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APALACHICOLA — The bloodstained dirt, the tracks of perhaps a half-dozen attackers and the lethal wounds to an enormous beast spoke of a methodical killing that Thomas Lewis has never forgotten.
The federal biologist came across the scene a few years ago in the Florida Panhandle, on an island where antlered creatures five times as large as native deer spend their days munching lily pads — until they are devoured by a top predator once declared extinct.
That's just part of the surprising character of St. Vincent Island, home to the state's only free-roaming wolves.
It might just be Florida's wildest wilderness.
"It's an intact barrier island with no human habitation," said Lewis, who worked there for 16 years.
The 18-square-mile island, now owned by the federal government, is officially known as the St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge. You can paddle to it in a canoe, angling through the tidal currents of Indian Pass. Or you can examine it from at home on Google Earth.
Google's aerial image shows the triangular island streaked with fine white lines. Those are former beaches facing the Gulf of Mexico; like the rings that build outward on a tree, those lines provide a growth record of the island. Gulf of Mexico waves build a new beach every so often, with fresh sand transported by the nearby Apalachicola River from eroding Appalachian Mountains in Georgia.
The ridges, spaced from 30 to 300 feet apart, have low spaces in between filled with wetlands and lakes. Pine and oak forests cover the rising slopes, while a desert mosaic of cactus, rosemary and bare sand dominates the ridge tops. This intense variety of environments is home to a wide range of wildlife.
And St. Vincent's fauna is even richer than it should be. A behemoth species of deer known as sambar was imported from its native India a century ago by an American tycoon who wanted to turn the island into an exotic hunting reserve. The sambar — weighing as much as 750 pounds — waded into St. Vincent's swamps and thrived.
In 1968, the Nature Conservancy bought the island for $2.2 million and soon resold the land for slightly less than that to the federal government as a wildlife refuge. Refuge managers elsewhere usually go all out to exterminate exotic species, but St. Vincent sambars posed little threat to Florida deer or the island's environment, so the creatures got a federal pardon.
The fewer than 100 sambars left on the island have become prized as hunters' lifetime trophies. Under refuge rules, shooting must be done with bow and arrow or black-powder guns.
The sambars' other pursuers are red wolves. Federal officials started putting wolves from another refuge on St. Vincent in 1990.
Biologists soon learned those wolves were happy to include sambars in their diets.
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