The Orchid Thief (29 page)

Just two years before Chief Billie shot the panther, the state of Florida had begun to try to save the species. Panthers were captured and fitted with radio collars and treated by mobile veterinary units carrying antibiotics, vitamins, bottled oxygen, endotracheal tubes, and balloon splints. Their movements were tracked by radio telemetry and published
over the Internet on the Florida panther website, http://supernet.net/chrisd/genel5/html. For a while the state planned to catch all the remaining wild Florida panthers and then move them to zoos, where scientists could oversee and assist their breeding and eventually reintroduce them to the wild. That plan was rejected when animal rights activists complained that it was too much of a gamble, and that if the species was going to die out, it should be allowed to die out with dignity in the swamp. The state then adopted a crossbreeding program. Texas cougars, close genetic relatives of the Florida panther, were released into the panthers’ habitat and encouraged to mingle. The cougar-panther offspring should have the benefit of possessing new genetic material, rather than the recycled and abnormal genes of the panthers alone; the diversity ought to strengthen the animals and eventually revive the population. Some people object to the crossbreeding program because it means the Florida panther might survive but it will no longer be genetically pure. As it happens, the Florida panther isn’t pure anyway. Scientists have studied the mitochondrial DNA of seven of the Fakahatchee panthers and traced some of their genes to Chilean and Brazilian cougars, which were imported to Florida for local menageries and then released into the wild in the 1950s and 1960s.

—

After Chief Billie wounded the animal, he fired his pistol again, missing. Then he took out a high-powered rifle and killed the animal with a shot to the head. Back at his lodge in the Big Cypress he posed with his dog, Bingo, and the panther, which he held up by its ears.

On December 7 Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission officers acting on a tip went to Billie’s lodge and spotted the panther hide and skull hanging out to dry. On
December 13, a Hendry County judge signed an arrest warrant for Chief James E. Billie, charging him with killing a Florida panther, a third-degree felony punishable by five years in jail or a five-thousand-dollar fine or both. Billie announced that he would plead innocent to the charges on the grounds that Seminoles had the right to kill endangered species on reservation land and that panther hunting was part of tribal spiritual and healing ceremonies and therefore was protected as a religious freedom. During oral arguments in May, Chief Billie told the judge he had been studying to be a medicine man for two years, and that killing a panther was required to attain such a rank. One of the tribe’s medicine men, Sonny Billie, told a reporter: “There is very powerful medicine in the panther. I will say that I am very proud of James Billie.”

The legal story of Chief Billie and the panther spread and tangled as time went on. Soon after he was charged, Billie filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Florida laws protecting the panther because they impose on Seminole religious freedom. Then Hendry County Circuit Judge Hugh Hayes wrote a twenty-three-page order dismissing the charges against Billie, but the Florida Court of Appeals reversed Judge Hayes’s decision and reinstated the charges. Billie was then arraigned on federal misdemeanor violations of the Endangered Species Act in addition to having to face trial on the reinstated Florida charges. Federal prosecutors had been awaiting the outcome of a Supreme Court review of a South Dakota case involving a Yankton Sioux who had killed a bald eagle. Once the Supreme Court held that the Bald Eagle Protection Act overruled Indian treaty rights, they charged Billie, and the federal trial began before the state trial, in August of 1987. All this time, no one had bothered to preserve the remains of the panther. When the animal was introduced
into evidence it smelled so awful that it made some people in the courtroom faint. Billie sat through the proceedings with a black kerchief over his mouth and nose because of the odor and complained to a newspaper reporter, “They ruined it! They didn’t salt it!” In fact, one of the game officers had boiled the skull and another had kept the panther’s hide in his home freezer for a year and a half. The rest of the carcass was missing because Billie had eaten it. Even though during the trial he maintained that he’d never seen a panther before the night he shot one and that he had believed he was shooting a deer, he told the
St. Petersburg Times
that he knew he had been aiming at a panther, and that he wanted to shoot it so he could have a sacred hide to show his children and that he thought the criminal charges and the government’s attitude were stupid. He also said that panther meat tasted fine with Progresso sauce and a little seasoning.

