McGraw and the Mississippi Department of Fish'and Wildlife. DEEP SOUTH The Rambler's headlights caught a scrap of paper nailed to a tree, a handwritten sign: REPENT. Darkness swallowed it, and Anna was left with the feeling she was surely on the road to perdition. God knew it was dark enough. Her high beams clawed the grass on the left side of the narrow lanc, plowing a furrow so green it looked unnatural: neon green, acid green. At least it's in color, she thought sourly. Everything she knew-or imagined she did-about Mississippi had been gleaned from grainy black-and-white television footage of the civil rights movement in the sixties. Her worldly goods in a U-Haul, a shrieking Piedmont in a cat carrier, and an ever-faithful, if occasionally disgusting, hound drooling on her thigh, she'd driven straight through from Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. Twenty-two hours. And she'd done it the old-fashioned way: without drugs.
