In some places along its course, Goat Creek runs shal low and sunstruck through deep grasses and reeds, through open fields and clearings in the vast woods around the Big Silver. I have never seen a gator, though I have seen the deadly roiling of the black water as one took a baby wild pig, and heard the terrible snortings, and the thin screams of the piglet, and I saw the black water redden with the piglet's blood. So I know that the gators are there. Deer by the hundreds come to drink at the muddy verges of these shallows. It is possible to see the mishmash left by their delicate cloven hooves almost any morning.
Wild pigs chuff there, too, feral and stupid.
But mostly Goat Creek runs in secret, in an eternal semitwilight of black-green trees and hanging moss and undergrowth so dense that it is like blood or darkness, a separate element. Its life here is a secret life in all ways, as secret as the place where it begins. I saw it, that Goat Creek is a finger that points to Pemberton. I came to Pemberton chasing banality like a hound a rabbit and found instead a lush, slow beauty so insistent and particular that it frightened me. After my initial visit to Tish, to scout the lay of the land and attend the interviews Charlie had arranged for me, I think I would have backed out of the whole thing because of the unease that beauty caused me, except that by that time Tish had found a place for Hilary and me to live, and had even paid the deposit on it.