Alligator Sam's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Alligator Sam heard the splash at dawn and could not tell which way it came from. He stood ankle-deep in black water with his rope coiled in his left pocket and his root knife in his right. Somewhere out in the swamp, a person was sinking. He had pulled a man chest-deep from the mud last spring and still woke up thinking about him. That was why he walked these swamps every morning. That was why he could not afford to guess wrong now. The splash came again, slow and panicked, the kind he knew. Sam turned his head one way, then the other. The sound bounced off the cypress trunks and died in the fog. Ahead of him, a thick bank of mist sat low over tangled roots and dark water, a place where every noise went in and nothing useful came back out. He had lost people to that stretch before. He had lost minutes there that he would never get back. He pulled the small device from his chest pocket. It was a sealed waterproof hearing aid a veterinarian had fitted for him after he came in with an ear infection from the swamp water. Valerie had built it for rain and mud. He fit it into his ear and the world sharpened. Now the splash had edges. Now he could hear the difference between water hitting a root and water hitting a hand. He turned a slow circle. The splash came from his right, past two leaning trees, behind the fog bank. He moved. His boots dragged in the muck. He counted his steps so he would not drift. Halfway through the fog he stopped at a patch where he had wasted twenty minutes last month chasing an echo. He dropped his pack, pulled out a short wooden post wrapped in red tape, and drove it into the soft ground with the heel of his hand. Next time he came through here, he would know to trust the aid and not the echo. He pushed past the marker and found her. A woman, sunk to the waist in a mire patch, her arms slapping the green water in the same slow rhythm he had heard. Sam knelt on a root, looped the rope under her arms, and braced. He pulled. The mud held, then let go. She came out coughing and crying into the reeds. Sam sat back in the wet and listened. The aid picked up another sound, farther off, from a direction he could now name. He helped the woman to dry ground, told her to stay, and started walking toward the next one.