3/18/2024 0 Comments What is a sharpshooter for rats![]() He thought it might be a good idea to jump in the water and drown, he was not sure why. Hydro was quiet, quiet in the front of the boat. Tonight the bloody deaths of the boy and girl at the William Tell Grocery occupied their minds, the two of them. ![]() Sometimes they had this exchange, father and son, but not tonight. Hydro said, one time, many times,"Do they understand what you tell them?" The echo of his voice across the wide water of the bayou was like a heartbreaking song, a music of the swamp. Often when he floated past in the boat and watched their playful wheeling, in and out among the cypress knees, he called out to them,"Lamar, we are all alone in the world!"or"Renford, cork is an export product of India!" Elmo-and could recognize them, and call each by its name, even at night, six feet long some of them, with a million sharp teeth and a naughty grin. Raney named the porpoises-Sister Woman, and Renford, and Lamar, and St. Scientists were forever arriving here from Jackson and Biloxi, with water-testing equipment maybe they knew. ![]() Minerals in the fresh water made it somehow fit habitation for these sea creatures, no one understood quite how. Somehow dolphins, porpoises, whatever they were, had made their way up here to the Delta, to this vast water, all the way from the Gulf of Mexico-who knows how, or why, up rivers and canals, to this inland sea-and they swam and bred and gave birth and fed upon the million carp and mullet and the other bony fish that populated the swamp. Rats the size of yellow dogs clung to the bark of trees by their toenails and yapped like puppies and then dropped into the water and held their noses up above the flood and swam to high ground where they sat and howled at the moon by night. Cottonmouth moccasins hung in the willow branches, turtles sat on the logs, alligators lounged in their big nests, which smelled of sugarcane and sorghum and rice and fish. Blue herons and cranes and snowy egrets stood on long legs and ate snakes and minnows in the shallows. Turkey buzzards floated above the swamp like prayers and admired their own reflections in the water. The water seemed limitless, everywhere, even to a boy who grew up on the island it was a black mirror, colored by the tannic acid that seeped into it from the knees of cypress trees.īeavers had felled the trees, a few trees anyway, sweetgum and tupelo, and built dams and houses as big as igloos, or tepees and they swam in and out, the size of collies. Raney had his fishcamp was a strip of high ground far out in a strange bayou, the vast, unbounded backwaters of many lakes and rivers from underground, somewhere, salt water, brackish at least, mineral salts, filled up the swamp and broadened it far across the Delta.
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