deep woods and the thicket-grown broom-grass fields; long-necked, long-tailed anhingas swung round and round like airplanes in the still upper air; tall blue herons and slim white egrets walked about over the flooded rice lands along the river flats. Sandy Jim heard a few gator voices at dawn and toward dusk, but the big bulls had not yet begun to make their dragon music. He heard no bellow which might be the challenge of the river king.
On the first warm day Mayfield, sitting hunched in his narrow square-nosed punt, his rifle leaning against the thwart in front of him, scouted the river, the ricefield canals and the long cypress-bordered backwater which made in from the creek a mile behind his house. On the second day he searched with equal diligence. On the third day, as he rested in the shade under the sycamores near the backwater's upper end, he heard the music of hounds.
They were his own dogs, he knew, and he remembered suddenly that his sons, weary of pork and butts meat, had planned one more deer hunt before the weather grew too warm. The law forbade spring deer hunting, but the law meant little in that remote corner of the Low Country. Sandy Jim, sitting cross-legged in his punt, listened eagerly to what his dogs were saying, comprehending their meaning as clearly as though they spoke his own tongue.
