He came up, slipping off the safety. But the rifle was only half up when the gator made a mad rush through the reed for the deep water. Shad swung the gun into position, panning fast in the general direction of blurred moving colour, and jerked – ca-blam! and saw the reed whip and the water spurt silver, and knew it was a clean miss, and saw the gator's thick tail slash across the water.
The gun crash caromed off the slough, rolled into the sharp protests of the bitterns and squawk hurons and echoed somewhere in the south woods. After that there was the quick _flut -a-fl utter_ of many wings.
Shad looked around, but there wasn't much to see. The fool gator was probably long gone. He squatted on the floorboards, bolted a fresh cartridge home, snapped the safety and set the rifle down.
The skiff undulated as though a ground swell was moving under the flat bottom. Where's the current coming from? he wondered.
The skiff lifted sharply, canted to one side and began sliding off. Shad grabbed for the gunwales, starting to get up, then stalled. He was tipping over. Out of the corner of his eye he saw water breaking on the scutellated back of a gator, and there was that angry red stratum replacing the missing scut. The gator's humped back seemed to be coming right at him; then – last instant – he knew it wasn't so. He was going to it.
Gator reared – skiff skittered – starboard tilted high above Shad and all the swamp went with it, tumbling into a spinning green smear – Silver and black shocked his eyes. He felt the solid impact of his weight slamming water – and everything was liquid. What he could see wasn't worth claiming. Straight ahead, an opaque olive, below, total blackness, above, a silvery sheen – the surface. He struck for it, broke it, felt cold air on his wet face, sucked a breath – half of it brackish water – and went kicking and flailing for shore.
He wasn't going in a given direction – _he was going_. He didn't know where the skiff was or where the nearest outcropping of bank stood and he didn't give a damn. He knew a king-sized gator was right behind him and the panic was on.
He kept waiting for the sudden shocking snap of the gator-teeth in his legs, could actually feel it, could see himself being drawn down to the mushy decay on the black bottom, and the pressing scaly weight of the great gator over him, and the torrent of stagnant water pouring into his open, bubbling mouth – and he went wild.
His swinging left hand struck a spongy something, and then his chin bumped into it. He raised his head, brought his knees and feet under him and started crawling onto the soggy bank.
The ground, as far as it went, wasn't anything to boast of. It was marsh land, not an island. Semi-solid, and already it was trembling. Shad hesitated in a crouch, streaming water from clothes and body, smelling that damn musky odour. A matted hurrah and catciaw thicket fronted the bank, and it was tunnelled and a throaty rumbling was coming from behind it.
He looked back. The skiff was seventy feet away and drifting downstream (ironic – thinking of Jort – but not a damn bit funny), and the scut-busted gator was kicking around out there in the run, watching him with wideawake eyes and snorfing and hissing, as though daring him to come back into the water.
The gator-ground was quivering rhythmically now, and it sounded as though a whole army of them were coming at him. He felt around the back of his belt for his knife and drew it in a hopelessly futile gesture of defiance. He started to go right, stalled, took a step or two left, got caught in indecision, and then began backing up, watching the thicket tunnels.
The first gator wasn't much – a clumsy female, and she veered off in a fright when she saw him crouching there. But the next one was a big granddaddy, and he came out on a direct line with Shad and his jaws unhinged, and Shad wasn't hanging around to see more. He legged it along the shore for the nearest water oak.
He put the knife blade in his teeth and hauled himself up into the branches. When he looked down he couldn't believe it. The ground was acrawl with gators. Down the bank they came with their peculiar stumpy-legged run and went splam! in the water. After a while their roars and grunts and hisses died down, and after a longer while the hurons and limpkins and what-all birds let off their squawking. The silence picked up again with a completeness that seemed smugly complacent.
There was the bogland- He didn't know how long he'd been in it. He was convinced it was endless, and knew it to be timeless. A thousand years came and went and nothing changed. He'd long ago lost the creek – without quite realizing at the time what was happening. But it had been impossible to follow it along the shore for more than a mile. Too many gators, too many thickets – he'd kept turning off, and farther off, and he didn't know how far he'd slogged or where.
It was a step-over, climb-around, wading horror. Halfpetrified logs, all sizes, all positions except straight up; broken old stumps like rotten teeth; ankle to knee-high stagnant water, the colour of old ale.
And sinkholes – he could never see them coming. And each time as he slip-shot down and the torpid, stinking water rushed up, his heart contracted with panic. And after a while he began to wonder how much of that a heart could take.
He waded.
It ended finally, as the sun ended. One moment it was there, and a moment later only the after glow blazed on the rim of the swamp, like a bright lamp standing on the grave of the sun. Then a pale grey twilight hung over the wilderness and Shad slogged through it wearily, watching the edge of the bog come at him with agonizing slowness. Beyond high land stood, with palmettos and pine trees and swamp oak -and food. Way, hay, he was hungry enough to eat a last year's poor-joe nest.
And then, right on the edge of the bog, he met a panther cat with the same idea in mind. Shad pulled his knife and crouched. The cat's head lowered and its hair started to bristle. Its eyes were beryl green and placed in its head on a down-slant to its nose, giving it a mean, sour look. Its lips lifted and it snarled.
Shad hesitated and then realized that the panther couldn't quite make up its mind. He decided to augment the cat's attitude by pulling back into the bog. He retraced his own track for a hundred-some feet.
The cat didn't like the water. There were easier and more familiar prey afoot. It padded off silently, glancing back from time to time to see that Shad was behaving himself. But they weren't always like that.
Taking it easy, Shad came out of the bog and started up the high ground. He went to where the first palmetto clump squatted and looked back at the darkening badlands.
"God," he whispered.
He didn't eat that night. It wasn't safe to hunt in the dark, and it was also hopeless. But he had a fire. He had three matches in his denims and he dried the heads by rolling them in his hair. He put his four tailor-mades on a flat rock and set it next to the fire. When he lifted the rock he found some slimy slugs stuck to the damp bottom. But he wasn't that hungry He drank swamp water and had a cigarette, and then tried to go to sleep.
The night crawled by like a wounded snake. His sleep came piecemeal, and between the fits and starts fear expanded insomnia until finally he gave up the idea as useless. He threw fresh wood on the fire, lit another cigarette and listened to the whispering feet of nameless things beyond the palmettos.
"It's going to be bad," he murmured. "Going to be real bad."
He was up and moving with the sun, heading south.
In the runty bay bushes of another island he found the remains of a long dead wildcat. It was bones mostly, with a few patches of hair and hide and the claws. It was the claws that gave him the idea for a fish lure. He tore a hunk of the hide loose and sat down with it on a log, then traced an outline on the hide with the point of his knife. When he was finished, the strip of hide he'd cut had the appearance of a lizard. He got the wildcat's claws and hooked them to his dabbler.