by Grace Draven
Only then did he look around for his pack and his gear.
His go-bag wasn’t where he’d left it, but it was only about fifteen feet away. It looked as though something had dragged it. The sand was in it, but it hadn’t been swallowed by the sand the way his clothing had.
His dry sack was nowhere to be seen.
The old fart’s poniard was half-out of the open top of the go-bag, handle just touching the sand. Napier’s hand went to his own belt, and his knife, sheath threaded there. He blew out his breath, drew his blade to look at and be comforted. Calmed. He had his knife. He had his go-bag. It felt like most of his gear was still in it. Things couldn’t be that bad then, he still had food, water, his knife. Binocs and camera. He’d had a bad night, sure, a spectacularly bad night, but he was moving now, getting out of Dodge.
Napier took one more look at the spring, beautiful as blue glass in the noon light, waited for his internal compass to spin back to true—the canoe was that way—and started walking.
Where his brain knew the trail between the blueberries should be was still the palisade of sweetgum trees. Still so tight together there was no slipping between them, and the branches were high enough that he couldn’t jump to one and climb up, through, and drop down on the other side.
He didn’t remember the branches being that high last night, but then he hadn’t been paying much attention once the naked woman walked off that porch. He spat in the sand, irritated as much by his own nature as by the wall of tree trunks.
Very well. The tree fence had to end somewhere. He’d find the end, and walk around it. Probably that was what he’d done yesterday afternoon, he just didn’t remember. He’d been led around by his dick, not his brain.
Except that his internal compass kept saying not that way, this way.
Napier shook his head, turned away from Jenny’s cabin above the spring, and started walking. He kept the line of sweetgums on his left, and the spring on his right. After a few minutes, he was out of sight of the cabin, and paused to fish a sandy bottle of water out of his pack. He cracked the seal and downed half of it in three long swallows, then forced himself to save the rest for later. There was the spring right there, after all.
Except you don’t want to drink that water again, do you, Chuck?
While he waited to make sure the water he’d swallowed didn’t bounce, he gazed out over the spring, thinking. Some part of him still wondered about the ivory-bills, but the bigger part of him wanted to find his canoe, paddle out to the main channel, and get back to Jolly Bay as soon as possible. He could make another run for the ivory-bills, maybe in fall, when many of the estuary’s trees would shed leaves and make spotting woodpeckers easier. And next time, he’d stick to the channel. He wouldn’t get drawn in by ghost birds flitting from tree to tree, luring him to—
A sudden thought startled him. The line of sweetgums continued, blocking much of his view of the territory beyond it. But the hamaca couldn’t be much larger than a dozen acres. It hosted some trees, and Jenny’s spring, but there would be an end to it at some point, as the small rise in the earth gave way to swamp and channels. Even these insane prison-guard sweetgums would be hard pressed to cross the channel a spring this size made. He’d simply find that channel, slip or wade around the sweetgums at its edge, and work his way back along them on the other side. Simple.
He looked out over the spring, which was still as smooth as glass. Even the boil, big as it was, wasn’t disturbing the surface. He remembered feeling its power, its hugeness, last night as he swam with Jenny. Which way had the maw of the spring pushed him? That was the way he should be walking, but he couldn’t wrap his brain around that concept. His internal compass spun crazily, as if this place’s natural magnetism kept north from staying where it belonged. His sense of direction said one thing, but the spring told him nothing at all. No directional flow, just glassy still water.
At this point, he was long past any conceivable place where he’d passed through the line of trees last night. Now he was just walking to find its endpoint, since there hadn’t been a gap large enough for his head, let alone his whole body. He knew that last night he’d come through a sizable gap, he hadn’t had to squeeze, or find room for his pack. He’d come through it as easily as if it had been a gate.
Napier felt sweat trickling over his skin, the salt stinging in his myriad scratches.
There was nothing for it but to keep walking. Sooner or later he’d find the channel, and after that, it was cake. A long walk, but cake. He went doggedly on.
There was just that one nagging thought. Where was Jenny?
