Long before any Floridian thought to compare a swamp ape to Bigfoot, the Seminole and Miccosukee were telling stories about something tall and hairy in the wet country. The Mikasuki-language name commonly translated as Esti Capcaki means roughly Tall Man, or Hairy Giant - a being best left alone, sometimes a warning to children not to wander, sometimes a spirit, depending on who is telling the story and to whom. The oral tradition predates European contact and predates the 1950s Pacific Northwest sightings that gave North American cryptozoology its standard vocabulary. Whatever the skunk ape is or is not, it did not begin in 1974 with Dave Shealy. It began, like a lot of Florida, with people who had been here for several thousand years.

The thing that distinguishes the skunk ape from its better-known cousins in Washington and British Columbia is the odor. Witnesses do not just describe a tall, hair-covered biped; they describe a stench. Rotting cabbage. Wet dog rolled in garbage. Sulphur and methane. Often the smell is reported before the sighting - a wave of it drifting through still air over a slough or a hammock of cypress, followed by branches breaking somewhere out of sight. Skeptics offer reasonable explanations. The Everglades produce hydrogen sulphide naturally as vegetation decomposes underwater. Methane bubbles up from peat. A startled wild hog or a feral pig wallow smells exactly the way witnesses describe. The believers reply that they know what a hog smells like, thank you, and this was something else.

The skunk ape's most famous recent moment came in the autumn of 2000, when an anonymous Sarasota woman mailed photographs to the local sheriff's office showing what she said was an enormous ape standing in her back yard at night. The pictures - two grainy frames of something tall and hunched on the edge of palmetto scrub - became known as the Myakka skunk ape photographs and have been argued over ever since. Wildlife officials suggested an escaped orangutan. Skeptics suggested a costume. Believers pointed out that an escaped orangutan in suburban Florida would have been news in itself. The photographs are real; what is in them is not settled. The same can be said of most skunk-ape evidence. Casts of three-toed footprints, smears on game cameras, distant howls captured on cellphones - none of it amounts to a body, and the absence of a body is the thing that mainstream science keeps coming back to.

The Skunk Ape Research Headquarters sits beside US-41 in Ochopee, a community whose only other claim to fame is the smallest post office in the United States, a converted toolshed about the size of a phone booth. The Research Headquarters is part gift shop, part reptile zoo, and part field station. Dave Shealy is a real person doing what is, on his own terms, real work. He has set out trail cameras across Big Cypress for decades. He has cast footprints and collected eyewitness reports and given hundreds of interviews. He charges admission, sells T-shirts, and runs swamp buggy tours - he is not pretending the operation does not have a tourist side. But the conviction is unmistakable, and so is the affection in which the surrounding community holds him. He grew up here. He knows the country. Whether or not he is right about what walks in it, he is the genuine article.

Big Cypress National Preserve covers 729,000 acres of cypress swamp, wet prairie, hardwood hammock, and pine flatwood, and it sits next to the 1.5 million acres of Everglades National Park immediately to the south. Most of it has no road, no trail, and no easy way in. Airboat tracks fade in a season. Helicopter overflights see nothing but a green plain. Florida panthers, almost extinct fifty years ago, slipped through the country largely unobserved for decades while biologists argued about whether any were left; eventually the cameras caught them and the population estimates jumped overnight. The lesson cryptid enthusiasts draw from the panther story is that big animals can hide in this landscape for a long time. The lesson scientists draw is that when there are big animals, eventually the cameras find them. Eight decades of skunk-ape stories have produced no body, no bone, no hair sample that survived genetic analysis. The Everglades keep the secret, if there is one to keep.