The arguments in Billie’s defense were diverse. His lawyer contended that the Endangered Species Act did not apply to noncommercial hunting on the reservation, and that the charges violated Billie’s freedom of religion because panther claws were used by medicine men and panther hides and skulls were used as Seminole power tokens, and that the panther hide had been seized unlawfully because the game officers had no warrant when they first came to his lodge in Big Cypress, and that, finally, Billie didn’t know he was shooting a panther—he thought he was shooting a deer, and even if he had known it was a panther he had no way of knowing it was one of the endangered Florida subspecies rather than merely an ordinary panther. Moreover, Chief Billie’s attorney argued, the government couldn’t definitively prove that the animal really was a protected Florida panther, since the protected subspecies
Felts concolor coryi
is almost impossible to distinguish from other subspecies. This was
not a novel legal tactic in Florida. For years, accused hog thieves had defended themselves in court by claiming that they thought the domesticated hog they’d stolen was actually a wild razorback and therefore ownerless and therefore they hadn’t stolen it from anybody, and if they had, they certainly hadn’t
meant
to—it was just an honest case of zoological misidentification. Eventually, the Florida legislature in 1937 did away with the I-didn’t-know-it-was-a-farm-hog-I-thought-it-was-wild defense by decreeing that as a matter of law, particularly laws applying to pig theft, there
were
no wild razorback hogs in the state. The federal jury in the Billie case deliberated for two days and then informed the judge that they were hopelessly divided over the question of whether the prosecution had absolutely proved that the animal was a Florida panther. Consequently the federal district judge declared a mistrial. The state prosecution—
State of Florida v. James E. Billie
—went to trial the following month. After less than two hours of deliberation the state jury acquitted him, and jurors later said that they were not convinced that the animal had been positively identified as a
Felts concolor coryi
. The day after the state acquitted him, the federal charges against Billie were dropped, probably because federal prosecutors took the state acquittal as a bad omen. At that point, Chief Billie demanded that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service return the panther hide to him, but his demand was refused because according to the Fish and Wildlife agents the hide was contraband. The flurry of prosecution was finally over at the end of October. In May, Chief Billie was reelected to a new four-year term as chairman of the Seminole Tribe. Shortly after, the federal government announced that it would be applying the Endangered Species Act’s Similarity of Appearance provision to any big cats in Florida; that is, anything in the state that could possibly
be mistaken for an endangered
Felts concolor coryi
was now also protected under federal law.

—

While his band was warming up, Chief Billie told jokes to the crowd. He was speaking either Hitchiti or Muskogee—I don’t know which because I don’t speak either one. It was a brilliant morning and the grandstand seats were as warm as griddles. After the jokes Billie said in English, “Now, you Indians better be careful about buying bear claws here at the fair! I hear a game warden’s looking to give you a hard time!” He let his guitar dangle against his hip and winked to the crowd. His hair was longish and choppy and he had high cheekbones and black eyebrows and a foxy, sharp-chinned face that looked good onstage. That morning he was dressed in a fancy cowboy shirt, black jeans, and a string tie. He winked again. “Boy, I’d sure love to have some sardines and crackers right now,” he said in an intimate tone. “Funny with us Seminoles, isn’t it? Now we got a casino and we got big dividends but instead of having a
new
lifestyle, we’ve just elevated our
old
lifestyle. We grew up on sardines and crackers. Now we have all our newfound wealth and what do we do with it? Well, we just buy
lots
of sardines and crackers, right?” He laughed. “As long as I can remember, I was always out in the swamp with my grandparents. What we killed that day we ate that night. It’s kind of hard to get that out of your system. It’s just the way I am. It’s the way we are.” The band started playing “Down in the Boondocks.” The crowd clapped along through the entire song. Toward the end of the final verse, a little boy—Chief Billie’s youngest son—ran out into the middle of the arena followed by a small, fat alligator whose jaws were held shut with duct tape. The boy was slight, bare-chested, and barefoot. In a moment he cornered the alligator and then straddled it. The crowd cheered and
Chief Billie smiled, brushing his lips against the microphone. The boy arched his back. The alligator arched his back. With one hand the boy grabbed the alligator’s snout and raised it in the air. With his other hand he reached up and flashed a victory sign.

