at three-thirty, and had not only done what he’d been told, but looked for additional work to do as well. The second day, when Stubbs had told him it was quitting time, Michael had shaken his head. When he’d been feeding the nutrias, he noticed that one of the furry little rodents was about to give birth to a litter, and he was in the process of fixing her a special nest away from the rest of the exhibit. “She’ll get nervous with all the people watching her,” he’d explained. “I’ll just fix her up a box in the storeroom, and after a couple of weeks maybe we can set up a special cage for the babies. Sort of like a children’s zoo.”
Stubbs had shrugged disinterestedly and let Michael do what he wanted, pretty much forgetting about the whole thing within a few days. But two weeks later Michael had stayed late again, and the next morning Stubbs had found a whole new exhibit next to the nutria cage. Inside a glass-fronted box were the new mother and her babies, who were now tumbling around like puppies. All around the box Michael had placed a series of neatly-lettered signs describing the life cycle of the little animals, from the period of their gestation to their expected life span, explaining what they ate and what their economic value was, as well as a clear description of their place in the ecosystem of the swamp. Stubbs had frowned at the exhibit, wondering why Michael had bothered with it, but that day he’d noticed that the baby nutrias had attracted more attention than any of the other cages at the headquarters, and on the tours that afternoon, people seemed more interested in the nutrias than the alligators.
By the third week Stubbs had stopped bothering to tell Michael what to do, since the boy was always busy and invariably stayed late, usually saying only, “There’s a couple things I still need to do.” The next morning Stubbs would find another of the animal exhibits revamped, or new docking lines on the boats, or a fresh coat of paint on whatever had started looking shabby. By now it was simply assumed that Michael would be the last to leave, and that whatever anyone else forgot to do, he would take care of.
For Michael, the job was the closest thing he could imagine to paradise.
He’d always known there was something different about him, something that separated him from the other kids.
At first, when he was Jenny’s age, he’d tried to be like them, tried to join in the spontaneous play of the rest of the children his age.
But his classmates seemed to sense that Michael was somehow different, and as he’d grown up, he had yet to make a genuine friend, yet to find one single person whom he felt he could tell about the peculiar emptiness that yawned inside him like a vast chasm threatening to swallow him up.
Over the years, he’d learned to pretend that he was like everyone else, laughing at the other kids’ jokes, pretending to have emotions he didn’t quite feel.
And as long as he could remember, he’d been fascinated with the swamp and everything in it. By the time he was ten, and he’d begun to accept the fact that he was never going to make any real friends, he started going out into the wilderness by himself, poking around among the bayous, watching the animals and identifying the plants. To him, there’d never been anything frightening about the marshes and bogs, nor had he ever gotten lost. Although he knew that for most people the waterways—and the endless tiny islands they surrounded—were a confusing, even frightening, maze, he saw each island as an individual. He knew every bend in the bayous.
Now, thanks to his father, he was being paid to spend even more time in the swamp, with its profusion of fascinating wildlife.
This evening he’d decided to go frog hunting. The big bullfrogs were peaking this time of year, and he’d already set up a terrarium to hold half a dozen large ones. If he was lucky, he might even still find an egg mass. Then he would be able to set up an entire life-cycle exhibit. Taking a large bucket with a mesh cover, and a flashlight, he got into a rowboat and set out, handling the oars expertly and silently, so that the little boat slid through the swamp without disturbing anything around it. Within a few