By morning, the incoming tide had lifted the skiff from the mud, and he woke on the floorboards, chilled and stiff. For a long while, he was amazed that he was not in his bed. He sat up and yearned for hot coffee and the closeness of his little house. The sky was clear and the air unnaturally cool. By seven he was under way, the engine pumping along in the middle of the boat. He got into Quatre Fils Bay, a thirty-mile-long shallow area washed out by some great hurricane a hundred years before, and he ran by the south shore, watching the marsh with his telescope, keeping the steering stick between his knees. By ten o’clock he began to see a sport fisherman or a crabber every two miles, but he didn’t even waste a wave on them, watching instead for something in his head that should come to his eyes. Then he saw the opening for Bayou Entrelac, a knotty, forking system of dead water and blind meanders leading into Horsefly Bay, an area popular fifty years before with muskrat trappers who were man enough to get to it with only paddles and pirogues. He made the sign of the cross and pushed the steering stick over, passing on the left a grove of live oaks rising like a round green oasis on the desert of marsh grass. In the oaks were dozens of snowy egrets, and Grand-père Abadie smiled up at them, letting the light from their feathers brighten his face.

That afternoon he ran the bayou, or what he surely hoped was the bayou, as it widened to small bays and narrowed to deep ditchlike passes stretched full of green water. At sunset he stopped to eat and heard a boat engine, an inboard, starting up in the distance. He pushed on through a shallow run that turned right and developed into a pelican-filled lagoon. Farther on, the lagoon constricted, and he headed for this narrowing, only to see that it lead to the open Gulf. He stopped the engine, listening until he heard the sound, then turned his glass south, capturing in its lens a crew boat towing a large white fiberglass skiff, heading toward what—he couldn’t see—a red bump in the distance.

He wanted to get over the mud flat and follow whoever it was, but the Gulf was becoming an open dark hole. He looked back over his shoulder. His work was here. Lighting his lamp, he opened the crackers, poured water, and spread potted meat with his pocketknife, eating over the spread-out charts, chewing into the marsh’s design, memorizing, tapping his temple with a crooked finger as though driving the facts inside.