Scat

“The ride took almost an hour because a truck full of tomatoes had flipped over on State Road 29, blocking traffic. A fire-engine crew was hosing the ketchup-colored muck off the pavement. Nick spotted a dead buck by the side of the road, and figured that the tomato truck must have struck it in the early fog.” 

The dead deer and the wrecked truck are pointed reminders of the damage industrial agriculture is doing to the local environment.

“When he pressed the Play button, the cypress strand came into view. The picture, though wobbly and somewhat out of focus, was easier to see on a TV screen than in the camera’s viewfinder. 

“‘There it is!’ Nick exclaimed when the tannish form crossed between the tree trunks.

“After a few seconds of stillness, the screen went blank.

“‘That’s it?’ his mother asked.” 

The encroaching eye of technological modernity is unable to penetrate this hazy, dense, and still wild domain of the Everglades. Although the expectation is that that Nick’s video, taken on the field trip before the fire breaks out, will end up containing evidence of a crime—the arson—it is actually the hardware store surveillance videos that end up solving the arson case. 

“Vincent Trapwick didn’t want his three snotty, pampered children attending school with ordinary kids, so he started his own private school and kept out just about everyone who didn’t have the same skin color, religion, and political point of view as Vincent Trapwick.” 

The history of the Truman School raises questions about the book’s major themes. Though it was founded by the Trapwicks (a family of despicable, wealthy people who closely resemble the McBrides), the school ultimately dissociates itself from its ignominious founders by renaming itself after President Harry Truman. But if the money that built the school was gained by plundering the natural world, and the school was founded expressly to defend prejudiced, unfair norms, can the school ever really be a good thing?

“As he’d be the first to admit, Dr. Dressler was not a particularly brave soul. He was uncomfortable in such a scraggly, untamed place, far from the comforting clatter and clang of civilization.” 

Dr. Dressler, the headmaster of the Truman School, is one of the novel’s more complex characters. He doesn’t belong to the world of rapacious capitalist developers, or to the world of the bushwhacking eco-activists. He follows his conscience but still has to answer to the demands of wealthy trustees.

“All of Mrs. Winship’s houses were located on championship golf courses; she herself didn’t play the game, but she loved watching the players traipse in their colorful outfits down the emerald slopes, pausing every few steps to hack feverishly at a tiny white sphere.” 

Golf courses are a well-known blight on the environment. Mrs. Winship’s love of them is not only superficial—she doesn’t even play golf—it also shows a careless disregard for nature and her ecological footprint and serves as another example of how greed and a desire for the trappings of wealth can cause damage to the environment.

“Obviously none of you have ever had the experience of being in my classes. Otherwise you’d know that on Mondays I always teach page 117—and only page 117—regardless of the subject matter.” 

Wendell Waxmo enters the novel from the pages of Lewis Carroll, a 19th-century writer of nonsense literature most famous for his work Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. His magisterial incompetence in the classroom serves as a foil to the missing, and underappreciated, Mrs. Starch.

“Moments later, Duane Scrod Jr. walked into the office. He didn’t look like an arsonist; he looked like the future president of the Student Council. He also appeared perfectly fit and healthy, despite having digested Mrs. Starch’s pencil.” 

Duane Jr.’s transformation from a disruptive weirdo to a hardworking, conscientious young man is a remarkable one. Mrs. Starch has been able to get through to him with empathy, despite (or perhaps because of) her formerly harsh, merciless treatment.

“Nick, too, had never imagined such a scene—a herd of taxidermied creatures displayed in wild disorder, from wall to wall and from the floor to the rafters. There were birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians of many sizes, suspended in poses of coiling, leaping, lurking, snarling, soaring, and pouncing. The animals stared with blank glass eyes through Nick and Marta, into infinity.” 

The scene at Mrs. Starch’s house, where Nick and Marta discover her taxidermy collection of extinct animals, is an unmistakable set piece of the novel. Hiaasen calls on the conventions of Southern Gothic literature here (describing a dilapidated, macabre house that reflects the warped psyche of its owner) but with a particular twist: the buried trauma that haunts Mrs. Starch’s house isn’t the crimes of the Old South but the crimes we have committed, and continue to commit, against Florida’s native wildlife.

“‘Ever heard of a writer named Edward Abbey?’

“Nick and Marta admitted they hadn’t. 

“‘No surprise,’ the stranger said. ‘I’m sure they don’t teach his stuff in that uptight private school of yours. Ed was sort of a bomb thrower, only the bombs were ideals and principles. He liked the earth more than he liked most humans.’” 

Edward Abbey is the most important literary figure referenced in the novel. Twilly Spree and Duane Jr. both carry out acts of sabotage inspired by Abbey and his eco-anarchist hero George Hayduke; when Nick reads Abbey’s novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, it is a revelation to him. The idea of lawless, daredevil antics in defense of the environment has an enormous appeal for these characters. 

