says of his wood pony applies equally to Matthiessen: He can "turn on a dime and give back nine cents change." On a good day, maybe even eleven.