by Grace Draven
A moment later he heard a hollow double rap high on a tree trunk, snatched up his go-bag in the hand not holding his camera, and ran toward the sound.
Branches and brambles caught at his clothing. He crashed on, heedless of his noise in his excitement. When a dark shape detached itself from a tree and flapped toward the river, vanishing in the feathery crowns of cypress trees, Napier shouted in triumph. He jolted to a stop and fished his compass out from under his collar, marking the woodpecker’s vector.
If only he’d been quicker to see it, able to catch a better look at the trailing edges of the wings where the ivory-bill would show white feathers, and the pileated woodpecker would show black. Napier had a sneaking suspicion his lack of training in ornithology would be his downfall here. What he did have going for him were his skills in moving through brush—when he wasn’t crashing through like a bear—and that uncanny knack of never getting lost.
He stared after the bird for a long moment, then turned back toward his canoe.
The new channel was smaller, densely skirted by cypress and the spindly shrubs that grew in the wet soil collected in the crotches of cypress knees. What had been river, in the main channel, now became more swamp, shallow water stretching for many yards in every direction. The canoe’s lack of a deep drafting keel meant Napier could nudge the craft into increasingly shallow water, but until he caught another glimpse of the woodpecker or heard it rapping, he would stick to the channel itself.
He looked over his shoulder, paddling strongly. The boat ramp and the landing had already vanished beyond the curves of the river and the undergrowth. From this vantage, he could see the upper reaches of a couple of snags, where the bark had been virtually obliterated from the trees, leaving behind holes that showed as dark as mouths in the white, shadowless light from the humid sky.
Big holes. His heart thumped in excitement. A cascade of speculation began in his brain, the idea that he might be the one to prove the birds were not extinct after all. Charles Napier, a 30-something soldier turned biologist, a low-paid man on the state of Florida employment rolls. He aimed the camera, zoomed in as tight as it permitted, and pressed the shutter. Again. Refocused. Shot. Zoomed out. Shot.
The canoe bumped to a stop. A thick clump of ti-ti branches knocked the camera from Napier’s hands to the bottom of the boat, and with a feeling of sick relief, he was grateful it hadn’t gone overboard into the dark water below.
“That’s how men get killed,” Napier muttered. “Should’ve been watching where I was going.” He shipped his paddle and scooped the camera into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. He shook his head—he wasn’t with his outfit anymore, they weren’t dealing with angry locals with guns, he was just on a Florida river, back in the good old USA where such things didn’t happen.
Mostly.
The memory-triggered adrenaline was still clearing his system when he felt the canoe’s balance shift with a soft thump, as though a weight had settled abruptly in the bow. Or something had nudged the canoe from below—a submerged cypress knee, maybe. Napier gripped the paddle and backstroked slowly out of the dense ti-ti shrubbery.
A cottonmouth slithered the rest of the way into the boat, its tail releasing the branches above the canoe’s bow. It was lazy and slow, a fat beast the dull color and sheen of scorched engine oil.
It was also the biggest cottonmouth he’d ever seen, and he’d seen a lot of them in his job. It had to be more than six feet in length, at its midpoint as thick as his forearm, well-fed on frogs and other swamp creatures. If it had stayed in the brush, or fallen into the water, Napier wouldn’t have given it a single thought beyond simple interest in it as an extraordinary exemplar of its species. But it was here in his boat through his own carelessness, and as his paddle finished the stroke, the snake drew into a bulging coil and gaped its mouth at Napier.
The rational part of Napier’s brain used phrases like the gaping is a defensive posture, snakes can effectively lunge-strike no more than half the total body length, you’re not a target prey animal, but the atavistic ape-just-down-from-the-trees part of his brain shouted that is one big fucking snake, those are fangs, get it out of my boat get it out get it OUT—
Napier froze, paddle still half in the water and turning the boat like a side-mounted rudder in the slow current. His heart thumped heavy and hard, shaking his body. He could feel his pulse in his feet. Did the wood of the canoe transmit the vibration, the ticking clock of his life, to the snake? Was it threat or invitation?
