It is a quarter past two in the morning. You have been standing in the same slough for six minutes, and the only light in this part of the basin is the one swinging behind the trees. Then the beam stops. It rests on the water six feet to your left, then slides, slow, until it is on the trunk you are standing behind. It stays there. Whoever is holding it does not step into it.
"Cold night for a survey,"
a man's voice says, from somewhere past the light.
"You picked the wrong tract. This one's been in the family since thirty-four."
The mud has your boots to the ankle and the cold has gone through your jacket. Until a moment ago the light came in long sweeps across black water, catching the underside of the cypress leaves, and something in the beam ticked against a trunk each time it passed: a metal ring, or a buckle, or a man's knuckles. Above the tree line the moon is a hard white coin, and it does nothing down here; the canopy takes all of it. Frogs, then nothing.
Boots in water. Slow, unhurried, moving along the far side of the trunks instead of straight at you. The light stays where it is, holding you in place by nothing but the fact of it.
"Fence you crossed is a boundary, and a boundary is a bill."
A hand comes up into the edge of the beam, black-gloved, and closes on a cypress knee.
"So here's how it goes. You get a count. You hear me say eleven, you move. You hear me say nineteen, you are still on this side of the water."
He lets go of the tree and the light drops to the mud, pointing at the ground between the two of you. A pale seam of open water shows past it, and beyond that, farther out, a second light blinks once and goes dark.
"Seven,"
he says. The beam stays down on the mud. Somewhere behind him a dog answers, twice, and stops.