The country was low and swampy, sawgrass and tule, tufted hummocks among the scrub trees. He veered from the creek to gain drier ground, half running now, breaking through a patch of alder upon a small pothole out of which a heron exploded slowly and rose before him with immense and labored wingbeat.
Before dark he came upon the creek again, smaller and clear, choked with duckwort and watercress, the flat verdant ground stretching away everywhere beneath the sparse cover of trees and a coppery haze quivering like some rare dust in this twilight. The child had come awake again and begun to squall. He entered a stand of cottonwoods where the ground held moss of a fiery nitric green and which he prodded with his foot for a moment and then laid the child upon. It howled redgummed at the pending night. He stood back from it and watched it dumbly. It kicked away the towel and lay naked with legs pedaling. He knelt forward in the damp earth and covered it again and then rose to his feet and lumbered away through the brush without looking back.
He did not return along the creek but took his bearings by what faint light still lay in the west and struck out across country. The air was dank and stormy. Night fell long and cool through the woods about him and a spectral quietude set in. As if something were about that crickets and nightbirds held in dread. He went on faster. With full dark he was confused in a swampy forest, floundering through sucking quagmires and half running. He did not come upon the river but upon the creek again. Or another creek. He followed it down, in full flight now, the trees beginning to close him in, malign and baleful shapes that reared like enormous androids provoked at the alien insubstantiality of this flesh colliding among them. Long and long after he should have reached the river he was careering through the woods with his hands outstretched before him against whatever the dark might hold. Until he began to stumble and a cold claw was raking upward through his chest. When he came upon the creek again he splashed into it thigh and crotch before he knew it was there. He stopped, his breath roaring, trying to listen. Very far away lightning quaked once, again, soundlessly. The current moved dimly about him. He spat. His saliva bloomed palely on the water and wheeled and slid inexplicably upstream, back the way he had come. He turned and watched it in disbelief. He plunged his arm into the water. It seemed motionless. He spat again, and again the spittle flared and trembled and listed perverse. He surged from the water and began to run in the return direction and at a demented pace through the brush and swamp growth, falling, rising, going on again.
When he crashed into the glade among the cottonwoods he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried.
It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.
IT WAS EARLY MORNING when the tinker appeared upon the bridge, coming from the woods with a sprightly hop like a stage dwarf after the main company has departed. He peered both up and down the road. Satisfied, he left the bridge and took the path along the river, going bowbacked among the rushes with his curious magelike agility. The sun was well up and the bracken along the shore steamed in the rising warmth. The tinker hummed a little air to himself as he went.
When he came to the branch where it joined the river he cast about for a crossing, coming finally to a narrows a short distance upstream. When he came back into the river path on the far side the tracks he followed had ceased.
Whoa now, he said. Which way we a-goin here?
He recrossed the creek and picked up the man’s trace in a furrow of crushed ferns that led into the woods. Ah, he said. We a-takin to the deep pineys.
He lost the tracks more than once going up the branch but he paid that no mind. He was watching for tracks coming from the other way and he could find none. After he had gone a mile or so he ran out of any kind of track at all. He circled and returned, finding nothing. Finally he crossed the branch and went down the far side and very soon he came upon the tracks again. He followed them into a small clearing and here they ceased. He looked about him. It appeared to be the same place in which the tracks coming up the near side had vanished. As if their maker had met in this forest some dark other self in chemistry with whom he had been fused traceless from the earth. Than he heard the child cry. He turned, small grin among his wire whiskers. He found it at the far end of the clearing in a cup of moss, naked and crying no louder than a kitten.