It was the last thing I expected to see and I leaned forward, squinting through the boat's Plexiglas windscreen. The weather was full of early-November bluster—high overcast and a raw wind—and the water was too cold and too choppy for pleasure swimming. Besides which, the red-haired guy was fully dressed in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved bush jacket. He came all the way out of the slough, one hand clapped across the back of his head, and plowed upward through the mud and grass of a tiny natural beach. When he got to its upper edge where the tule grass grew thick and waist-high, he stopped and held a listening pose. Then he whirled around, stood swaying unsteadily as if he were caught in a crosscurrent of the chill wind. He stared out toward me for two or three seconds; the pale oval of his face might have been pulled into a painful grimace, but I couldn't tell for sure at the distance. And then he whirled again in a dazed, frightened way, stumbled in among the rushes and disappeared.
