The Pulse

taken Casey, he had learned his lesson before and was determined not to leave her alone or out of his sight, even for a few minutes. He tied the bow of their canoe to a cypress knee near the little sandbar and took her hand in his, his machete in the other. Warning her to silence, he crept forward along the path with Jessica in tow, stopping to look and listen every few steps, just as he’d seen the Wapishana do when they were stalking game in the jungle.

There were more tracks in the deep carpet of leaves covering the ground along the narrow path, but none were clear enough to decipher or even to tell if they were made by Casey or by the man in moccasins. The presence of so many tracks made it all the more likely that the two of them had been here for much longer than just an overnight camp. Grant knew for certain his hunch was right when he emerged on the other side of the thicket into an open area of forest with little undergrowth. There, on the far side, was a platform hut built between four trees, not unlike those he’d frequently seen along the rivers of Guyana. A mix of man-made and natural materials, the hut’s log support beams and plastic tarp roof were an unusual combination he hadn’t seen before. A few feet away, hung upside down from a rope stretched between two trees, was the skinned carcass of a small deer. He froze at the sight of the camp, watching and listening to be sure no one was in the vicinity. Thanks to the fact that the tree house itself was open on all but one side, he could easily see that there was no one hiding inside it.

After waiting for what seemed like at least five minutes, he crept out into the clearing with Jessica’s hand still in his, his machete upright and ready for action in the other. There was something lying on the ground not far to one side of the tree house, opposite the side on which hung the deer carcass. He let go of Jessica’s hand to walk a little closer, giving her a look that told her not to follow. Even before he was close enough to really be sure, he heard the buzzing of flies and then could see them swarming by the countless hundreds. The object on the ground was the body of a man, sprawled face down onto an animal skin that had been staked out next to a fire pit. When he walked closer, Grant saw that next to the dead man’s head, bloody and thrown aside on the ground, was a full- sized axe with a weathered wooden handle. The man’s skull was split from a blow to the back of the head that surely must have been delivered by the nearby axe, and the thickest congregation of the flies covered the oozing mess that spilled out of the wound. Looking over the rest of the body, Grant’s eyes were immediately drawn to the man’s feet, which were clad in crude, handmade deerskin moccasins.

Grant took a couple of steps back, feeling a touch of nausea and shock at the violence of the man’s death. Though he couldn’t see the face to be sure it was the man they’d passed on the Bogue Chitto that day, the moccasins left no doubt in his mind that it was him. But who could have done this? Was it even possible that Casey could have done such a thing herself? To spare Jessica from the gruesome sight, he turned around and warned her to stay back, speaking in a normal voice now that he knew the man with the canoe was dead. Then he began calling Casey’s name, yelling at the top of his lungs, joined by Jessica, until their voices were hoarse. When they finally stopped, there was no answer, only the indifferent stillness of the swamp gradually replacing the fading echoes of their shouts.

Grant quickly scaled the primitive ladder to the platform floor, looking for clues among the duffel bags, backpacks, buckets, and ammo cans scattered around the floor. He searched through all the bags looking for the pistol that belonged to Casey’s father. It was gone, and there were no other firearms to be found, though upon opening the military surplus ammo cans he found that two of them were still packed with individual boxes of ammunition in three different calibers: .22 Long Rifle, .357 Magnum, and 7.62 x 39 steel-jacketed Czechoslovakian military surplus.

The plastic five-gallon buckets stacked along the one tarp wall of the shelter were empty except for one. Opening that one up, Grant was delighted to find that it was packed with cans of tuna fish, vegetable soup, chili beans, and one-pound bags of rice. If Casey had been the one who took out her abductor with the axe, it appeared she had the presence of mind to take all of the weapons and most of the food supplies in the shelter before leaving in the canoe. Grant resealed the bucket and the ammo boxes and carried them all down the ladder and over to the edge of the clearing where Jessica was waiting. Then he returned to the fire pit, trying not to look at the corpse beside it. He put his hands on top of the dead coals in its center and felt for heat. They were cold on the surface, but when he dug into the pile with his fingers, he found warmth just a few inches deep. He didn’t know how to estimate for sure how much time might have passed since there was a fire here, but he figured it couldn’t have been much more than about 24 hours at the most, and maybe a good bit less. It was clear that Casey had left the scene of whatever had happened here in the canoe, and the tracks they’d seen when they first got here made sense now. There was only one way she could have gone, and that was downstream. Since there was no one here who could have kept that fire going after she left, Grant was hopeful that she wouldn’t have had time to go very far.

