Baxter Beaver knew the swamp better than his own teeth. He had mapped every hidden channel that threaded through the Big Dark Forest, and this one had been his best work. Now he stared at it and did not know it at all. The storm had drowned the old paths. Reeds stood where open water used to run. A stump he once used as a marker sat under a foot of new mud. His map was worthless. He knelt on a low bank and pressed his paw to the paper. Ink lines said solid ground lay three steps ahead. The mud there was black and smooth and wrong. He picked up a stick and pushed it down. The stick sank to his wrist and kept going. "That would have been my leg," he said out loud. "Then it's a good thing you used the stick." Baxter turned. Tuffy Turtle stood at the edge of the reeds, goggles pushed up on his shell, boots caked to the buckles. Days ago Tuffy had asked Baxter to check on the families the storm had scattered. Baxter had filled a notebook with their names and their needs. He had promised to reach all of them. "I can't get to the far side," Baxter said. "My channels moved. Every path I trusted could sink me." Tuffy looked at the smooth black mud for a long moment. "Mostly, I think, you don't need the old channels," he said. "You need to get across the new ones." Baxter stopped. He looked at the felled trees the storm had left along the bank. He looked at the coil of fiber rope on his belt. Then he looked at his own strong teeth and flat tail, the tools he had used his whole life and forgotten for a moment. He got to work. He gnawed three logs to a matching length and bound them tight with the rope. He lashed a support beam beneath. In an hour he had a small bridge, light enough to lift, sturdy enough to hold him. It did not need to know where the safe path was. It made its own. Baxter laid the bridge across the first sinking patch. It held. He walked over, lifted it behind him, and carried it to the next black stretch of mud. He crossed again. Tuffy watched from the bank and nodded once. "That works," Tuffy said. By afternoon Baxter stood on the far side, dry and whole. He looked back at the ruined swamp. His old map was dead. But the bridge on his back could carry him anywhere the mud tried to stop him. He opened his notebook. The next scattered family lived deep in the flooded groves, past water he had never charted. He had no map for it, and now he did not need one. He shouldered the bridge and started walking.