The late-afternoon sunlight lay heavy on his lids, the bayous were still, as if warn down by the day’s heat. Surrounded by his home, he began to drowse, the past rising up like a specter, crowding his drifting mind.

When he was eleven years old Preach awoke to find that he was unable to move his limbs. He had set up camp at his usual spot in the densest part of the bayou, on the edge of the Chitimacha village, having temporarily lost his desire to sleep at home, a craving that came over him now and again when his father, paralyzed from the waist down after being shot with an arrow through the base of his spine, started raving. People believed he spoke in tongues, that he was a kind of shaman, connected to the Old Ones—creatures out of nightmares who, it was said, had roamed the bayous long before the Chitimacha came into existence. The boy Preach was having none of it, a practical bent having been forced on him in order to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, leaky and patchwork as it was.

His father had hunted the Chitimacha with a passion beyond Preach’s comprehension—as if they were encroaching on his territory rather than the opposite. Preach did not resent them shooting his father; he’d killed six of their people. They had to stop him. In fact, Preach, inquisitive to a fault, sought them out. To his surprise, they befriended him, even, in their way, adopted him. He did chores for them and they paid him, both in food for his family’s table and in wisdom old as time. Their elders taught him how to identify, observe, and learn from the wildlife that, in those days, teemed through the bayous.

It was early morning, and he sensed that he was hovering somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. He thought of his father, unable to walk. But in the next moment he was distracted by a different sensation, that of being in a place that was neither sleep nor wakefulness, nor anything in between. A new place; an unknown place. Nothing looked right—or the same. The butterfly hovering over his chest, the ant toiling across the back of his hand, the leaves on the trees, the lacy pattern of the thin twisted branches. In fact, he could see through the leaves, the branches, the treetops. Through the mountains beyond, through even the sky. He found himself staring at his own face. And yet it was one he didn’t quite recognize. Inside him a glowing coal began to burn—no, no, not a coal—a second heart, that beat to a rhythm so complex it made him dizzy even though he was lying on his back.