It was hard going. This was no tame state park lake with a well-worn path around its circumference. This was Florida jungle, pin oaks and palmettos, smilax and cypress, fox grapes and blackberry. Tangles, knees, thorns, turtle burrows, gnarled roots, boggy places hidden beneath clumps of sundew. Every few minutes Napier paused to catch his breath and get his bearings, study the surface of the spring to see if maybe here he could detect the water’s direction of flow.
His sense of direction told him he was walking in a circle. After an hour, he thought that perhaps the large pine tree snag he stood beneath—one with a heap of scaled bark at the base—was the one Jenny had pointed out to him the night before. The Lord God Birds’ roost.
He looked up, uncomprehending. Surely he should have found the channel by now; hadn’t the spring pushed him in this general direction last night? Didn’t its mouth open just beyond Jenny’s cabin, and aim toward this snag? Yet there was no channel, the pool of the spring seemed nearly circular when he looked out across it, and there was still the marching wall of sweetgums, unwavering and regimented, to his left.
It was enough to make a man believe he was hallucinating. Weren’t there some shellfish that could make you sick enough to see things if you ate them? But he didn’t remember that being true of crabs, only mollusks.
He sat beneath the tree, his back to the trunk, and emptied out his go-bag. The old man’s pig-sticker was at the top of the bag again, insistent as a three-year-old child. Napier set it next to him. He found his opened bottle of water and a piece of jerky, and ate a little, drinking to wash down the salty beef. He felt a little better with something in his stomach, and finished off with a stick of gum to clear the last of the bad taste from his mouth.
With all his gear out of the pack, he emptied the white sand next to him, catching a few grains on his finger to look at more closely. It just looked like sand, the same sugar-white as the Gulf of Mexico beaches he’d seen a hundred times. It didn’t smell salty, like beach sand. It smelled of nothing, not algae or spring water or dust, just nothing. He touched a few grains to his tongue, rolled them experimentally, then spat them out. Sand. He hadn’t expected to discover that Jenny’s beach was made of drugged silicon, and it wasn’t.
Nothing made sense, which was every bit as unsettling as waking in that cabin with monster hickeys and scratches everywhere. The world would not be still. It would not follow the rules. It didn’t look right. It looked so wrong that he couldn’t be sure whether it was the world that had gone wrong, or Napier himself, and that was the most frightening thing of all. To have his own mind, that finely-tuned machine, betray him.
She’s dead. She’s under the water, in pieces. You put her there. Something inside you broke, soldier.
Napier shuddered. He gathered up his things, one by one, and put them in his go-bag. Last of all he picked up the old man’s poniard and slid it from its sheath, testing its point against his palm. He scrutinized it to be sure the blade had no red tinge, no dried blood.
He stood, shouldering his bag. He tied the leather laces of the poniard’s sheath through his belt, next to his own knife, and kept his hand on its hilt as he walked on.
The sun declined in the sky. The day heated, burning off the humidity and leaving only scorch behind. No birds sang or called or rustled. No fish leaped in the spring. There was no wind. The water was still. Napier saw a single dragonfly, i
ts abdomen curved to the surface of the spring below the stem it perched on, as if it were stitching a line across the water. It was peacock green, iridescent and shiny.
There were no mosquitos, unlike last night.
Maybe they don’t like the way I taste now. Maybe I taste like Jenny.
He laughed, but the sound echoed across the spring, returning to him distorted and desperate. Napier fished in his bag for the opened bottle of water and drank the rest of it down. He put the empty back in the bag and walked on, doubting now that he would ever find the channel.
Only a minute or two later, it occurred to him to take a sample of water from Jenny’s spring. Assuming he ever found his way back to the canoe and civilization, he could have it analyzed like any other water sample. He wondered what analysis would tell him about it. Napier paused where the cypress knees left a gap at the bank, and knelt there. Letting down his pack, he fished for the empty bottle and removed its label, so he wouldn’t drink it by mistake. He filled it, capped it tightly, and pushed it all the way to the bottom of his pack. He cupped his hands and splashed spring water over his face and neck, cooling his hot, raw skin. A second handful, a third. The spring water, this time, was soothing on his skin, rinsing the salt of his sweat away. Still, he resisted the urge to lick his lips, instead wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.
