His fingers wandered east like the logic of the searchers already out in the open water. The farther east one traveled, the more porous the marsh became, the map breaking up into a spongelike system of lakes, lagoons, mud holes, bayous, cutoffs, pipeline canals, reefs, shell mounds, chênières, and mud flats. He smiled at the names, a list of old friends: Business Bayou, Little Business Bayou, Dead Tarpon Point, Tisdale Cut, Jack Lane Bay, Lake Deux Pied, Fiddler’s Lagoon. He studied a ten-mile-long stretch of shore, the southern rim of Isle de Loup, fronted by a mile of two-foot-deep mud flats, a silty area where fisherman seldom tried their luck. The others would search deep water on the Gulf side, but if Paul’s crew had made it to Isle de Loupe, they might have decided to wade north through the marsh rather than risk waiting four days or more to be seen by a crab fisherman or alligator hunter braving the flats at high tide. Yes, he thought. If they washed ashore and knew where they were, they might try to slog five miles to Quatre Fils Bay, which would be full of fishermen. It would be easy for them to get lost, but they might try it.

Abadie had read the tides in the morning paper. He looked at his windup wristwatch and bent to untie the skiff, watching his fingers stall on the knot. It would, after all, be easy to turn around and go home. He looked up at Berrard Larouquette, at his face, which was still in many ways six years old. Pulling the knot free of the piling, he pushed off, opened the rough door in the compartment in the bow, and stowed the yellow charts. By the time the skiff had throbbed under the railroad bridge, he had said ten Hail Marys and a good Act of Contrition.

When he rounded the first bend below Tiger Island, he remembered one reason he no longer ran in the main channel with his old boat. His eyes were no good for distance. He pulled out his telescope from its canvas case, looking downriver to a white trawler going out. He decided to follow as long as he could see it, but a rumble at his back signaled a big offshore supply boat coming. It roiled up behind him and he closed his eyes and picked up his shoulders, waiting to be run over or passed. The big boat sliced by and he cut across its wheel wash to keep from shipping water. By the time he got straightened up again, he was across a thousand-foot river near the willows and had lost sight of the white trawler.