Ransom prepared a light meal for himself, then spent the next half an hour sealing the hatchways and windows.
As he knelt down by the starboard window in the cabin something flashed past outside, and a sharp voice broke through the silence.
"Doctor! Quickly!"
A long wooden skiff, propelled by a tall sunburnt youth, naked except for a pair of faded cotton shorts, swung up and bumped against the houseboat, materializing like a specter out of the canopy of reflected light that lay over the black mirror of the water.
Ransom went up on deck and found the youth, Philip Jordan, fastening the skiff fore and aft to the rail.
"Philip, what on earth-?" Ransom peered down into the narrow craft. What appeared to be a large nest of wet mattress floc, covered with oil and cotton waste, lay in a parcel of damp newspaper.
Suddenly a snakelike head lifted from the nest and wavered uncertainly at Ransom.
Startled, Ransom shouted: "Philip, tip it back into the water! What is it-an eel?"
"A swan, doctor!" Philip Jordan crouched down in the stern of the skiff, smoothing the clotted head and neck feathers. "It's suffocating in all this oil." He looked up at Ransom, a hint of embarrassment in his wild eyes. "I caught it out on the dunes and took it down to the river. I thought it would swim. Can you save it, doctor?"
"I'll try." Ransom stepped over the rail into the skiff, knelt down by the bird, and searched its mouth and eyes. Too exhausted to move its head again, the huge bird stared up at him with its glazed orbs. The oil had matted the feathers into a heavy carapace, and choked its mouth and respiratory passages.
Ransom stood up, shaking his head doubtfully. "Philip, spread its wings out. I'll get some solvent from the cabin, and we'll see if we can clean it up."
"Right, doctor!"
Philip Jordan, foster child of the river and its last presiding Ariel, lifted the bird in his arms and unfurled its huge limp wings, letting their tips fall into the water. Ransom had known him for several years, and had watched him grow from a child of twelve or thirteen into a tall, longboned youth with the quick eyes and nervous grace of an aboriginal.
Five years earlier, when Ransom had hired a cabin cruiser and spent his first solitary weekends out on the lake, rebuilding his own world from scratch from the materials of water, wind, and sunlight, Philip Jordan had been the only person he could incorporate into this new continuum. One night, as he sat in the well of his craft moored to a deserted quay among the marshes, reading under a lantern, he heard a splash of water and saw a slim brown-faced boy paddle a homemade dinghy out of the warm darkness. Circumspectly leaving a few feet of open water between them, the boy made no reply to Ransom's questions, but watched the doctor with his wide eyes, paddle lightly touching the water. He wore a faded khaki shirt and trousers, the sunbleached remnants of what seemed to be an old scout uniform. To Ransom he was part waif and part water-elf.
Finally, after several long pauses in which Ransom resumed his reading and the boy moved twenty yards away, his blade slipping in the liquid silver of the nightwater, he had come in again and produced from between his feet a small brown owl. Raising it in his childlike hands, he had shown it to Ransom-or more probably, the doctor guessed, had shown Ransom to the owl, the tutelary deity of his water-world-and then vanished among the reeds on the dark surface of the lake.
He appeared again after a lapse of one or two nights, and this time accepted the remains of a cold chicken from Ransom. At last he replied to some of Ransom's questions, speaking in a small gruff voice. He would only answer questions about the owl, the river, and his boat. Ransom assumed he belonged to one of the families living in a colony of beached houseboats further along the lake.
He saw the boy on and off over the next year. He would share a meal with Ransom in the well of the houseboat, and even help him to sail the craft back to the entrance to the river. Here he always left Ransom, reluctant to leave the open water of the lake. Friend of the waterbirds, he seemed able to tame swans and wild geese, and knew every cove and nest in the banks. He was still shy of telling Ransom where he lived, and invariably referred to himself by his surname, the first clue that he had escaped from some institution and was living in the wild. His strange changes of costume-he would suddenly appear in a man's overcoat or an odd pair of old shoes three sizes too big-confirmed this. During the winters he was often close to starvation, going off alone like an animal to eat the food Ransom gave him.
At these times Ransom wondered whether to report him to the vagrancy authorities, frightened that after a cold weekend he might find the boy's dead body following the fish downstream. But something dissuaded him, partly his own increasing influence over the boy-he lent him paper and crayons, and helped him to read-and partly his fascination at the spectacle of this juvenile Robinson Crusoe of the waterways creating his own world out of the scraps and refuse of the twentieth century.
Fortunately, as he grew older the hazards of Philip Jordan's existence diminished, and from this starveling Crusoe scavenging for every nail and fishhook he turned into a wily young Ulysses of the waterfront. His face lengthened and narrowed, the sharp nose and arrowlike cheekbones giving him an alert, resourceful appearance. He carried out various jobs for Captain Tulloch and the yachtsmen in the basin, which made him less dependent on hunting and fish-trapping. Yet many enigmas still surrounded him. Whether these would finally be revealed with the imminent death of the river remained to be seen.
Ransom collected a bottle of turpentine and some cotton waste from a locker in the galley. Perhaps his selfishness in not reporting the youth years earlier might make Philip now pay a terrible price. Although he had managed to eke out an existence for several years, the river was no more a natural environment than a handful of pebbles and waterweed in an aquarium. Its extinction would leave Philip Jordan with a repertory of skills as useful as those of a stranded fish. To date his only enemy had been a fairly pliable nature. Man, on the other hand, had left him alone. Although Philip was not a thief-yet from where had come those mysterious "gifts"-clasp knives, a cigarette lighter, even an old goldplated watch-he had learned the arts of petty pilfering, and one day soon, if no- rain fell, he would be shot down for it like a dog.
"Come on, doctor!" Philip Jordan beckoned him through the hatchway and helped him over the rail. The swan lay inertly with wings outstretched, its plumage glistening with oil in the sunlight.
"Easy, Philip." Ransom knelt down and began to clean the swan's bill. The bird roused faintly, more in response to the manual pressure than in recovery. To Ransom it seemed nearly dead, smothered in the great weight of oil.
Impatiently, Philip Jordan shouted: "Doctor, that's no good! I'll take it down to the galley and soak off the oil." He lifted the great bird in his arms, the wings like a black drooping cross.
Ransom shook his head. "No, Philip, I'm sorry. It's too big a job."
"What?" Philip cocked an ear at him, struggling with the swan's flopping head. "What's the matter?"
"I can't spare the water. The bird's almost dead," Ransom said firmly.
"That's wrong, doctor!" Philip steadied himself in the skiff, the bird sliding in a helpless sprawl out of his black gleaming arms. "I know swans-they come back when they're nearly dead." He released the bird and let it flop between his feet. "Look, all I need is one bucket and some soap."
Involuntarily, Ransom glanced up at Catherine Austen's villa. In addition to the water tank in the roof, there was a second tank containing two hundred gallons in the pontoon of the houseboat. Some inner caution had prevented him from revealing its existence to Philip Jordan, for which he now despised himself.