“Piper, I don’t want to give up either,” Perch said, “but if someone gets hurt, I couldn’t live with myself.”
“You can have the vasculum,” said Piper. “If you’ll let us keep going, it’s yours.”
“What? No, it is not his!” Tad’s objection was forceful. “Cole’s vasculum is an important piece of science history. It belongs in a museum. It has value because of what it represents, not just because it’s made out of gold. Perch would probably melt it down or pawn it off for a quick buck!”
“Now, hold on a minute, Tad—” Perch rushed to his own defense.
“No, you hold on!” Tad snarled. “That vasculum is going to the Smithsonian or, better yet, the Fernbank Museum so people in Georgia can enjoy it.”
“On whose say?” Perch asked.
“On my say! Cole was my ancestor. By right, that makes the vasculum mine!”
Perch snorted. “Obviously, you haven’t heard of a well-known legal precedent known as Finders Versus Keepers!”
Piper circumvented their argument. “Perch, think of it,” she implored. “My dad was reading the financial section of the paper the other day, and I overheard him tell my mom that gold is worth more than a thousand dollars an ounce now. The vasculum has to weigh, what, two pounds? That’s over thirty thousand dollars! It’s probably worth even more to an antique collector or history buff. You could buy a whole fleet of Mud Cats with that kind of money. Think of what it would mean for your business.”
Perch glanced past Macey, back at the gathering of alligators. They were buoyed in the water, as still as logs. There were so many, clustered tightly together, all in a row, findable by their raised eyes and nostrils. “It’s funny; when I was a kid, I saw this one cartoon where Tarzan crossed a river by jumping around on the backs of crocodiles. Things sure seem more plausible in cartoons, don’t they?” Perch sighed.
“Please,” Piper begged.
“To be honest”—Perch stared at his toes—“business hasn’t been that great lately. I wish I could afford to say no. Okay, Piper. We’ll keep going for now.”
“Thank you, thank you!” she said, then added “Thank you” for good measure.
“But if those gators get any weirder—”
“Then we’ll go,” Piper agreed quickly, giving him no time to change his mind. “Tad, give the vasculum to Perch.”
Tad was seething. “I don’t believe this! No! I won’t!”
“Tad! Give it to him!” Piper made a grab for it.
Tad yanked the vasculum from her reach and held it over his shoulder. “Piper, this is important! It’s a piece of history!”
“You’re gonna be a piece of history if you don’t give it to her!” Creeper threatened. He jumped up from his seat, ready to scrap. “This is about Grace! She’s worth a lot more than some stupid gold box!”
Creeper was right, Tad realized. Of course Grace was more important than his ancestor’s vasculum. He felt like a fool for forgetting what they were there for.
He was about to hand over the vasculum when Creeper and Piper lunged for it simultaneously. Startled, Tad dropped it behind him. The vasculum fell, clanged against the gunwale, and splashed into the water.
“No!” Piper yelped.
“You idiot!” Creeper cocked his arm back to swing at Tad, but Macey caught his wrist in her huge paw.
“No hitting,” she said.
Tad turned pale. “I’m—I’m sorry! I’d decided to give it to you, I swear! You didn’t have to attack me!”
Piper leaned over the side of the boat, hoping against hope that she could still rescue the vasculum. But all she saw was the reflection of her desperate face staring back at her. “It’s gone.…”
“No it’s not,” Perch said, spanning his legs over the gunwale. “I’m going after it.”
“The hell you are!” Like a linebacker, Macey brushed Tad and Creeper aside, grabbed Perch, and threw him onto his butt on the bottom of the boat. The look on his face was one of shock and betrayal. She pinned him down easily with one hand. “There’s an armada of gators not thirty yards yonder, ya dang idjit!”
She let him think on this, and when she let him up, Perch scrambled onto the aft bench, out of her reach.
“That’s thirty thousand dollars, Mace!” he cried. “We can’t just let it sit on the bottom of the Oke! We need that money!”
“More than ya need your arms and legs?” Macey asked. “Boy, you haven’t got the sense that God gave a goose.”
