“It’s just a question of paying attention,” I said. “Look at me. I’ve seen lots of copperheads and haven’t gotten bitten yet. I know only a couple of people on my road who ever got bitten.” Somehow that didn’t seem to reassure them nearly as much as I had meant it to. “I’m just saying I don’t recommend strolling around in vegetation where you can’t see what you’re stepping on.”

I started paddling as hard as I could to distance myself from accusing stares. A few minutes later, I heard the clank of canoes, much splashing, and even more squealing. “Watch out!”

“Bruno, be careful!”

“No, don’t move! I’m going to fall!”

I twisted to find the two canoes locked in the middle of the channel as the four people in them tried to rearrange themselves so that Bruno and Claudine were sharing a canoe, with Bruno in the stern, and Gaëlle and Titi were sharing one, with Titi in the stern.

“I can’t look,” I said.

Sébastien flinched as one of the canoes wobbled particularly dramatically. “Laura, if my mother falls into the Okefenokee pond and gets eaten by an alligator or any other form of American wildlife, this will not have been a successful honeymoon.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “No one will ever believe I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Chut!” someone said. “Is that an alligator?”

We all turned to look, Claudine and Titi frozen with legs in two different canoes. We had drifted to a point where the swamp opened out into a large pond. And there, at the opposite end from us, was an alligator. A part of an alligator, to be precise—we could only see a partial curve of his tail above the water, and that part of his tail was six feet long. I remembered the guide telling us to keep an eye out for the biggest alligator in that part of the swamp, an eighteen-footer that hung out in a pond . . . a pond around about here, now that I thought about it.

Claudine and Titi settled into their canoes very quickly. “Let’s go get a closer look!” Jean-Charles said excitedly.

“Maybe we can wake him up and see him swim around!” Bruno agreed.

“Umm,” I said. I had been pretending I was a tough American for a couple hours now and hated to give up the role, but I hesitated at annoying an alligator three times bigger than any of us. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

“Oh, look at that one!” Justine exclaimed. On the other side of the pond, a younger alligator dropped off a tuft of land and into the water, giving us a good look at his teeth as he did so. He was a tiny ten-footer. I’m a five-footer. I just mention it to keep things in perspective.