People ask me sometimes where the nickname “Animal” came from. There’s a photo of me at 45 years old that pretty much answers the question. Back in those days I could carry five sheets of plywood by myself. Six buckets of material, three in each hand, forty pounds apiece. That was just a regular workday. Young and dumb, like I always say.
But the nickname wasn’t just about being strong. It was about how we hunted.
Back then we were running deer in the Everglades using a bull track, which is basically a big tracked vehicle built to move through swamp country. It’s the right tool for that terrain. Nothing else gets through the Everglades the way a bull track does. The thing is built for it.
The problem is gator holes.
You’re driving along and all of a sudden somebody yells, “Gator hole! Gator hole!” and you hit the brakes halfway in, then you throw it in reverse and gun it back out. Woo! It becomes second nature after a while. You learn real fast to read the ground out there, or the ground teaches you a lesson you won’t forget.
We had dogs with us on these hunts, and one day we drove into a low spot and the water came up fast. We had two 300-pound dogs riding on the sides of the track, and they ended up hanging off the edge, choking, struggling to hold on. The second we got stopped and got out, we grabbed those dogs and pulled them clear. That’ll wake you up in a hurry. Those were working dogs, hunting dogs, and you don’t leave your dogs behind.
That was the way deer hunting worked out there. You’d load up in the bull track and just start covering ground, driving the Everglades, and the dogs would do their thing. They’d pick up a scent, get moving, and then a buck would break out into the open. Big old buck. And that’s when you took your shot.
It wasn’t a clean, easy kind of hunting. It was wet and loud and unpredictable, and half the time you were pulling a dog out of the water or dodging a gator hole you didn’t see coming. But that’s the Everglades. It doesn’t give you easy. It just gives you real.
That’s where the nickname came from. Not from any one thing, but from all of it added up. The way we moved out there, the way we handled whatever the swamp threw at us. Animal. I’ll take it.
