Reports So Far, p.2

The third report came from a man who had been hunting with his buddy in Lulu, Florida, which is not far from the Osceola Forest (swamp) which is connected to Pinhook Swamp which is in turn connected to Okefenokee Swamp. All that makes it the biggest wildland left east of the Mississippi. This is what he said (unless I tell you differently, these quotes are paraphrases, not exact recordings of what anyone says) : "My buddy and I were hunting up in Lulu when we smelled the awful smell and heard something growling in the thick brush. Since we only had muzzleloaders, we decided to back out of there."
While writing these three sightings, I have thought of a fourth one. Ida Rae Snyder and I went up to the Okeefenokee Swamp, and I asked around for sightings. I hear of two: a man who worked at a campgrounds claimed to have seen them and another man at Wal-Mart told me a gentleman had reported a sighting of one on the St. Mary River. We drove to the campground, and I asked around for the man who had supposedly seen the bigfoots. A female staff member said he had gone home. She was very reticent, and I learned nothing from her beyond that. A male staff member was more loquacious, saying that the man who claimed to have seen bigfoots saw all kinds of strange things. He was very dismissive of the man's reliability.
For several months, the local hunters have been seeing what appears to be a gorilla going up and down the New River and the Santa Fe Rivers in Baker, Bradford, and Union counties here in north central Florida. In October, I listened to several archers at C&S Sports in Lake Butler discuss their sightings. Even Wayne Cox, the owner of the store, had heard him moving about. Another bowman had seen a shape that did not resemble anything he had ever seen in the jungle-woods here. Wayne had talked to a man who had seen the creature walking. Since he claimed to have killed fifty bears in West Virginia, he knew it was not a bear by the walk he walked. The creature was walking on two feet then and was about four feet tall. Someone in Baker County ran the creature up a tree and called state fish and wildlife. Game wardens came out and said he was too high up in the tree for their dart gun, identified him as an "orange" variety of the fox squirrel, most probably, and left him a box of doughnuts. Surely, game wardens know that squirrels don't eat doughnuts. When they came back the next day, he was gone. I have heard from a black panther colleague, Mikus Singleton, in Georgetown, South Carolina that it is standard fish and wildlife practice to kill any monkeys or other simians found in the wild. I hope fellow hunters will not do such a cruel thing, but leave the gorilla alone for all of us to enjoy. More importantly, he has a right to his life just as you have a right to yours. Don't tell me you need to kill him for meat because with the high cost of hunting licenses, club dues, rifles and other gear, including all kinds of four wheel drive vehicles, you could stay home and eat porterhouse all year and still save money. One idiot out there makes all of us look bad. It's not fair, but that's the way it goes with people who operate on an emotional level instead of a rational one. Woods 'N Water , a magazine out of Perry, Florida, which is loaded each month with pictures and interesting articles about hunting and fishing and other outdoor matters, ran a little story about the creature asking if he were a gorilla or a baby bigfoot.