The cottonmouth’s scales were large and horny, edges lifted and separated from each other, discolored and misshapen as the toenails of old men. The snake was old—beyond old, he thought wildly, eternal and monstrous. It had dwelled here forever, since the world began.
Move slowly, the biologist’s brain said. Don’t frighten it more than it is already, it will bite if threatened, bites are toxic but rarely fatal unless an anaphylactic reaction occurs and—
His soldier’s brain had other ideas, ideas that sped faster than rational thought, the sorts of ideas the body understood better than the mind. As the snake stretched forward, tongue flicking, tasting the scent of Napier in the bottom of the canoe, for one instant the head was free of the fat stack of snake behind it. Napier swept the paddle forward into the bow of the canoe and pinned the cottonmouth behind the head with the blade.
Instantly the snake was all reaction, a tangling, slithering rope of fury, thrashing, coiling, uncoiling, mouth gaping wider and wider. A greenish-gold glow flared from its eye, a retinal reflection of the white overcast sky above. Napier’s first impulse was to rise to his feet to get better leverage on the paddle, but the canoe rocked wildly as he shifted, and instead, he went to his knees despite the no no don’t put your body in the bottom of the boat you’re in reach now it can bite through those trousers but maybe not through your boots oh Christ of his rushing thoughts. He planted his ass against the thwart behind him, pressing the paddle firmly forward, one hand well down the shaft, the other on the grip. The cottonmouth twisted and thrashed, and when its tail flailed past the shaft of the paddle, it twined and gripped there like the tendrils of a kudzu vine taking over a telephone pole. Napier felt more and more of the snake’s weight lifting from the canoe’s bottom to the paddle shaft, looping and knotting there, squeezing, squeezing.
Then he heaved the paddle into the channel, throwing it as far as his awkward grip could manage.
“I don’t need two paddles.”
“Ain’t sendin’ you out with just the one.”
A gator hadn’t bitten off the blade of this one, though with a shaken laugh Napier added aloud, “Still plenty of time for that, Chuck.”
In the channel, blending in with the tannic waters, the cottonmouth was swimming back toward the sheltering ti-ti branches, having filled its excitement quota for the day. Napier took long, slow breaths, calming his pulse, and reached for the backup paddle behind him. A few J-strokes brought the canoe around and in reach of the other paddle, floating with its bright yellow blade shining wetly in the sun. He brought it aboard and turned back the way he had been heading before the cottonmouth took its unexpected joyride.
One more glance over his shoulder…just to be sure, he told himself. The snake was not to be seen, but something else was moving in the undergrowth beyond where the snake had last headed. He thought he saw something pale and large, but only for a moment, then his angle of view changed and the visual shifted. He shook his head. Maybe the nude sunbathing woman again? He wasn’t far from the landing where he’d glimpsed her leaping like a doe into the underbrush. He thought about all the blackberry brambles and branches against naked flesh, and grimaced, hoping he hadn’t caused her to hurt herself. The sun peered out from the thickening overcast for a moment and its brilliance reflected from the swamp channel water and blinded him.
But—wait. The sunbather had been on the other side of the channel. Not her, then. Nothing after all, he told himself, and checked his compass again, taking a be
aring from another balding snag a hundred yards up and stroking smoothly. Nothing at all.
Fifteen minutes later he heard another double rap. This time it came from the swamplands to his right, bearing southeast, and a moment later he thought he saw a bird swooping from high in a tree to a spot on another, lower down. It was large and black, and it landed on the trunk of the second tree.
Woodpecker, without a doubt. Most birds perched on branches, not trunks. He nosed the canoe out of the channel into the flooded cypresses, paddling with slow care, watching for stumps and knees and hanging moss. His eyes scanned the trees above him, and he turned as he passed each clump, to check the backside.
The double rap rang out again above the sounds of the swamp. Napier’s head swung, and he was rewarded with a dark flapping flutter among the cypress branches above, then the bird vanished once more. He followed, camera at the ready, in case the bird should swoop out of the canopy into more open territory.
