Scott Williams: The Pulse

Another consequence of the long days of being completely alone in such close proximity to Jessica was a growing attachment to her that he could tell was mutual on her part. He supposed it was inevitable, considering the situation into which they had been cast, but the more time he spent with her and got to know her, the more he liked what he discovered. Though he had felt they were as different as two people could be just a couple of weeks ago, the challenges of life in the woods brought out a part of her he hadn’t seen before, and he liked it. He thought her chances of adapting to life in this altered new reality were slim when they had first been preparing to leave New Orleans, but here on the river, she surprised him as she quickly conquered her fears of the dark and the local wildlife and even overcame her reluctance to try new foods.

The realization that he was feeling something more than mere friendship towards her gave him a twinge of guilt and brought nagging doubts that he was really as committed to finding Casey as he had been when they started out. On the one hand, he felt he had done the best he could and had put Jessica in even more danger by bringing her deep into this swamp on a fruitless chase. Continuing on to the cabin without trying to find Casey wasn’t an option he had considered for even a minute, and he knew Jessica wouldn’t have either. But after all this time, it was becoming clear how hopeless the search really was, and each day that went by with no sign of her at all made that realization all the more evident. He couldn’t help but think about what the future would bring, and right now Casey simply wasn’t in that future and he had to accept the fact that she might never be.

Whatever it was he was feeling towards Jessica, he had managed to keep it well in control, and did his best not to let her know. He certainly didn’t want to discuss it, as he wasn’t even sure if it was real or just a natural reaction to the stress of the situation. Not only did he feel bad about it because of Casey, but he knew that Jessica must be going through her own wide range of emotions considering how close she was with Casey as friends and roommates. And in the beginning, he had been much more attracted to Casey than to Jessica, as they seemed to have mutual interests that were apparent when he first met her at the freshman anthropology field trip he attended as an assistant.

But night after night, as he shared a camp with Jessica, and she slept close to him in their sleeping bags against the canoe or under the tarp, depending on the nature of the campsite, he felt a growing desire for her. It had started that first night when she wrapped her arms around him in terror at the shriek of an owl. He couldn’t deny that it felt good to comfort her then, and that he took comfort in the closeness of their embrace as well. The whole world had changed practically overnight, and they were only human, after all—a young man and a young woman—trying to survive without any of the systems or structure that had always been a part of their lives until now. As he steered the canoe from the stern, guiding around the twists and bends of this new bayou, he pondered the implications of these things as he watched her wield her paddle with the new skill she’d mastered so quickly.

This particular route was proving to be one of the most interesting yet. They had followed a series of dead sloughs that led them off of one of the main branches of the Pearl River. The route led through several still lakes, connected by sections of running water flowing generally southward. Paddling through this deep swamp, he’d almost overlooked a tiny channel that split off in a clear-running branch. They’d had to backtrack a few yards upstream to check it out, and at first it didn’t even look big enough to accommodate a canoe. But there was a strong current flowing into the entrance, evidence enough that it was indeed a bayou and not merely a slough. It had to come out again somewhere downstream, so Grant suggested they push on through a little ways and see if it was passable. Once they’d followed it for a few bends, it opened up a bit, and surprisingly, the water was clear enough to see the white sand bottom anywhere from a few inches to three feet below the surface. It was one of the many unexpected surprises of the swamp and one they would have completely missed if they had relied on first impressions. The little bayou led them into a magical stand of old-growth cypress and Tupelo gum, with huge flaring buttresses and almost solid sheets of Spanish moss hanging like curtains from their lower branches, nearly touching the water.

“This is magnificent,” Grant said. “This is a glimpse of what this entire river basin forest would have looked like back before they logged most of it over a hundred years ago.”

“It’s kind of creepy too,” Jessica said, looking around at the moss-draped giants in awe. “It has an otherworldly quality or something.”

“I know what you mean. It’s primeval , that’s what it is. Most people today have never seen anything like it, because in most places there are only tiny remnants like this scattered here and there. But a lot of the jungle I saw in Guyana was very similar.”

After that exchange, they drifted on in awed silence down the narrow bayou, staring up at the huge trees and only occasionally dipping their paddles to avoid hitting something. Being in this place made Grant think about the Wapishana people again. Their lifestyle would be totally unaffected by this solar event that had disrupted the world for everyone else. For them, life would be the same today as it was before, and they would likely be unaware that anything had happened. He was snapped out of his contemplation of this by a whispered, excited cry from Jessica:

“Grant! Look!”

He saw that she was focused on the bank to their left, where there was a small sandbar in the inside bend of the bayou, maybe four feet wide and several yards long. The edge of the sandbar, sculpted into a smooth-faced bluff by high water the last time the river level had been up, was collapsed and broken, and piles of it had fallen off and slid down to the water’s edge. At first, Grant thought maybe an alligator had pushed itself off the bank into the river, but the tracks that were everywhere on the sandbar were no reptile tracks—they were human footprints! And not only that, as he looked closer, he could see that what had collapsed the edge of the sand was the weight of a canoe being pulled over it, into the water. There was the unmistakable area of smooth, flattened sand that could only be made by the hull of a canoe or the belly of a big gator, but the sharp, central groove down the center of the slide mark told him for sure that it was the keel of an aluminum canoe. And he was certain the mark was just like the one at the place where Casey was taken and the last one they’d found so many days ago.

He was shocked, almost unable to believe what he was seeing. He immediately motioned Jessica to silence as he quietly jammed his paddle into the bottom to stop their forward motion. Stepping over the side of the canoe, he hung onto the gunwale while he pulled it closer to the bank and bent over the disturbed area for a closer look. There were many tracks in the sand, some old and shapeless and impossible to decipher, but the more recent ones made it clear to Grant that they had been made by two different people—a large man wearing moccasins and a person with significantly smaller bare feet! The latter could be Casey’s, and they could mean she was still alive! Furthermore, the barefoot tracks seemed to the be the most recent, as several of them were superimposed over the top of the moccasin prints, including a few that were alongside the slide mark made by the canoe. He wondered what that could mean as he crouched down beside the canoe and told Jessica that he was sure Casey had been here, and recently.