And here I sit, he thinks, feeling the hard board infirmary porch seat against the bottom of his spine, resting before a journey. He laughs a little and looks across the yard at Milo Macraw, his young boy, the one who sleeps beside him at night, and a tenderness enters him, surprising him as it does sometimes, making him stop, say, under the big sycamore with half its limbs lightning-shrunk, and look up into the living branches in a kind of wonderment. Milo wants to go with him all the time. After the last escape they put him, put Delvin, in the Bake House, threw him in among the ants and ground wasps and the doodlebugs and hoppergrasses and the big black scorpions clacking their swords. He lay among them thinking of the creatures that lived so close to the earth they felt the vibration of every step and smelled every smell and sensed in the cold or heat seeping into the grains of sand what was coming and going in this world, like they had to know, like this knowledge was so important to them that, like the professor said, they had evolved — evoluted he’d called it before he met the professor — until they were able to crouch so low to the ground they missed nothing. And he wondered: What do they need all this information for? Were they waiting for some hint of something? The coming of some Bug Redeemer?
He lay among them flat on the earth studying what it was like in the bug universe, and he was lying there when the big cottonmouth slid over his belly and curled up on his chest. Its tongue flicked his chin and then it flicked his lips, and then it flicked his eyes he’d squeezed shut and he could feel the snake’s cold breath and he knew it was drinking from the little balls of sweat at the corners. With its tiny delicate tongue it licked his ears clean and his nose and the corners of his eyes and his lips, and he could feel the snake’s heart beating like the covered drum of a distant tribe, speaking in the dark of the world of light. He could smell the odor of the snake like the smell of garbage and he lay still in the dark with the weight of the snake on him because the smell told him the snake was afraid. It was hard to breathe and he thought well I am being suffocated by a damn poison snake and then he felt the snake’s breath in his mouth, the slow, you couldn’t call it pulsation, but a slithering of expelled breath from the snake’s broad nostrils making a regular susurration coming into his own mouth.
