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the pockets of my life-jacket with a knife, a notepad, Polaroids and a
spool of cord and dragged the kayak down to a ditch in which a
trickle of water still ran.
In this rill it looked as if a battle were being fought. Sand gobies
shot off in puffs of smoke like artillery shells. Baby flatfish raised trails
of ack-ack fire as they scudded away, tails hitting the mud every few
inches. Battalions of heavy armour trundled sideways, claws swivel-
ling towards me. Soon the water was deep enough to lift the boat, and
I set off upstream.
It was dead still. The water rippled away from the kayak, startling
giant mullet at the edges of the channel. They furrowed round in
semi-circles, then shot away in explosions of spray. Ringed plovers
pattered along the shore with strange throaty warblings, then glided
ahead of me on sickle wings. I could smell rotting seaweed and hear
the strange music of the mudflats: the fizz and snap of millions of tiny
creatures shifting in their burrows. On the sandbanks was the wreck-
age of stumps and branches brought down by the recent floods.
A knot in brick-red breeding plumage ran along the sand dipping
its head, then took off with a long swooping whistle. A bumblebee
trapped in the surface film broadcast frantic barcode ripples: sound
made visible. I stopped paddling and drifted upriver, into the maze.
As I moved up the estuary I started tasting the water. Salt meant
that I was travelling up a cul-de-sac, fresh or brackish that I was fol-
lowing a channel connected to the river. On most days it worked. But
so much rain had fallen in the past week that the water everywhere
tasted slightly fresh: the tides must have been pushing it back and
forth. I know of no other way of navigating the labyrinth of channels.
There are no visual clues: even when you leave the boat and stand on
the banks you can see only the major cuts. The runnels, which are two
or three feet lower than the domed surface of the sand, are invisible
until you are almost on top of them.
I paddled blindly and soon came to a network of bayous, trenches
scoured out by the currents, connected only by a thread of water. I
slipped out of the boat and began to drag it up this trickle. Whenever
I stepped into deeper water I felt shrimps battering against my feet.
They moved like a film missing most of its frames: they appeared, dis-
appeared, appeared again a few inches away, darting with flicks so
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