“Drake McBride had stumbled into the oil business after failing at many other jobs and ruining many other companies. He enjoyed spending money much more than he enjoyed working for it, and this was the secret to his lack of success. It also helped to be lazy, easily distracted, and not very good at math.” 

Drake McBride is a villain with no shades of gray or seductively appealing features: he is evil, mean, and extremely stupid. McBride has few distinctive traits other than greed and a complete disregard for life and nature; as a character, he seems more like an allegory of capitalist depravity than a distinctive individual. Through him, Hiaasen is able to criticize institutional issues of capitalism and not just an individual with bad intentions.

“The U.S. government had announced a plan to buy up the drilling rights for oil and natural gas beneath the vast Big Cypress Preserve to protect the vanishing wetlands from future damage. 

“‘All we’ve got to do is find some oil, any oil,’ Drake McBride said excitedly, ‘and Uncle Sam will pay us a fortune not to pump it. Isn’t that the wildest danged thing you ever heard of?’” 

This passage explains the illegal oil-drilling scheme that sets the novel’s plot in motion. What makes this scheme especially villainous is the fact that McBride doesn’t just plan to destroy the Everglades for profit—he wants to profit off the very policies designed to protect the Everglades as well. Hiaasen doesn’t reveal this scheme, in flashback, until the novel is nearly half over, after emphasizing the unique significance of the Everglades; this plotting strategy creates suspense, while ensuring that the potential destruction of this land will have maximum impact.

“He seldom left the state of Florida, a place that he loved, a place that was breaking his heart because it was disappearing before his very eyes. 

“Twilly Spree had good intentions but a rotten temper, which occasionally got him into hot water. He didn’t like high-rise buildings and freeways and ugly subdivisions named after nonexistent otters or eagles. He didn’t like concrete and asphalt, period, and he especially didn’t like the people who were burying the wilderness under concrete and asphalt.” 

Hiaasen created the character of Twilly Spree for an earlier novel, Sick Puppy, and his appearances in Scat!—always by lucky coincidence—strain at the outer edges of the novel’s realism. But his utter devotion to Florida’s wildlife lies close to the moral core of the book, and he uses his wealth for good instead of being corrupted by it, like every other rich person in the book.

“Nobody could find the terrible weapons supposedly stashed by the Iraqi government, while many of the terrorists who were attacking American troops had turned out to be Iraqi citizens. It was hard for Nick to understand why good soldiers like his dad were being blown up by some of the same people they were trying to help.” 

The subplot featuring Captain Waters’s return from the war avoids the kind of satirical or polemical critique that runs through the novel’s environmental themes. In this passage, the false pretext for beginning the war (the supposed weapons of mass destruction) and one of its most disastrous consequences (widespread radicalization) are referenced in a tone of mild confusion, rather than sadness or outrage. 

“Wendell Waxmo preferred to drown his brain in bland television, especially the shopping networks and infomercials. He purchased every goofy, worthless gimmick that he saw on cable—cheese curlers, mayonnaise whippers, personalized oven mitts, ear-hair trimmers, electronic sock deodorizers, reusable dental floss, and even a flashlight that stayed on for three straight years, night and day.” 

The character of Wendell Waxmo occupies a unique spot on the novel’s moral hierarchy. Though television and consumer culture have apparently negatively affected his brain (shown through nonsensical actions like his insistence that he teach only the contents of page 117 on Mondays, no matter the content of the page), this is a trifling offense compared to greed and environmental exploitation. The character is ridiculed but not loathed the way characters like Drake McBride are.

“‘And by the way—is that a stupid place for a field trip, or what? Way out in the middle of nowhere? If that was my class, I’d take ‘em all to Sea World to watch those killer whales do ballerina dances, or whatever.’” 

In this passage, Drake McBride, the president of the Red Diamond Energy Corporation, complains about the school field trip that almost stumbled upon his illegal drilling operation. By suggesting that Sea World—where animals are kept in captivity and forced to perform for spectators, in conditions many animal rights advocates find unethical—is as educational as the Everglades, McBride shows his stunning ignorance and lack of values.

“To Nick, the kitten was a thing of unreal beauty, exotic yet delicate. Its pelt was dappled with spots that would fade over time, and its long tawny tail bent upward at the end but was ringed, almost like a leopard’s. Oversized and pointy, the ears were woolly and as white as cotton on the inside.” 

“Squirt,” the baby Florida panther, is a precious, almost sacred, being in this text. Everyone who comes into contact with it is ready to take extraordinary risks to keep it safe: Duane Jr. is kicked out of school and accused of arson; Mrs. Starch disappears and is ultimately shot; Nick breaks his arm. The novel is unequivocal: this is a life worth fighting for.

