Totch Browns memoirs of vanished days in the Ten Thousand Islands and the Evergladesthe last real frontier in Florida and even today the greatest roadless wilderness in the United Statesare invaluable as well as vivid and entertaining for Totch is a naturalborn storyteller and his accounts of fishing and gator hunting as well as his life beyond the law as gator poacher and drug runner are evocative and colorful fresh and exciting.from the foreword by Peter Matthiessen In the mysterious wilderness of swamps marshes and rivers that conceals life in the Florida Everglades Totch Brown hung up his career as alligator hunter and commercial fisherman to become a selfconfessed pot smuggler. Before the marijuana money rolled in he survived excruciating poverty in one of the most primitive and beautiful spots on earth Chokoloskee Island in the mangrove keys known as the Ten Thousand Islands located at the western gateway to the Everglades National Park. Until he wrote this memoirrecollections from his childhood in the twenties that merge with reflections on a way of life dying at the hands of progress in the ninetiesTotch had never read a book in his life.