Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

man
    who came in the front door was that much closer to
    the back one. I solved that by leaving first. I could see
    that I was doing it again. My grandfather was right.
    Clay Venable had gotten further under my hide in a
    shorter time than anyone ever had.
    Just the same I was glad that he had proved to be
    an ordinary, skinny, milk-pale Yankee after all. I had
    nothing to fear from him. And then he raised his head
    and saw us on the porch and smiled, and the ordinar-
    iness vanished like smoke in the wind, like a disguise
    that he had cast off. My heart flopped, fishlike, in my
    chest.
    “Shit,” I whispered.
    My grandfather laughed aloud.
    Peacock’s Island is a small barrier island in St. Helena’s
    Sound, fitting like a loose stopper in the bottleneck
    formed by Edisto and Otter Islands to the north, Har-
    bor and Hunting Islands to the south, and the shallow
    bay created by the conflu

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    ence of the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto Rivers to
    the west. It lies in a great, 350,000-acre wilderness
    called the Ace Basin, an estuarine ecosystem so rich in
    layers upon layers of life, so fertile and green and
    secret, so very old, so totally set apart from the world
    of men and machines—and yet so close among
    them—that there is literally no other place remotely
    like it on earth. Other areas in the Lowcountry that
    were once this pristine have irrevocably gone over to
    man now, and cannot be reclaimed, but a combination
    of private and public agencies have set their teeth and
    shoulders to safeguard the Ace, and now protect sizable
    swatches of it.
    The bottom 91,000 acres of the Ace Basin are tidal
    marsh and barrier islands, scalloped by dunes older
    than time itself and thick with unique maritime forests
    of live oaks, loblolly and slash pines, palmettos,
    magnolia, and cedar. It is possible, on Peacock’s and
    the other barrier islands of the Lowcountry, to en-
    counter, in a day’s walk or canoe trip: bald eagles, os-
    preys, wood storks, an amazing variety of ducks and
    herons, wading birds and shorebirds and songbirds.
    My grandfather said that someone had counted sixty-
    nine bird species in the great arc of the Ace. You can
    also see—or rather, perhaps, see tracks of—another
    eighty-three species of reptiles and amphibians, includ-
    ing a fearsome array of watersnakes and the big, thick,
    brutish rattlers of the

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    Lowcountry, and, of course, the ever-present ranks of
    alligators. I have seen, during my summers there,
    whitetail deer, bobcats, foxes, rabbits, otters, raccoons,
    wild pigs, possums, and some fleeting things that I will
    never be able to name. The ponies are an aberration;
    no one is quite sure where they came from, but my
    grandfather thinks they are offspring of the tough little
    marsh tackies that used to dot the interior of Hilton
    Head and the larger Sea Islands, themselves offspring,
    perhaps, of the ponies brought by the English planters
    to work the lowland fields. He believes that the first
    of the Gullah settlers over in Dayclear brought the sire
    and dam of this herd with them, and since no one is
    sure when that was, the provenance of the ponies is
    as misty and unsubstantial as the marshes themselves.
    The Gullahs can only tell you that the ponies have
    been there “always.”
    The panther that my grandfather swore he heard in
    the nights should not, by rights, have been on the is-
    land at all, since no one has seen or heard of a panther
    in the Ace Basin since time out of mind. I certainly
    never saw one. But I believe there was one in my
    grandfather’s time, for in that vast, succoring basin,
    one-third light, one-third water, and only one-third
    substantial earth, life in all its abundance has evolved
    all but unseen for millions of years, infused twice a day
    by the great salt breath of the tides, and that

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    panther was as surely a child of the Southern moon as
    the blue crabs and the dolphins and the