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.

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.

Sam ran toward the splashing with the stakes under one arm. The vest caught on a low branch and yanked him back. He tore free and kept moving. Ten steps later the vest snagged again, this time on a clump of reeds. The buckles caught. The pocket flap hooked a root. He lost three seconds ripping loose. Somewhere ahead, a person was sinking, and every second was air. He stopped at the next mire patch. Duckweed shivered on the water. The splashing had gone quiet. Quiet was worse than loud. Sam unbuckled the vest and let it drop in the mud. It was built for a human rescue worker with narrow shoulders. On him it was armor that fought back. Dale came up the marked line at a run, boots slapping. He carried something folded over his arm, tan canvas, bright patches sewn all over it. "Valerie sent this too," he said, breathing hard. "Said the vest wouldn't fit a gator. She dug this out of her clinic closet." He shook it open. It was an apron, long, with a strap for the neck and ties for the back. Pockets ran across the front in red, blue, yellow, green, each one patched and stitched by hand. Sam took it. Light. No buckles to catch. He looped the strap over his head and Dale tied the back around his ribs. The pockets sat flat against his belly. Sam pulled the rope from his overalls and coiled it into the big front pocket. The knife went in the side pocket. A handful of red stakes fit in the back. Nothing hung loose. "Go," Dale said. "I'll bring the vest to the road." Sam went. He slid between two cattail stands where the vest would have caught him. The apron dragged nothing. He heard a weak splash off to the right and cut through the reeds toward it. A man was in the mud up to his chest, mouth just above the water, eyes closed. Sam pulled the rope from the front pocket in one motion. He looped it under the man's arms and braced against a cypress root. He pulled. The mud let go with a slow suck. Sam dragged him onto the bank and rolled him on his side. The man coughed brown water and breathed. Sam pressed a stake into the man's hand and pointed at the red line. "Follow it. Dale's at the road." The man nodded and started crawling toward the first stake. Sam stood up in the apron and listened. Two more people. Somewhere north, a reed moved the wrong way. He turned toward it and ran, and this time nothing snagged.

Sam stood still in the apron and listened. Two splashes. One to the north, weak and slow. One to the east, faster, closer. He could not tell which one had less time. If he ran north and the east one went under, the east one drowned. If he ran east and the north one stopped splashing, the north one was gone. He had one rope and two people. He cut back down the marked line at a run. Dale was at the road, folding the discarded vest over the tailgate of his truck. He looked up when Sam crashed through the reeds. "Two," Sam said. "Different directions. I can't pick." Dale did not argue. He dropped the vest and reached into the truck bed. He pulled out a coil of thick yellow rope, twice as long as Sam's, finished at both ends with clean wrapped tips. "Barn rope," he said. "I brought it for hauling. Both ends are good. Tie one to each of them and walk them out at the same time." Sam took it. Heavier than his own, but the fibers were tight and dry. He stuffed his own rope deeper in the front pocket and slung the new one across his chest. "I'll follow you in as far as the last stake," Dale said. "When you get them close, I'll pull." Sam ran east first, because east was louder. He found a woman clawing at a root, mud to her ribs. He fed one end of the yellow rope under her arms and knotted it. "Hold. Don't fight the mud. I'm coming back." He paid the rope out behind him as he moved north, stepping between hummocks. The coil shrank in his hand. He found the second one, a boy, only his shoulders and face above the water, eyes wide. Sam looped the other end under the boy's arms and cinched it. Now the rope ran taut between them through the reeds, a straight line with a person on each end. Sam stood at its middle and braced against a cypress. He pulled the boy's side first, short and steady. The mud gave. The boy slid free onto matted roots. Sam shifted his grip and pulled the woman's side. She came loose slower, but she came. Dale reached the last stake and took the woman's end. Together they walked both people down the red line to the road. Sam untied them at the truck. The boy was shaking. The woman sat on the ground and pressed her hands flat to the gravel like she needed to feel something hard. Sam coiled the yellow rope back over his shoulder. He turned toward the swamp and listened again. Wind in the cattails. A frog. Then, far off, a slow splash he had not heard before. "One more," he said, and started back in.