Crimson Shore

A lion hunt was, in fact, an excellent metaphor. Pendergast could not hope to outsmart or outtrack Dunkan: the man was in his element. Pendergast would have to rely on his instincts and his acute senses.

A few stalks of freshly broken grass showed Pendergast that the man had deserted the animal path. He followed Dunkan’s trail, allowing himself just enough flashes from his light to keep on it. The track burrowed deeper and deeper into the heavy, tall grasses of the marsh. They were on a medium-size marsh island and eventually they would reach a mudflat and tidal channel.

After five minutes of silence, save for rattling gusts of the wind, there came a sound to his right — a sharp snap. Immediately, Pendergast stopped in place, sniffing the air. The raw human stink was no longer detectable. That meant only one thing: Dunkan was no longer ahead of him, no longer upwind.

But where was he? In an instant, Pendergast understood that the feral brother, unable to shake Pendergast, had decided to circle back and come up on him from behind.

Allowing himself another brief wink of the light, Pendergast veered southwest and pushed his way through the grass. After making a slow arc of about a hundred yards, he stopped. With any luck, he was either behind Dunkan now or — even better — perpendicular to his path. Keeping intensely still, gun and flashlight at the ready, he listened for any sound — an intake of breath, the faint snap of a twig — that would signal Dunkan’s approach.

Nothing.

Five minutes passed in which Pendergast remained in position, unmoving. And then he noticed it: Dunkan’s stink, drifting toward him once again from the southwest.

What had happened? After brief consideration, he realized that Dunkan had probably heard him and was abandoning his double-back. The stench that briefly reached his nostrils was fainter: Dunkan had used the time to put significant distance between them. Maybe he was trying to escape him, after all.

Rising from his place of concealment, Pendergast moved quickly upwind, in the direction of the odor, using his flashlight more often now in search of signs, more focused on speed than silence. Several minutes of running and pushing through the dense grass brought him to the edge of a mudflat. On the far side of the flat lay a wide tidal channel. The tide was coming in strongly: ripples of black water were moving inland with dangerous rapidity, filling in the labyrinth of tidal islands.

His flashlight made out a set of nearby footprints. They led out of the salt grass and went straight down to the water. Pendergast let his light play out over the channel. And there was Dunkan, head bobbing as he struggled across the water toward the mudflats on the far side.

Pendergast did not hesitate; stuffing his flashlight into the pocket of his camos, he ran down to the water’s edge and plunged in. The water was as cold as ice, with at least a ten-knot current and a vicious undertow, which threatened to drag him down and carry him away. He swam hard, stroking his way across, fighting against the cold and the tug of the salt water. As his head came up from above the waterline he could again make out Dunkan, now out of the water, upstream from him, struggling through the mud on the far side.

It was the work of three desperate minutes to get across, while being swept along for at least a hundred yards. At last, Pendergast found his footing on the other side and heaved himself out of the water, nearly frozen, and began to half wade, half crawl through the knee-deep muck of the island. The moon came out from beneath scudding clouds just long enough for him to catch a glimpse of Dunkan. He was standing at the edge of the wall of high grass, a hundred yards away, bayonet in hand. Covered head to toe in mud, only the whites of his eyes showed — and they stared at Pendergast with wild fury.

And then he turned and disappeared into the grass.

Pendergast struggled across the expanse of mud until he reached the point where Dunkan had disappeared. He noticed that the dried grass had been mashed and broken into such wild and random tangles it was nearly impossible to tell which broken stalks might have been the work of a passing man and which the result of wind and storms. But Dunkan had left traces of his passage in faint smears of mud.

As Pendergast forced his way inward, the grass became even thicker. Initially, smears of mud guided him through the dry grass, but soon those traces vanished and he lost the trail. The moon was once again obscured and there was near-zero visibility; even his flashlight was of little use in the dense grass. Dunkan was no longer upwind; he could be anywhere.

After several more minutes of fighting his way through the grass and dry reeds, Pendergast once again stopped to listen, Les Baer .45 in hand. Silence. Dunkan, it seemed, had the uncanny ability to move with a minimum of sound, without disturbing the grass — a feat that Pendergast knew he could not reproduce.