He penetrated deeper into the swamp, moving from glimpse to glimpse, tree to tree, open water to shallows that all but required him to pole the canoe as if it had been a gondola. Each time he despaired, the bird would flap and drop, or rap. Never was he quick enough with his camera, and never could he get a good look at the trailing edge of those wings, but he kept following. Kept telling himself the double rap was a definite signature, and since he hadn’t heard the pileated woodpecker’s raucous call, even more proof that the bird he was chasing might be the ivory-bill.
A certain slant of light through the cypress trees made Napier ship his paddle and drift slowly into what amounted to a clearing in the swamp. The water was more transparent here, less dark, as if an influx of spring water fed the faint current. A hamaca of large oaks and magnolias lay before him, and the golden tinge to the light made him look at his wristwatch.
It was nearly six in the evening. The knowledge made him blink hard. Where had the afternoon gone? Or, rather, he knew where it had gone—tree to tree, channel to stream to channel to bog, following the bird, but he hadn’t been aware how swiftly time was passing. He sat for a minute, getting his bearings. The late afternoon light gilded the tea-colored water of the swamp and set a soft gleam to the hard finish of the magnolia leaves.
Napier’s internal compass spun. To his right was where the sun was sinking, but he would have sworn that west was directly behind him. In his daisy-chain journey through the bottomlands of the Choctawhatchee, he’d lost his sense of direction, relying instead on his eyes and ears to mark his passage. He turned to look behind him, but the canoe’s wake had already melted into the water of the swampy clearing, and he was unsure which stand of cypresses and knees had marked his entrance.
Stupid. Almost as stupid as driving the canoe into the brush and picking up a venomous passenger.
He was starving, and very thirsty. Now that he was still, the sweat gathered on his brow, so he scrubbed his face against his upper sleeve. He felt oily, greased by his own salt and sweat. Napier shipped his paddle and stretched his legs out in front of him. His feet tingled as blood rushed in and he noticed his pulse in his insteps. He leaned back, drew his go-bag toward him, and reached inside. The old fart’s knife was at the top of the bag again, nearly sliding out as Napier pawed for a bottle of water, guzzling half before he slowed to breathe again.
From a few feet away came a soft purling noise. He looked in time to see the finny side of a good-sized fish as it sank below the surface. Too big to be a bass taking an insect. He should think about finding a campsite for the evening, dig a latrine, rig his hammock and tarp before full dark. He had a couple of hours yet before the light was done, but he liked being ready without having to rely on the battery-powered lantern he’d brought.
The hamaca ahead of him—dry ground composed of silt and sand collected by live oaks and magnolias, palmettos, wild grapes, smilax vines and love grass—looked promising. He paddled to his right and located a sloping bank where deer and other creatures came down to the channel to drink. Easy enough to drive the little wooden canoe up the slant and scramble out of the bow. He pulled the boat completely onto land. What little current there was in this backwater probably wouldn’t pull the canoe off the land, but he was taking no chances. Napier might have two paddles, but he had only one boat. He grinned a little, shrugged out of his life vest, dropped it in the boat, and shouldered his go-bag and the drawstring dry-sack that held hammock, tarp, and a towel or two.
There was a splashing in the water, and when he turned, what he saw made his black brows crawl up into his hair.
A catfish—big as your boat, been around longer than original sin—was thrashing its way up the bank where he’d just dragged the canoe. Its tail drove it forward, and its dreadful fleshy-lipped mouth, filled with dozens of small, razor-edged teeth and surrounded by black barbels damned near as thick as his little finger, appeared to be sucking something down. What the hell had it chased onto the bank behind him? The fish’s baleful eye, greenish in the slanting afternoon light, fixed upon him in what seemed to Napier like hunger.
“Christ,” he gasped. The thing was nearly as big as the canoe. Was that what he’d almost seen surfacing?
Nothing like getting what he’d wished for. Monsters everywhere in this place—ghost birds flitting ahead of him, always just at the edge of perception, draining his sense of time away as if into a bottle of booze. Catfish the size of sharks. Snakes that fell from trees.