“Mrs. Starch gently lifted the bottle to the kitten’s mouth and began humming a lullaby. The tune was surprisingly soothing and pretty. Marta and Nick were stunned; this was a side of their teacher that they’d never observed, or had even imagined to be part of her buzz-saw personality.” 

Because Mrs. Starch has been portrayed, up to this point, as a harpy with an ugly scar and a terrifying personality, it is a shock for Nick and Marta when she suddenly appears, in this scene, as a maternal figure. While the novel eventually makes it clear that Mrs. Starch was good-hearted all along, this sudden reveal makes it seem, initially, that the baby panther has transformed or redeemed her somehow. It is an otherworldly, magical scene, which speaks to the importance of this rare creature.

“‘Look, my job is to fill young minds with knowledge, and certain fields of knowledge can be boring at times. Really boring. Which means I have to be tough in order to keep my students focused. I don’t expect to win any popularity contests, but at least you’ll be able to write five hundred intelligent words about the Calvin cycle when you finish my course.” 

Mrs. Starch explains her pedagogical philosophy in this passage. Though her humiliation of students in the early scenes seems brutal, the novel bears her out, as all of her students come to appreciate biology, and Mrs. Starch, by the end. 

“‘Here’s something else that Duane and I share: we both know what it’s like to be abandoned. “Dumped,” in the current jargon. One day, Duane’s mother just lit out for France without even telling him. My husband did the same thing—not to Paris, but to Plano, Texas, which is more his speed. I don’t know why he walked out on me, but it hurt. Still does.’” 

Mrs. Starch explains why she relates to Duane Jr. and addresses the rumor that she murdered her husband at the same time. The novel is full of characters that suffer abandonment, but people (and panthers) also build new bonds to replace what has been taken away.

“‘S-C-A-T,’ the flags sneered in fluctuating capital letters, as cheery as confetti. SCAT. 

“‘Either he’s telling you to go away,’ the pilot mused, ‘or he’s calling you a name.’ 

“Or both, thought Jimmy Lee Bayliss with disgust.” 

The two meanings of “scat”—an order to go away or a term for animal excrement—each appear at different times in the novel. Twilly Spree’s message to Red Diamond Energy is the only moment where both meanings are equally, simultaneously valid. 

“Twilly motioned for the search party to halt and gather round him. He bent down and carefully lifted a palmetto frond, revealing on the ground a dark greenish pile of unmistakable origin, containing tufts of deer hair, bits of bone, and wisps of white egret feathers.” 

As the title suggests, panther droppings or “scat” play an important role in the book’s plot. Finding panther scat is much easier than finding the elusive and well-camouflaged panther, so Twilly Spree and Duane Jr. use it to track the panther mom who has been separated from her cub by the Red Diamond drilling operation. The panther scat also contains an image of the Everglades ecosystem in miniature: hidden under the palmetto fronds that provide cover, bits of deer and egret end up in the feces of this apex predator. 

“‘Hardly any animal on earth is more endangered than the Florida panther—are you aware of that? There’s somewhere between sixty and a hundred left, that’s all, and our job is to try and save ‘em from extinction. That’s why we follow up on possible sightings.’ 

“‘But I told you, there can’t possibly be a sighting out here, because there ain’t no damn panthers!’ Drake McBride protested. 

“The officer said, ‘They’re really quite beautiful. Ever seen a picture?’ 

“‘No, but I’ve seen cougars out west, shot dead and skinned where it’s all proper and legal. Basically the same varmint.’” 

For a novel in the thriller genre to create suspense and excitement, the characters have to face danger and risky situations. Hiaasen has staked the “thrill” of this novel on the perilous situation of the iconic, and very nearly extinct, Florida panther. This exchange with the park ranger clarifies how important it is to save the baby panther cub—and the other native wildlife that could soon be wiped off the earth.

“Reaching up with his good arm—the left arm, the same arm he’d been training with and building up for weeks—he grabbed the branch from which he was dangling...

“And began pulling himself up. 

“Pulling with all his strength.

“Pulling in spite of the worst pain he’d ever felt, or had ever imagined feeling.

“Pulling even with a terrified panther cub attached like a cactus to his flesh, yowling and spitting in his face.” 

In this climactic moment, Nick’s extraordinary effort finally reunites the panther cub with its mother. It is a joyful moment and a significant milestone for Nick, who has wanted to defend others (like Marta and Duane Jr.) from danger or unfair treatment throughout the novel, but been too afraid to do so. His better nature triumphs here as he climbs a tree toward a dangerous predator, with his right arm broken and holding a squirming baby panther.