“But isn’t there a place where he’ll cross our sign from this morning?” I said.
“If he does, he’ll know where we came from and where the raft is, or he’ll turn and come back for us. Or he’ll do one first and then the other.”
“Then we need to get to the raft first,” I said.
“So we’re going to fly over his head?”
“No,” I said. “We’re going to sail under his feet.”
“You mean the river?”
“Of course I mean the river,” I said.
“And how are we going to do that? Swim for miles? Ride a fish?”
“One thing for sure is we need to get down to the water, and we need to get there fast, and we need to do it well behind Skunk’s trail…Good grief, did you see his feet?”
“I did, and it couldn’t have been feet.”
“Oversized shoes?” I said.
“Like snowshoes. You know what those are?”
I shook my head.
“They’re made long and wide to walk on snow. Those shoes he had on were made to walk on the marsh and move quickly and not bog down. He would know that from being on wet ground so much.”
“Come on. I got an idea, but we have to hurry.”
We jumped up and grabbed our bags and started toward the river, crossing Skunk’s trail as we went. The riverbank was full of trees, and there was underbrush and blackberry vines to contend with, too. Close to the river the bank was falling off from being washed by rain. Roots from trees stuck out all over. Below them was a thin line of damp sand and gravel. We swung off some of the roots and dropped onto the wet sand, went along close to the river for a good long ways. I looked around and around, but didn’t see what I needed. Terry and me kept going, and finally, I saw a dead tree above us, sticking out of the bank. It was short-ten feet long-and thick. The limbs had mostly dropped off of it from rot. The top of it had long ago come loose and fallen away and been washed downriver. Its weight was causing the rest of it to lean out toward the water and its roots was springing out of the ground.
I laid aside my bag, scuttled up to the high ground, and crawled out onto the tree. “Come on,” I said. “Help me.”
Terry was looking at me as if I had suddenly lost my senses. But he put his bag down and climbed up and behind me on the dead tree.
“Bounce,” I said, and began bumping my butt up and down.
Terry followed the plan, and we bounced for quite some time before I heard the roots slipping completely loose of the bank. The dead tree fell.
It struck the ground below, throwing us off it. When we looked up, we saw that it had broken nearly in half. We had to stand on it and bounce with our feet until the pieces were free of one another.
I opened my bag, looked inside, grabbed a ball of twine, and slung the bag over my shoulder. I used twine to tie the bag to my overalls strap, and then I wrapped a couple runs of twine around it and my waist, so that it fastened to my back. I cut the twine loose with my pocketknife, cut another run of it, tied a loop of it to the handle of Constable Sy’s pistol, then made a loose necklace of it; the gun hung around my neck and down on my chest. After that, I helped Terry tie up his bag in a similar fashion, though he didn’t have an overalls strap to help him out like I did.
I put the knife away, said, “Come on. Push.”
We shoved the log out into the water, and I practically leaped at it like a lizard. Terry followed suit, and away we went, down the river. The log tried to turn loose of us at first, but we found places on either side where we could hang, and that balanced it out.
By this time twilight was gone and night had dropped down on us like a croaker sack. But the black was lit now and then by lightning. It was sizzling across the sky in bright runs, and thunder was banging out like someone striking a number ten washtub with an ax handle.
The water was cool and it was hard to hang on to the log, especially now that we was in a wider and swifter part of the river. It started raining hard enough it was like bullets slamming onto our heads; it made the river run even faster. To make matters worse, the old tree was loosing bark, and it was chock-full of ants that bit me and made my skin feel like hot tacks were being knocked into it.
The log kept dipping, though, and pretty soon there were no more ants. There was just us and that log, the rainstorm, and the dark water. The lightning flashed and lit up the sky in such a way that the riverbank was clear and bright for a moment-and I saw Skunk squatting on the side of the bank between two trees. He was sitting there like a statue, watching us rush by.
I could see he had the mud shoes strapped on his back, because they was poking up over his derby. The water ran along the rim of his hat and leaped off at the front. The badge he had taken from Constable Sy was pinned to his derby. What I had seen flopping along the side of his face was a dead bird, dangling head-down on a cord fastened up in his copper hair. Jinx had said it was a seasoned bluebird, but it didn’t look all that seasoned to me, and I couldn’t have told you in that glimpse if it was blue or black or plaid, but it was a bird. I spied a hatchet hanging off his belt, and a big cane knife in a sheath, near big as a sword. He clutched his gnarly walking stick in the middle. I could see his face in the flash. It was reddish, like an old penny, and squashed into shape, like a gourd that had grown funny. He seemed about as interested in us as a fly was in arithmetic.
Then we sailed on, and the long run of lightning was gone. I had to yell over the roar of the river, “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“It was Skunk. He must have crossed our trail below, cut back, and made for the river, found our new trail.”
“That’s not good news,” Terry said.
There was another flash of lightning. I glanced toward the bank, and there was Skunk, running along, dodging through low-?hanging limbs and jumping over bushes like a rabbit.
“Worse news,” I said.
“I see him,” Terry said.
And then we didn’t see him. The flash was gone and the thunder boomed and the river churned on.
The water carried us along and the rain picked up and the lightning kept flashing, more often now, and the thunder came up behind it quick-like; it was so loud it made the water in the river shake, and it made me shake, too.
I don’t know how long we sped on like that, but in time the river began to narrow again, which is the way the Sabine does, and we was coming to a place where we could see a sandbar poking out into the water from the shore. I immediately thought that would be Skunk’s moment to reach us.
Way the lightning was coming now, our wet path was lit up every few seconds. I used the flashes to look toward the bank, then toward the sandbar, but I didn’t see Skunk. Maybe the rapid river had carried us so far beyond he couldn’t catch up.
It was so damn miserable being out there in the water on that fraying log, I was thinking maybe we could get off of it at the sandbar, go through the woods the rest of the way. If we were ahead of Skunk, maybe we could stay ahead.
Whatever the good or the bad of that plan, the idea got dropped, cause there was a long lightning flash, and I saw Skunk running above on the bank. He would be coming up on the sandbar about the same time as we was, though it lay below where he was on the bank by a good twenty feet.
“Paddle wide,” I said.
We each had just one arm to spare on either side of the log, and our legs to kick with, but we went at it, thrashing around like a monstrous catfish. The log veered, but Skunk jumped. I saw him do it in one long flash of the lightning. He looked for a moment like he was pinned in midair. The tree limbs in the background looked like bony fingers clutching at him. Then he came unstuck and landed on the sandbar as gentle as a cat. The lightning went away, and it was so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.