Out in the spring, there was suddenly movement. He got slowly to his feet, watching the lazy, sinuous progress of a reptile across the glassy surface. An arrowhead of wake grew behind it.
It’s the alligator that ate Jenny. But she’d told him gators didn’t come into her spring. Napier tossed his head, flicking wet, draining hair back from his brow.
It wasn’t an alligator, he saw now, watching the creature heading off to his left. It was a snake, and it looked as big as a python, but the coloring he glimpsed as it writhed through the water was that of a cottonmouth. In this isolated, lost-in-time hamaca hemmed in by martial sweetgums, it was remotely possible a snake had grown to be that big, though not likely.
Behind him came the distinctive double rap, somewhere woody, somewhere high.
Napier shook his head. It couldn’t be. He looked back the way he had just come, past the cypress knees, ti-ti shrubs, the mess and tangle of Florida panhandle wetland plants, and felt overwhelmed with exhausted frustration and disorientation.
Rap rap.
Could it be? He unslung his go-bag once more, digging in it for the camera. He blew away grains of sand from its casing, and hoped nothing had gotten to the lens or the various mechanisms.
He was going. Of course he was going. One last look for those god-damned ghost birds, that was all. If they were pounding away at that pine snag, great. Fine. If they weren’t, he was finding that channel and getting out of this insane place. His hand brushed the hilt of the poniard, then moved past it. He scrambled back the way he had come.
From fifty feet away, he could see chunks of bark tumbling, bouncing, skidding their way down the trunk of the snag. Napier dropped into a crouch behind screening brush and readied the camera. His heart pounded slow and heavy. To his right, the sweetgums stood as still as lampposts. He looked over at them. Nowhere in their peculiar palisade had there been a gap larger than his spread hand.
They weren’t natural.
Nothing here was natural.
He turned to his right and snapped a quick shot of the line of sweetgums, then one shot upward, into their interlaced boughs. Almost as if the trees had perceived his attention, their branches tossed and swayed.
There was no wind. No breeze.
That river, it’s haunted.
Just the trees, lacing their wooden fingers together ever more tightly, as if to say there was no getting out that way. He had the distinct impression that if he were to find a way up into those branches, the trees would fling him back to earth.
A tooting mew from high above brought Napier’s attention back to the pine. Plaintive, almost silly, like a turkey call rubbed only halfway. His fingers fumbled with the camera, and he wished like fury he had one that could record audio. He set down his bag and went slowly, so slowly, toward the tree, looking up, the camera roughly aimed, his finger on its trigger. He’d shoot, no matter whether he had a good view or not. He could always review the images on the computer later.
The double knocks went on as the bird, whatever it was, hammered away at the pine. Bark continued to fall, chunk by chunk and bit by bit. The bird was on the far side of the tree.
Napier waited, his eyes glued to the spot where his ears told him the bird was.
When the bird scaled its way around to Napier’s side of the tree, Napier fell to his knees.
White on the trailing edge of the wings as it moved, and white back patches when it paused to peel more bark with its chisel bill. So much white. Napier sat back hard, the camera clicking madly, his breath whistling in his lungs as he fought down shouts of triumph. It was a male bird, its crest a swashbuckling swoop of scarlet.
“The Lord God Bird,” he breathed to himself. It was the only term suitable to the magnificent creature, nearly two feet from beak to tail tip. Brilliant. Striking. Violent in its search for food, easily chiseling large chunks of decaying wood from the tree. He shot the camera. Shot and shot. He found himself lying stretched on his back, camera pointed upward, clicking away while he stared and absorbed and bathed in his amazement.
This was it, this was the proof. He held it in his hand. The birds were not extinct. Critically endangered, without doubt, but not completely gone from the earth.
Out in the spring, something big jumped and splashed. Napier heard it, but he had no spare attention. He lay on the shore, slippery knuckles of cypress grinding into his back, the spring-water lapping gently inches below his head, disturbed by the passage of whatever it was.