“Well, you’re not my mother or my boss. I’ll get it,” Tad said. “It’s an important artifact. It would be a crime to leave it behind.”
Macey literally growled. “You try it, boy—and this goes for you too, Perch—I’ll bang you two dummies like cymbals.” No one doubted she could make good on her threat.
Perch tried to reason with her. “Mace, you know how fast I can swim. I’ll shoot to the bottom and be back up with the box before those gators cross half the distance.”
“I said I’ll do it!” Tad repeated himself.
“Shut yer traps,” Macey ordered. Just like that, she commandeered the boat. “Perch, get me the portable depth finder.”
Perch fished inside the bow bench and retrieved something that looked like a thin yellow wand with a button and a tiny digital screen on the opposite side of the handle. “Here you go.” He handed it to the new captain.
Macey turned the depth finder on. “If the water is deeper than ten feet, the gold thingamajig stays on the bottom. Ten or less and you can dive for it, Perch. That’s the deal—take it or leave it.”
Tad didn’t agree with her choice of diver. “I said I’ll be the one—!”
“And I said Perch!” Macey thundered an inch from his face. Tad’s mouth snapped shut and he plopped down next to Perch.
“I’ve givin’ you a five Mississippi count, Perch. You do not linger. You go to the bottom, get the box and come straight back up. If you don’t see it, you don’t waste time lookin’ for it. You come back up. You understand me, boy?”
Perch nodded rapidly, like a bobblehead doll.
“All right, let’s see how deep this bathtub is.” Macey set the depth finder against the hull, took a reading, and announced the result. “Twenty-one feet.”
“That can’t be right,” Perch challenged. “The Oke rarely gets that deep, only in the big lakes. The finder must be busted.”
“Let’s go again.” Macey took a second reading against the hull. “Twenty-one feet,” she confirmed. “That’s that. Good-bye, box.”
“Maybe you’re doing it wrong,” Perch said. “It can be sensitive. You know how you are with electronics. Let me try.”
She handed it over. “See for yerself, then, doubting Thomas.”
Perch leaned over the side and dunked the depth finder right into the water. “Sometimes it works better when you do it this way.” He clicked the button, waited a couple of seconds, and then took a look at the screen. He smirked. “See! This thing is busted. Now its reads seventeen feet.”
Tad leaned in to verify the result. “He’s right. Seventeen.”
“I’ll try it again.” Perch repeated the test, then laughed. “Eleven feet! What a piece of junk. One more time.”
Dunk, click, check. “See? Now it says five feet! I think I proved my—”
Macey was the first to witness the ancient thing breaking through the algae. She yanked Creeper away from the gunwale. “Brace yerselves!” she warned just as the creature’s massive shell made impact with the bottom of the boat.
The depth finder had been accurate at every reading, but the sonar wave had been bouncing off the hard shell of something following the boat below, hunting them in secret. They couldn’t know that the readings had also been alerts, announcing the ancient thing rising, foot by foot toward the surface. Now it was too late. The creature rammed into the hull of the Mud Cat, lifting the starboard side of the johnboat high out of the water.
“Gah!” Tad cried, as he fell backward over the port
side gunwale and into the water. Piper and Perch pitched forward and tumbled together over the starboard side. Piper twisted and back-flopped into the swamp, but Perch landed headfirst on the beast’s jagged shell. Dazed, cut, and bleeding, he rolled off the shell and followed Piper through the thin film of algae.
Once again Piper was underwater, facing the surface but falling down toward the bottom. She could see the sun, distant, a pinhole of light. It was brashly bright compared to the dark tarp of algae sealing off above her head like a pool cover. She could still make out the solid underbelly of the boat, rocking side to side, settling after the crash.
No, not the crash. The attack.
Something had attacked them. And now she was in the water with it.
The last thing she saw before the algae blocked out the crepuscular rays of sunlight was the terrified expression on Creeper’s wavy face as he yelled her name. If she died now, at least he was safe in the Mud Cat. He could go home and tell their parents what had happened. There was that, at least.
Piper was a sinker. She had to stop her free fall to the bottom, so she forced her limbs into motion. Falling became treading. Treading became swimming.