—

In the middle of the afternoon I ran into Vinson Osceola near the front gate. Vinson was the only one of the defendants in the orchid case besides Laroche I’d gotten to know a little bit and I liked him a lot, even though he was quiet and sardonic and had never been particularly friendly. I happened to have met his girlfriend, Sandy, at the Little Mr. and Miss Seminole talent contest the first day of the fair, and between the Little Mr. Seminole who performed “Jailhouse Rock” and the Little Mr. who sang a squeaky, rueful version of “It’s My Desire to Live for Jesus,” she told me what it had been like to grow up on the Big Cypress Reservation in a shack with her grandparents and uncles, what it had been like hearing the Florida rain strike the tin roof like buckshot and staying up all night, all of them, making up stories about what the rain was trying to say. Now she lived in Hollywood, which she said was nice but too fast—too much of an urban place, too many cars and drugs and bars and street corners that made it too hard to have kids grow up in the Indian way.

When I ran into Vinson he was waiting for Sandy so they could go together to the community dinner. She was helping set up the dinner and he had agreed to oversee the grilling of two thousand steaks. As usual, Vinson was wearing mirror sunglasses, so I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at me or through me or around me, although he seemed to at least be listening to me. I asked him whether he had been back to the Fakahatchee since the judge’s decision, and he said, “Nah, nah, not since then.” I wondered if he’d seen or talked to
Laroche since Laroche had left the reservation. “Nope, haven’t seen or talked to the dude,” he said, running his finger back and forth under his chin. “He’s what got us in trouble.” Had he collected any orchids since Laroche left? “Nah, none, no way,” he said. “Before we got in trouble with Crazy White Man, the orchids are what got us into trouble in the first place.” I wanted to go to the community dinner, but it was Indians-only, and no one I appealed to for permission would budge. Vinson explained that it would bother the older people to have a white person at the dinner—that no matter how many years they’d been mixing in the non-Indian world, they still felt separate and suspicious. “White people, it’s your job to make money,” he said to me. “Indians, we have our own job. Our job is to take care of the earth. We are different from you and we always will be.”

Instead I went to watch the end of the rodeo. The first night’s rodeo had been restricted to Indians, but Saturday night was open to any kind of cowboy or cowgirl, and a lot of the roping teams were made up of one Seminole and one non-Seminole. I watched the team of Wildcat Jumper and Sean John storm around after a thick-necked bull named Jimmy Lee while the sun fell behind the palm trees. I had a long drive ahead of me and it was late, so I watched one more team try to rope a bull named Risky Business and then I walked back to my car. I passed the Seminole Casino on the way, the acres of parking lots with guard towers raised like hackles here and there, the plain gray facade of the casino building. There was not one empty parking spot in the place. It was nearly midnight, but people were still streaming in—couples in dinner clothes, a broad-backed older woman with an aluminum walker, a pair of white-blond big-breasted girls in cowboy shirts and boots, a man with thick plastic glasses and the heedful face of a night watchman. The casino wasn’t
much to look at inside, except for the painting of Chief Billie on the wall with the Seminole greeting “Sho-naa-bish” in giant script beside him. Otherwise it was a big, quiet cavern with tables and tables of men playing Texas Hold-Em and 7-Card Stud beside a sign that said
POKER IS FUN AND RELAXING
. The only sound was the clicking of poker chips. It was a room filled with a million precise, intense, noiseless movements, like an operating theater during brain surgery. In another room, hundreds of people seated at long tables were playing bingo. Many of them had collections of lucky totems next to their bingo cards—rabbits’ feet, plastic elephants, statuettes of the Virgin Mary, snapshots, small plush toys, rosaries—and they were silent, too, until the man at the head of the room called out “B-twenty-three” or “O-seven,” and then there would be a murmur and a shifting, like the sound of water running out of a tub, and when someone yelled out “Bingo!” there was the sound of hands slapping down on cardboard game cards as the exasperated losers swept their chips away so they could start again. The waiters and the waitresses and the poker dealers and the bingo callers and the valet parkers and the casino cashiers were all white people, all with fluorescent-tinted skin and stiff hairdos, and all the customers were white and some had tourist tans and bloodshot eyes, and even though the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Seminole tribe’s annual powwow was being celebrated only a few yards away and the chief of the Seminole tribe was peering down on every single table of Texas Hold-Em and 7-Card Stud, you felt nothing of that world at all in here—you felt only the fever and focus of the games and the hard heat of people wanting to win.