With another scrabbling thrash of its tail, the big fish slid sideways into the water and vanished, leaving behind boiling swirls.
“Christ,” Napier said again, breathing out hard. He scraped his fingers through his sweaty dark hair. He’d heard of catfish taking all kinds of things, from frogs and other fish to birds. That one had been big enough to take down an unwary heron.
Or the hand or foot of an asshole like you, Chuck. His hand went to his belt knife on its own, brushed there, and settled the knife firmly in its holster, though it needed no adjustment. What if that beast had surfaced under the canoe? He’d’ve gone into the drink, him and all his equipment. What scant proof he had of the ivory-bill’s existence would be swallowed by the deep ooze at the bottom of the swamp. He turned away from the channel and the canoe, and headed toward the center of the hamaca.
In only a few feet, it was as if the Choctawhatchee delta and its attendant cypresses did not exist. Napier pushed into the scrub of blueberries, ash and pin-oak saplings and loblolly bay, seeking relatively higher ground and a good place to sling his tarp and bed for the night. Mosquitoes, disturbed as he pushed through the brush, hummed in his ears. Gnats swarmed the salty sweat on his face. Napier set his teeth and exhaled harshly through his nose, plowing grimly on, hoping to stumble on the deer trail that led to the channel. Anything was better than this scraping slog.
The hamaca seemed like a large one, more island than plant-colonized sandbar. Fifty feet from the channel the underbrush thinned. The sand underfoot was pale, dotted with clumps of love grass gone gold with August heat. Sunlight slanted through the trees, coming in lower now. A shadow winged over the sand before him and Napier looked up sharply. A huge turkey buzzard awkwardly flapped past. They were built for the slow, motionless drift in a kettle of rising thermals, not the agility required in the jungly undergrowth. Napier wondered what it had found to eat here, but it winged out of sight and he was once more alone with his go-bag and his thoughts and the mosquitoes.
The sparser undergrowth led him to a trail, and it was there that Napier’s DLR brayed again.
The trail was clear, white sand, as white as the sand at the base of the pine where he’d found the ivory-bill’s workings at noon. Not a scrap of leaf or needle or gray swamp marl discolored it.
“Shit.” He stopped, looking from left to right along the trail. It was bordered by blueberry bushes, as neatly pruned as a hedge, on both sides.
It merited much more than a simple curse, but Napier remained silent. Something walked here, something with bare human feet. He could se
e the impressions left in the white sand, narrow feet with a sharply angled slope from big toe to least. Napier drew his belt knife and began to walk the trail.
No sooner had he set foot on the white sand, with his shoulders nearly touching the blueberries on either side, than he heard it: the slow, squeaking clarinet noise of the ivory-bill.
It lay ahead of him, whatever it was. The DLR warred with the desire to glimpse the thing he had come so far to see.
Desire won.
Napier broke into a trot, the knife held carefully at his side. The go-bag bounced against his flank. He ignored the noise he made, focusing on the sound of the bird, and by the time the trail took a deep curve to the left, he was moving too fast to stop. He burst into the clearing where a little shack stood on cypress pilings above the crystal blue waters of a limestone spring. A blonde woman, naked as Eve, sat on the edge of the elevated porch some six feet up, swinging her bare feet in empty air. A turkey buzzard—the one he had just seen?—perched above her on the railing like a demonic familiar, and let out a rasping, reptilian hiss that chilled Napier’s blood.
DLR, indeed, and not only because she was the second—or maybe the third, the DLR hinted—naked blonde woman he’d seen that day.
“What the fuck,” he breathed to himself, moving backward, his feet seeking the trail and not finding it. He risked a glance behind and frowned. The opening in the blueberries through which he had burst was not there.
Nor were the blueberries.
Instead, he found his way blocked by a stand of sweetgum trees planted so thickly they were a living stockade. He could hardly have thrust an arm between them, and would have sworn upon his life they were not there a moment ago, but that was impossible, just like the pristine path and the perfect hedges. He looked wildly for the trail opening, the knife jittering in his hand until he found the killing grip and took firm hold of both the knife and his nerves.