He rushed Jessica back to the canoe and quickly loaded the supplies and ammunition he had taken from the tree house into the bottom of the hull with their own gear. He had been so hungry before they got here that, if not for the sight of the dead man, he would have surely wolfed down some of the soup, beans, and tuna right out of the cans to replenish lost calories that had been so hard to come by in the swamp. He would have also eagerly thrown most of the deer carcass in the canoe for later too, but right now, he was still feeling queasy from what he had seen and had completely lost his appetite, especially for meat.

They followed the current downstream as it twisted its way out of the old-growth forest and back into hardwood bottomland forests more typical of the rest of the river basin. Visibility was limited to a few yards, as the banks of the stream here were overgrown with head-high palmettos. They had paddled less than an hour when Grant spotted a sign that the canoe had been pulled up in the mud. He stopped and got out, and immediately noticed a small pile of charred wood on a patch of ground where the leaves had been cleared away. There were faint footprints, but the harder surface on the top bank did not leave clear impressions.

“I’ll bet this fire was from last night!” Grant said to Jessica. “She must have stopped here after she left the camp because it got dark. If that was the case, she wouldn’t have left here until daylight this morning, and can’t be too far ahead of us. Come on, let’s go!”

They worked their way around the twists and turns as fast as possible, but by the time the bayou emerged from the forest and rejoined one of the main branches of the Pearl River, it was late afternoon, with little time left before sunset. Grant was at a loss as to what to do next, but he had to assume that if Casey was indeed alone in the canoe, she would head downstream, as there was simply no way she could retrace her route back upriver against the current. He and Jessica paddled into the middle of the river and had only gone the distance of one big, sweeping bend, when she stopped mid-stroke and pointed at something in the distance ahead.

“Look! Is that a canoe?”

It was indeed a canoe, its bow pulled up halfway onto a small sandbar! And it was the common aluminum model, like the one the man who had taken Casey had been paddling when they saw him that first day of this ordeal. It had to be the same canoe, and if so, she surely must have paddled it there. But why was there was another boat pulled up alongside it? Grant could see that the other vessel was not another canoe, but rather a small johnboat, the type of watercraft most favored by the local fishermen in these parts. He could also see that it had an outboard motor hanging off the stern. Such a rig was too heavy to paddle far, so he assumed the motor must still be operable for the boat to be here in such a remote place. But who could it belong to? Could the owner have been the one who did that to Casey’s abductor? And if Casey had been in the canoe next to it, where was she now, and was she in danger yet again from these new strangers? Grant whispered to Jessica that the situation merited a cautious approach, though he could barely contain his anticipation to find out whether or not Casey was indeed finally within reach. With slow, deliberate strokes of the paddle, he maneuvered the canoe over to one side of the river, careful not to make a splash or any excessive movement that would attract attention from a distance.

“Don’t use your paddle, and keep quiet,” he whispered. “I just want to let the current carry us slowly, close in to the bank where they can’t see us. I want to get a good look at whoever it is in that other boat before we show ourselves.”

Using the paddle blade as a rudder, Grant steered the canoe as it slowly drifted downstream in the sluggish current. A thick stand of cattail marsh grew on the bank just ahead, between them and the two boats they were approaching. Grant aimed for the edge of it, and when the bow knifed into the tall grasses, he grabbed a handful to hold them in position, where they could observe the scene while staying hidden. For several minutes there was no movement or sound at all, and he wondered if whoever it was in that boat had taken Casey into the woods away from the river. He was about to paddle on ahead to find out when two men stepped out of the trees and walked over to the johnboat, one of them stooping down to get something out of it. Grant was glad they were well hidden