A fat aluminum skiff approached from behind and flew by, the fisherman aboard waving broadly, on his way to the outer marshes on the Gulf’s fringe. As the other boat disappeared around a bend, Paul reached back to check the lubricators. He watched the wake rolling sleepily out from the stern until he heard the gun pop again. Colette motioned him to the bank as before, and she looked over the bow, pumped the gun, and fired again. It was a big sow rat, and she could hardly lug it over the rail. “Two dollars,” she said, rubbing a spot of blood on her patched jeans.

“We rich,” he said, spitting over the side.

She turned to glare at him, then looked over his head. “Bend down,” she said, and as he did, she fired over his back and across the stream. “Number three is over there by that stump.” She pumped the empty shell into the boat.

He ran the engine backward toward a mound of fur. He watched her pull the carcass in and throw it on the others. “If you say two dollars, I’m turning back,” he said.

“Come on, get this thing moving. They’re really coming out.”

She was right. The overbred swamp was teeming with animals. As the light lessened, they could hear their cries, like babies, human and unnerving.

“Sounds like we’re hunting kids,” he said.

“The darker it gets, the more they cry out, Abadie says. It’ll help us find them.”

In a mile or so they saw a cut in the bank and knew they had reached the mouth of the old diversion canal. Leaving the main channel, they entered a narrow thread of black water. Paul steered close to the bank, and the rudder glanced off a stump, so he put them in the middle and slowed the engine. On the left was marsh grass, on the right a weedy bank sloping up to a ten-foot-high levee built to protect cane fields on the other side. He could see paths cut in the weeds where the rats made their nightly runs. It was after six o’clock. Reaching down to the duckboards he picked up the handheld spotlight and tested it. He saw a little water in the bilge, so he grabbed a Luzianne coffee can and bailed.

Colette shot a rat right in front of the boat and had him up dripping and dying before they could run over him. “Kill the engine. You got to paddle for a while.”