The great prairie of sea grass and tidal water stretched away to the horizon, south and north, and out toward Tybee Island some four or five miles to the east. Small islands, known locally as hammocks, were dotted in haphazard fashion across the face of the marsh. I had explored several of the hammocks and on each of them had found the ancient shell mounds left by the original native inhabitants of this coast—a people who disappeared soon after the Spanish set foot in the region.

I always love being out here. It is a wild place, little changed in thousands of years. And even with the depredations of uncaring man, this is still one of the principal cradles of life. The great rivers of Georgia: The Savannah, Ogeechee, Altamaha, St. Marys, and others drain the interior of the land and pour their mighty waters into this vast catch basin. The tides flush in and out twice a day, alternately covering and exposing the wetlands, mixing and distributing the life-giving nutrients into a nutritious primordial soup.

Tiny creatures are born and find sanctuary within this fertile oasis. Some are food for others, and some grow and feed off smaller organisms. The bigger ones, when ready, answer the call of their species and follow their innate chart of life back out to sea, the cycle of life continuing thus. I have read that the productivity—the biomass—created and nurtured by an acre of salt marsh is twenty times greater than that of an acre of prime Midwestern farmland planted in corn. We mistreat this nursery of life at the peril of our own species.

I kept a sharp eye on the surface as I navigated this piece of water. The powerful tides of the Georgia coast scour deep channels in the salt creeks and other streams, but they are always moving soil from one place and depositing it in others. The swirl of the water shows where it flows around an obstacle, and the rise of a bank at an inside bend indicates where the water is deepest.

The waters were still rather warm but would begin to cool off rapidly now that the season was getting late and the nights becoming longer and chillier. The tropical animals, like the tarpon and the manatees, would be pointing their noses back south again and making their way to the perpetually warm waters to the south of Florida’s St. George River. And before long, the right whales would make their annual migration from the North Atlantic waters of New England to the Georgia Bight, where they would give birth to that year’s generation of calves.

Rounding a sharp bend that pointed Miss Rosalie’s bows directly to the south, I saw, in the distance, the hammock that was my reference point for where Danny Ray had found the body of Tonya Causey, where it had been deposited on a bank of mud and oyster shells by the falling tide.