Alligator Sam's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Sam walked into the fog with the rescue vest buckled tight over his overalls. Three people were out there. He could pull them from the mud one by one, but the woman he had left on the bank kept nagging at him. She was safe on dry ground only if she stayed there. One wrong step in this fog and she was back in the mire. Any person he saved after her had the same problem. He needed a way to mark the safe ground so a rescued person could not wander off it. He stopped at a mire patch he knew. Green duckweed floated on the murky water. Reeds and cattails leaned over the mud. Sam pulled the knife from his right pocket and cut three tall reeds. He tied them together with a strip of silk from the vest pocket. He pushed the bundle into the bank. It leaned and fell. The mud would not hold it. He tried a second bundle. It sagged and slid sideways. Marking the path this way would take him all night, and the marks would not last. A voice came through the reeds. "Sam? That you making all that racket?" Dale Hutchinson stepped out of the fog in his straw hat and overalls, boots caked to the knee. He was the farmhand from the fields past the swamp edge, the one who fixed Valerie's fence line and watched her shed when she was gone. He carried a coil of red flagging tape over one shoulder and a bundle of wooden stakes under his arm. "Valerie sent me," Dale said. "Said you had folks out here and no way to keep them put." He tossed Sam a stake. It was sharp on one end, wrapped with red tape on the other. "Drive one every ten steps on solid ground. They'll see the red through the fog. Tell them to follow the line and not step off it." Sam turned the stake in his hand. "How many you bring?" "Two bundles. Forty stakes." Dale grinned. "Figured you'd use them all." Sam drove the first stake into the bank by the mire. It sank deep and held. He walked ten steps toward where he had left the woman and drove a second. Then a third. The red tape glowed in the gray air. When he reached her, she was sitting where he had put her, shivering. He pressed a stake into her hand. "Follow the red back to the road," he said. "Don't step off the line. Dale's waiting." She nodded and started walking, stake by stake. Sam turned back into the fog with the rest of the bundle under his arm. Three more people. Now he had a way to send them home. He heard splashing far off to his left, faster than before, and started to run.