Swamps, particularly such vast and mostly uncharted swamps as the Florida Everglades, provide a natural habitat for all sorts of large and small creatures. Isn’t it likely, then, that one such creature might be a cousin, or at least a distant relative, of the Sasquatch and the Yeti of northern climes? Indeed, there have been many accounts of similar-looking beings in the bayous of Louisiana and in the Everglades itself. There is even an old Seminole Indian legend of the Stuestaw Enawchee, “gigantic beings from some nether world that had inhabited the Rivers of Grass from the time of creation,” who had come out of the swamps to war on the first Seminoles a thousand generations before the appearance of the white man. When, as part of a routine military “Survival Exercise,” three tough U.S. Marines are first set down in a remote section of the ’Glades, they do not believe in, or fear, the Stuestaw Enawchee or any swamp creature. But what happens to them in that primitive and alien environment is enough to make a believer of any man — and in the case of one, Master Sergeant James C. Kelly, to add a whole new dimension to the exercise of survival. For even as creatures go, the one which he encounters is extraordinary