She felt, at first, insecure in her footing. The piney-woods had been firm and dry. Following Mart along the marsh, in and out of the swamp, barefooted, the soft muck gave alarmingly under her. Here and there Mart pointed out a bubbling seepage and warned her of quicksands. She remembered the cypress swamp, where she had moved carelessly in brown water shoulder-deep. To her memory it had been surer, but she decided that a stranger might have been uneasy there. The cypress waters, amber-brown like a fine clear coffee, had been open. There was no undergrowth. The marsh edge, the very waters of the lake, until they were a half-mile out, were a thick, slippery mass of lilies, marsh-grass and coon-tail. Frogs splashed everywhere. Small fish darted in and out, brushing cool against her bare legs. Water moccasins slid like oil into the water.

In a brief time she grew intimate with the marsh Mart called a prairie. The marsh gave them their living, for in the cool autumn crispness Mart began to trap along its borders. The lake in front, the jungle hammock behind, enclosed them in what came to be a delightful safety. Rations were still scanty at times. Hunger was not new to her belly, but it was on the whole rather unimportant. A deep peace filled her. Sights and sounds and odors moved her as they had not done before. They were all associated with the pleasure of knowing that Mart was there; never more than a mile or two away.

Mart came in with a soft-shell cooter. The turtle was new to her. It had come out of the marsh to lay its eggs.

“Mart, a thing with a ugly ol’ head like that un, shore ain’t fitten to eat.”

“I mean, shore is!” he insisted. “Hit’s a sight sweeter meat than chicken.”

“Hain’t it a fishy ol’ thing?”

“Nary a mite. Go on, Florry, cook it. We ain’t had no meat in so long.”

He drew out the long leathery neck with a hooked wire and cut off the sharp-beaked head with his knife. He separated the neck and four thick legs deftly from the shell, trimmed off sections of the translucent border, flexible like thin gristle. The female was full of yellow fat and still yellower eggs, some of them encased in paper-white shells, ready for depositing in a hole in the sand.

“ ’Coons and skunks is wild for cooter eggs,” Mart told her. “You kin allus tell when it’s fixin’ to come a rain, for a cooter’s got sense enough to lay jest aforehand, so’s the rain’ll wash out her tracks and fool the varmints.”

“Be cooter eggs fitten for folks to eat?” she inquired distastefully.

“I mean! And here’s a question my daddy allus asked and nobody couldn’t never answer. Why do a soft-shell cooter lay a hard-shelled egg, and a hard-shell cooter lay a soft-shelled egg?”

She marvelled duly at the conundrum without an answer.