Free Marshlands by Matthew Olshan

of the canoe.
    Progress along the waterway, which in places is hardly more than a brackish tongue of mud, is hard-won. It becomes clear, as evening lowers its shroud over the swaying grasses, that we will not reach home before dark.
    Chigger wants to push on. His determination gives me pause. Perhaps he has taken a lover. And why not? He’s young and handsome, and there’s prestige in his long association with me. I wouldn’t mind sleeping in my own bed, either. The comforts of camp have softened me. But it’s unsafe to move in the marshes at night. This is unrelated to the occupation. Night in the marshes has been dangerous for thousands of years.
    Where should we sleep? I ask.
    Chigger protests in his gentle way, but I insist. Finally, he suggests a reed island in a nearby lagoon. There will be shelter , he says, whether or not the villagers have carried .
    The marshmen are nomadic, moving from island to island as their buffalo exhaust the local fodder. Their mobility has always amazed me. They’re capable of loading their households onto improvised rafts and vanishing into the reeds within minutes, if need be.
    He doesn’t wait for my assent. He knows I trust him implicitly in these matters. If he says there will be shelter, it will be there.
    The reeds shudder as we part them. A purple gloom presses down their tips. Mallards call out overhead, inspiring Chigger to song, too, something about a girl with a gauze dress, and the tattoo on her thigh that can be seen through it.
    Or perhaps it’s a song of bride-stealing. The dialect is unfamiliar to me. In the gurgling near-darkness, the meaning of a monotonous song like this has a tendency to bend itself to one’s mood.
    Suddenly he squats. His bright palm flashes behind his back. This is our signal. There may yet be enough light to take another pig. Killing them is not mere sport. These wild pigs cause great hardship for the marshmen, rooting up their crops, trampling their goods, and causing a surprising number of fatal wounds with their filthy tusks.
    I take up my cape gun and disengage the safety, which causes a new tension in the boat. Chigger’s back glistens with exertion. It’s a moment of great intimacy between us, although he’d surely never describe it that way. Hunting accidents are second only to the resolution of blood feuds as a cause of death among the young men of the marshes.
    The channel widens. He maneuvers the canoe to one side, then beaches it on ground that remains invisible to my eye even after the keel has bitten deeply into sand.
    I follow him, staying close in the last of the light.
    Pig? I whisper.
    He nods, then spreads his arms wide. A large one.
    And then we’re on it. No sooner do we make out the hulking head, like an entire bristling beast itself, than the breeze shifts. The pig turns on us, shattering the peace of the evening with its roaring.
    It charges, but the attack is merely a feint. By the time there’s a clear line of fire, the pig is crashing away through the high grass.
    We’ve missed a kill, but it’s no great tragedy. The hunt was already complete. The violent atmosphere quickly dissipates. A cool breeze fluffs the grasses, restoring the calm.
    But something’s out of place. Chigger senses it, too. He touches my elbow and points to a shape on the ground where the pig was feeding, something dark and long laid out on the wet stubble. I ready the gun. It could be another pig, a juvenile.
    As we approach, the breeze carries a familiar stench. It’s not another pig after all, but the corpse of a young marshman, perhaps a few years older than Chigger.
    The pig has been at the face. The forehead is split, and the scalp torn away. The cheeks are mostly gone. One ear remains, and just a bit of dark flesh where the nose was. The eyes have been eaten by something smaller. A crab, perhaps.
    He was a sturdy young man, a rice farmer, by the look of his legs, which are scabbed up