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.

Sam followed the second sound to another mire patch and pulled his rope from his left pocket. It came out in a wet knot, still caked with mud from the woman. He worked at the tangle with cold fingers. The knot only tightened. Out past the reeds, he heard a man cough water, then slap the surface twice. Sam had nothing ready to throw. He pulled the knife from his right pocket and cut the rope free of itself. Half of it fell useless into the water. He kept the dry end coiled in his fist and looked for anything else he could reach. A tree above him held a wide sheet of web between two branches. At the center sat a spider the size of his palm, yellow-legged, watching him. Sam had seen its work before. The silk held rainwater in beads and never soaked through. "I need line," Sam said. He held up the cut rope. "Long as you can spin. Now." The spider dropped on a thread and began to run between the branches. Silk pulled from its body in a bright, thin cord. Sam grabbed the end and wound it around his forearm as fast as the spider laid it down. In under a minute he had a length that reached across the mire. He tied the silk to the last dry foot of his old rope and threw the weighted end. It landed across the man's chest. The man grabbed it. Sam braced against a root and pulled. The silk held. The mud let go with a sucking noise, and the man came sliding out onto the bank, coughing, alive. Sam sat back and breathed. On his lap he found something the man had clutched the whole way in: a braided leather strap, thick as a wrist, tied to a soaked oilcloth vest with reflective stripes and buckles. A rescue vest. The man had been coming to help. "Others," the man said, when he could speak. "Three more. That way." He pointed into the fog. Sam looked at the vest in his hands. The buckles were dry inside. The strap was long enough to loop a chest. He stood, pulled the vest on over his overalls, and clipped the strap to the front. He asked the spider for more silk and coiled it into the vest's chest pocket where it would stay clean. Three more people. He started walking. His old rope he left in the mud. He would not need it again.