She tried to remember: had Perch fallen overboard too? And what about Macey and Tad? The creature, whatever it was, had nearly flipped the boat. It had been like one of those amusement-park simulator rides, bucking on tilting hydraulics. She looked around for the others.
The water was dim, scummy, and haunted by fluttery shadows. Piper could see a bit, even with the algae overhead, but it was all so confusing. She thrashed and kicked hard, pirouetting to take in her surroundings. It was difficult to tell what was up, what was down, and where she was within it. The swamp seemed infinite in all directions—endless, like space. The green water was speckled with dark motes, creatures too small to identify and too light to sink. The water was polluted with hungry life.
Piper glimpsed a twinkle of gold far below on the bottom. She couldn’t risk diving for the vasculum. There wasn’t enough oxygen left in her lungs. And while the alligators seemed to be holding their position for now, that could quickly change.
Piper saw the ancient beast as a shadow first, like a zeppelin sailing dreamily through a cloud. She fought against the impulse to open her mouth and scream underwater—if she did, she’d drown.
The beast swam directly toward her, paddling with powerful scaly legs, its feet tipped with long, rakish claws more bearlike than reptilian. Its mouth was raptorial, hook-beaked for clasping and crunching prey. Its body looked like an enormous slab of jagged black rock.
Their attacker was unmistakably an alligator snapping turtle, easily the biggest Piper had ever seen. So big that she could feel a surging wave pushing ahead of it as it closed the gap between them. The alligator snapper, the largest of the turtle species, was common in southern waters, but never in her life had Piper seen one so massive. It looked about four hundred pounds, with a tail like a cudgel and an armor-plated shell several inches thick and six feet across. Something dancing inside its beak drew her focus. Piper stared with horror at the fleshy bubble gum–pink tongue that was darting about inside the turtle’s open mouth. It looked like an earthworm in the throes of a seizure. The alligator snapper’s tongue was the ultimate fishing lure. The turtle, she realized, was trying to entice her into willingly entering its bone-crushing jaws.
Piper flapped hard, desperate to get out of range of the beast’s head. It was like trying to crawl from the path of an oncoming truck. The reptile was too big. She couldn’t escape it.
Something grabbed her by the ankle and yanked her down hard. The turtle glided over top of her head. Its cross-shaped plastron—the yellow undershell—scraped her scalp. It was that close.
Whatever pulled her from the turtle’s trajectory didn’t let go. She thought of the vines that had snared Perch and instinctively kicked hard to free her leg, giving Tad a fractured nose in the process. Her friend had saved her, and she’d kicked him in the face for his troubles.
Covering his red-clouded nose with one hand, Tad pointed up with the other. Together they swam toward the surface.
With Creeper’s help, Macey dragged Piper and Tad up over the gunwale and into the boat. “I thought you were goners for sure!” the woman said, her voice brimming with relief.
Creeper used a fresh Oke Dokey Boat Tours T-shirt to blot swamp water off his sister’s face. Piper saw that he was trembling.
“I’m okay,” she assured him. She took the T-shirt from his hand and ran it up and down her algae-specked arms.
“Did y’all see Perch?” Macey was in a panic. “Please tell me ya saw him down there!”
Piper shook her head. “No. I looked, but no.”
“Me neither,” Tad said in a nasally voice. He was sitting on the floor of the Mud Cat, pinching his nose closed with his fingers to stanch the flow of blood. Exhausted, he struggled to pull himself up onto the middle bench. Droplets of blood dripped from his face and spattered on the plastic seat cushion. “I’ll go back for him.”
Tad leaned over the gunwale just as the vasculum flew up from the water, cracking him in his leaky nose. He caught the gold container before it could fall back in, slipped on a puddle, and landed on his back.
Perch pulled himself up into the boat and plunked down next to Tad on the floor. He ran his hands through his wet and bloody hair, clearing it from his eyes. There was a gash on his forehead where he’d landed on the turtle’s jagged shell, but it was nothing a Band-Aid from the boat’s first-aid kit couldn’t patch. “Anyone get the license plate on that monster?” he joked, then he slapped Tad on the bare bottom of his foot. “Hey, man, did you know your nose is bleeding?”
