"Well," he said to himself, "I'll find it in a minute here."
But the sound of his voice was incongruous with the vast stillness and he looked up with a start. The sun was sitting on top of the trees like a red hot disk. He knew he wasn't going any farther that day.
He hauled the skiff, bow first, onto a pine island and made a fire on the beach with lightwood. He was Godawful hungry but his stomach had to wait until he'd gathered enough firewood to see him through the night. He wasn't about to go looking for wood in the dark. It was a warm, miasmic night and the cottonmouths would be out frog hunting.
He made a broad circle around the crown of the island, gathering lightwood, and then took a swing along the shore on his way back. It was there in the muck that he saw the water-fified depression that looked like a track.
It was-a timber wolf's track. He made a sharp little sound between his teeth and shook his head.
He hurried back to his camp. And after that he didn't make a move without first picking up the old Springfield.
The night folded in like a navy-blue blanket being drawn over the chin of a weary, golden-whiskered old man, and an osprey's shrill cry sent spine-tingling echoes against faroff cypresses. Shad finished his beans and counted his taior-mades. Six left. He went tsk with his teeth and wished he'd brought his makings along. But he rolled up in his blanket and treated himself to a smoke anyhow. What the hell; tomorrow morning he'd find the Money Plane, and that evening he'd be a back at Sutt's Landing. Yeah.
He dropped fast into deep sleep and foundered there for a few hours, and then slowly started drifting upwards again and into the flickering imagery of dreams -.
The swamp was smoking. A sort of ghastly whitish jelly had crept in covering everything like a sickening spread of grave clothes. It was like a disease, as if leprosy were secretly digesting the mud and water underneath. He hated to put his foot down in it, and yet had to, or else how could he go on. And he had to go on – but he didn't know why.
When his first foot went down it disappeared as though swallowed by mush, and it felt like that too, and he wanted to draw back but couldn't – could only go forward. He waded.
If there was a sky it was a dull lead grey, but it wasn't like a sky; it was the dome of an endless room. And then he realized he was lost in a nether land. There was no beginning, no end, only a profound sense of emptiness.
Yet there was no end to the swamp. As he waded he sensed the passing of the years, and when he looked down at his rifle – it was only a slender bar of scaling rust, the stock half-rotted away and busy with wood-worms. He tried to throw it down, but it wouldn't throw. Then he saw his rust-scaling hand. It had solidified to the gun.
He was in the very center of a great shallow-water prairie. The grey walls of the nether room were so far off it would take him eternity to reach them. And he asked, "Why am I here? What has brought me to this place?" Then a hummock rose out of the smoke like a monstrous black bear, and he waded to it.
Something was sprawled spread-eagle on the black tattered crown of the hummock. He struggled up to it with great revulsion at every step and looked. It was the pulpy ash of a man's bones, except for the skull. The skull still wore its skin and hair in death. He looked at the dead face of his brother, and Holly stared back at him with stark blank eyes.
Shad sat straight up. He thought he'd screamed – but it was a wildcat sharing the island with him. He started to reach for the Springfield, and then noticed his fire was dwindling to embers. He heaped on more wood, got things going merrily again and felt a little better.
He curled up in the blanket again and thought about having another cigarette. But he decided to save it. Tomorrow this would all be over with, he thought. He closed his eyes and wondered what he was supposed to make of the dream he'd had of Holly. A warning?
In the morning the bull gators down the line began slaughtering the morning hush with a ferocious earthtrembling vigour. Shad kicked out of his blanket and stiffly stood up. He didn't do anything for a full minute but rub at the back of his neck, stirring up his circulation. His head felt as though it were riding sidesaddle to his body.
He ate some jerky and biscuit, found a little guzzle that wasn't too silty and had a drink, and then made some coffee and smoked a tailor-made with it. He was in the skiff and on his way before six-thirty
The swamp was very gaudy, spread-out, dressed in vivid tatters of leaves, in a great hush of green and turquoise, where the cabbage palms mutely met the sky in a ragged line of enchanted silence.
Too silent. It gave him the willies, somehow.
He came to another cross creek and turned south to search the east bank for blazings, and after a mile of it, leaned on the pole and said, "Well, fer God sake. What the hell's going on here?"
But standing there mumbling wasn't getting any wood chopped. He stobbed back to the channel.
And it went on like that. Brooks, creeks, guzzles, leading into prairies, savannas, lakes, back to the channel -.
And the goddam no-see-'ems zig-zagging about his head, in the corners of his eyes, up nostrils, zip into his mouth; and in the palm bogs there wasn't any air, only a thick heavy substitute of rank odour; and a gator in the water hissed at him instead of running when he jabbed him with the pole; and limpkins, bitterns, and ibises, and largemouthed bass, gars, and fat pan fish, and monster cottonmouths, timber rattlers, and coachwhippers, and titi and paintbrushes and hurrah blossoms and catclaws and log litter – and by two in the afternoon he'd plumb had it.
He snatched the pole inboard and set it athwart, placed his fists akimbo and glared at the swamp. "You goddam bitch, you!" he shouted. And the cry ran somewhere, maybe across the flat prairie on his starboard, and echoed faintly – _Bitch you_.
Shad sat down and rubbed the back of his neck. He'd been stubbornly evading the truth for the past hour, but now the fight had gone out of him and he felt like an old hat someone had kicked to the side of the road. So faced up to it and said it right out.
"I've pure-out lost myself. That's what I've gone and done."
Then he sighed heavily, sat up and said, "Goddam," and reached for the pole. There was only one thing to do and that was to try to find his way back to Breakneck, pick up his markers and start all over again. And he hated the thought of it. Not only because of the time it was going to cost, but because he felt certain that Jort and Sam would be hanging around there waiting.
He didn't pay any attention to the gator at first. It was fifty feet off with just its eyes and tip of snout showing above the water, and one gator more-or-less didn't mean much to him. Besides, he was busy right then ramming the skiff over and through a dense bed of golden-heart. The gator's corrugated back broke the surface and it opened its jaws and hissed.
He noted that the gator had been in some kind of brawl. One of its starboard scuts was missing and he could see the gleaming stratum of reddish-black scar tissue. But he didn't think anything of it.
The gator sank hurriedly as the skiff cleared the lily bed and bow came at him. Shad gave a shove ahead and the bow went tchuunk!, upset his equilibrium and reared upward crazily.
Shad swung around, clutching the stobpole giddily, as the skiff settled with a splamp! He thought it was a submerged log, until he saw the gator scurrying away underwater. The slough was so-so clear and he could see the magnified back and the laterally-compressed tail hitching. Then the gator entered that realm of the creek where the sky mirrored itself on the surface. Shad couldn't see him after that.
What was wrong with that fool gator? He'd never seen one act that way before. "What's he think I got in here – a goddam dog?"
He eased the pole from the water, letting the skiff drift. He crouched and felt for the Springfield. If the big scutbusted bastard thought he was going to have a Shad dinner, then he had another think coming.