He photographed the bird until the camera’s storage was full. Not another shot could fit, so he lay with his hand above his head, shading his eyes from the sun, low and sliding down the horizon.
Napier sat up abruptly, and the ivory-billed woodpecker saw him at last, cocked its head and let out its raucous call. The bird launched its body into space and flapped away into the beams of light to…except that wasn’t the west. The late sun angle proclaimed it was, but Napier’s internal compass insisted west was a different direction.
Once again the Choctawhatchee River—and the ivory-bill—had stolen hours from him. He thumbed the camera on and checked the last few images to be sure he had something, anything, to prove he’d found the birds. He got to his feet, stiff, aching, needing to piss, and stumbled back to where he’d left his bag, safely back from the waters of the spring.
A large cottonmouth coiled around the bag, muscular body flexing, squeezing. Its flat head and empty eyes looked at Napier with a peculiarly targeted malevolence. You, the eyes seemed to be saying, with the greenish reflection in their depths. Charles Napier.
Napier flicked through the bag’s contents in his mind. Bottles of water, all his food. Binoculars. He had the most important thing in his hand, the camera, with its evidence of the ivory-billed woodpecker. He could just leave the bag behind, but that meant leaving safe drinking water, and the bottle of spring water for testing when he made it back to civilization. And he really liked those binocs.
He was thirsty now. It had been hours since he’d drunk that last half-bottle; the sun angle told him so. He glanced around him for a handy stick to prod the snake—every bit as big as the one that had fallen into his canoe—away from his bag, but saw nothing except the piles of scaled bark at the base of the ivory-bill’s pine. He bent for a handful and chucked it at the snake, which only hunkered down tighter and swelled.
Napier pushed the camera into a front pocket. It was a tight fit, but he couldn’t afford to drop it. He scooped up more chunks of bark and began pegging the snake, aiming at its ugly head. The missiles only seemed to make it more determined to squeeze itself tighter around his bag. The top flap bulged as the items inside were pres
sed upward and out.
“I’m not leaving that bag behind,” Napier panted, as he shied yet more chunks of bark at the snake. It sent out a flickering tongue to mock him, and its green-shine eyes gleamed.
The sun was still sinking, and Napier had found neither the channel nor his canoe, and all too soon it would be time for him to find a safe place to wait out the hours of darkness. His hand flicked angrily to his belt and unsheathed the old man’s brittle poniard. It came to hand before his own belt knife, and it fit his palm, and it wanted to be thrown, it cried out to be thrown with a voice like the hum of an electric fence, and so he threw it. The poniard sped straight and true from his hand and struck the snake a few inches behind its head. The knife stood in the wound for a moment, while the snake’s mouth gaped and its teeth vanished in the whiteness of its mouth flesh. Then the knife toppled and the snake was fleeing for the spring, coiling and uncoiling, looking back at Napier, making half-lunges at his boots, but gone, bleeding but gone, gone, spilling over the bank into the glassy water, arrowing out of sight.
Napier stood panting, heart racing. Sunlight played along the edge of the old poniard, casting a greenish reflection that vanished as Napier bent to pick it up. He wiped the blade on his pants and sheathed it meditatively.
With the go-bag slung on his shoulder again, Napier kept going, the evil monotony of the sweetgums to his left, the beckoning spring to his right. The roots along the shore seemed taller, more persistent, but he was tired and hungry and dehydrated, which undoubtedly led to more stumbling in his step. He was afraid to stop, to waste what light was left more than he had already. He had to find that channel where the spring fed its flow to the Choctawhatchee.
He had to.
The fireflies showed themselves as dusk fell. They blinked on early here in the scrub around Jenny’s spring, rather than waiting for full dark the way sensible fireflies elsewhere did. Napier found the sweetgums crowding the edge of the spring now, making his passage ever more difficult. Soon he would be wading, and he didn’t like that idea, not one little bit. He paused for a breather, staring around him in the ruddy twilight, the sun setting in the not-west, the mosquitoes rising but not biting, for which he was grateful. Far in the distance, the Lord God Birds came in to roost, making their hooting calls as they landed.