Not bothering to get up, Tad reached out and presented Perch with the vasculum. “Take it, guy,” he muttered. “You earned it.”
The Field Notes of Botanist Dr. Brisbane Cole
August 28, 1823
Mother Nature saw fit to grant me a front-row ticket to the second act of a wondrous and secret show. In the first act, no doubt a spring performance, a mother alligator snapping turtle swam up from the bottom of the swamp and crawled onto the shore of a narrow strip of land. There she dug a hole, laid her clutch of eggs inside it, and carefully buried them all. Sadly, I was not in attendance. The second act, which was post-intermission as I was passing, was by far the more interesting half of the production. To my delight, the ensemble cast was in the midst of a breakout performance. As many as twenty hatchling turtles, each no bigger than a thumb’s length, clawed their way to freedom and began the epic four-yard trek to the water. To see so many intrepid survivors made my heart leap with joy. Turtle eggs are a delicacy for many forms of wildlife. The usual cast of scoundrels—skunks, raccoons, and their ilk—often dig up nests to abscond with the eggs and devour them. Nokosi and I waited breathlessly until the very last turtle emerged, but just as he crawled from the sand, the story took a dark twist. A mink crept low and silent toward the hatchling, licking its lips in anticipation of an easy meal. I’m not sure what possessed me, for a gentleman knows that it’s never proper for the audience to interfere with the outcome of the story. But ever since I was a young boy, I have always preferred a happy ending, and so I smacked the surface of the water with my paddle, soaked the mink, and chased it out of the plot. The turtle did not stop to thank me, nor would it have been wise to do so. It reached the water and swam downward to join its siblings in the murk. The star of the show had triumphed in its quest. This was an ending I could drink to. I raised my flask of water, sipped, and wished him a long and prosperous run.
“Look at it,” Tad said. “That thing has to be a world-record holder, for sure.”
The five of them sat in the boat watching the giant alligator turtle tread water fifteen yards away. Its craggy shell poked up through the algae like a barren island, midway between the Mud Cat and the alligators.
“People ask me all the time how big turtles get in the Oke,” Perch said. “I had to do a little research so
I could look them in the eye when I answered. The biggest snapper in the world weighed over two hundred and thirty pounds. There were rumors of one caught in Kansas that people claimed was four hundred pounds, but that was never verified. Donatello over there has to be at least four hundred. I’d be willing to go out on a limb and say he’s a quarter-tonner.”
“It would take forever for a turtle to grow to that size,” Tad said. “A hundred years, at least.”
“Try two hundred,” said Macey. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Thomas Jefferson was president when that beastie was a hatchling.”
“It’s just floating there.” Perch slapped his palm against the outside of the hull, and hollered, “Here, turtle turtle,” but the turtle ignored him. “Why isn’t it leaving? Snappers are usually shy and only surface when they need air or lay eggs.”
“They don’t usually attack boats either,” Macey reminded him. “What’s normal doesn’t apply to this part of the swamp. All the reptiles are acting crazy as an outhouse rat.”
“I know what’s wrong with them,” Creeper announced. “It’s that evil tribe you told us about. The Taska…Teska…”
“The Tasketcha?” said Perch.
“Yeah! Them!” Creeper nodded. “They must have possessed the turtle, and the alligators too. They’re trying to get at us so they can jump into our bodies and take us over. They need to possess us so they can leave the swamp, just like Macey said.”
“It’s just an old folktale,” Tad scoffed. “There’s no such thing as magical tribes or evil spirits or possessed alligators. The animals are probably just really hungry.”
“Is that supposed to make us feel better?” Piper asked. “And why would they be hungry? It looks to me like the water is loaded with their favorite foods.”
Tad shrugged. “I’m just saying there has to be a scientific explanation for this. Something less crazy than ghosts.”
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” said Perch. “We can’t go back the way we came. Not with a five-hundred-pound alligator snapping turtle playing goalie in the narrow. We’ll keep moving west.”
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