Sonny opened the outboard’s throttle a little and nosed the boat through a deeper channel in the cypress trees. They were thirty miles south of Natchez and twenty west of Woodville, deep into Lusahatcha County. This swamp lay mostly on land owned by the Double Eagles’ hunting club, but partly on federal land, too—a national forest. Sonny’s destination was a stand of virgin cypress that looked like something on the cover of an Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback. At the heart of this swamp, some cypress trunks were fifteen feet in diameter. Sonny and Frank had once tried to stretch a fifty-foot rope around the trunk of the one called the Bone Tree, and they’d come up three feet short. Frank claimed some of those trees were a thousand years old.

“Shit,” Sonny muttered, watching the orange sun flare against the purple sky as it sank below the horizon. He was going to have to use a flashlight to get back to civilization. “We shoulda been there by now.”

He put down his pistol and picked up a map Snake had drawn for him on a much earlier occasion. As he studied it, Sonny kept glancing over its edge to make sure Jimmy Revels stayed still. The kid’s T-shirt was rusty with dried blood and stained black with grease, his left arm wrapped in bloody gauze. In the fading light, Sonny could no longer tell if his eyes were open or closed.

Stinging sweat dripped into Sonny’s eyes, and he squinted through it at the map. I gotta be almost there, he thought. Then, as though transported by his thought, he realized he was. The normal cypresses had given way to grassy islands, humped mounds of earth crowned by gargantuan trees. The cypress knees alone were larger than the trunks of most trees. Sonny saw paths worn through the grass on some tussocks, probably by hungry deer, exhausted from swimming. Deer were damn good swimmers, though not many people knew it.