around the shore of the lake. For this, and not “mefcator,” was the term he had used during the cell phone conversation.
Another thing Beau was that Rufus wasn’t was easily distractible. So one day it was suddenly all about this alleged meth gator. The pigs were back-burnered. Gators of that size were, in Waco, far more unusual than wild pigs and so the story had that going for it.
Beau’s hypothesis was incredible to Rufus, and yet he stated it with complete sincerity. Gators lived in rivers, which were the ultimate destinations of all sewage. Modern municipalities made efforts to treat their sewage, but sooner or later it did have to go somewhere. Sewage treatment was designed to handle poo, and little else. Complicated molecules such as pharmaceuticals tended to pass through unaltered. You could find evidence of a population’s usage of drugs, legal and illegal, in its sewage.
Meth cookers were notorious abusers of the sewage system. Moreover, they were infamous for bypassing sewage systems even when they were available—which in the sorts of places frequented by meth cookers, they often weren’t. So, by hook or by crook, a lot of meth found its way into rivers. Gators scented it and selectively traveled up those river forks where the scent was strongest, unerringly zeroing in on meth labs. Somewhere around the shores of this lake, someone was cooking meth, and in doing so had attracted this nest of meth gators, who might, for all Beau knew, have followed the scent trail all the way up from the Gulf of Mexico.
Since the inflatable was still in the Bosque, on the downstream side of the dam, they put the pontoon boat into Lake Waco and spent an evening putt-putting around looking for the sorts of habitats that, according to Beau, would be looked on by large gators and meth cookers alike as congenial. Rufus, nervously along for the ride, could not help but see the same sites through the eyes of a herd of feral hogs. He began to feel a gnawing anxiety about what unpredictable consequences might stem from spontaneous hog/gator interactions. He had pulled the infrared scope off his rifle. After night fell over the lake he began using it to survey boggy inlets along the shore. Beau reminded him for the hundredth time
that gators were not warm-blooded: a joke he never got tired of. But Rufus wasn’t looking for gators.
They came around a point and into view of a tiny inlet, just a kerf in the land where some small creek probably spilled into it. On the IR, the boundary between water and land was a solid, squirming mass of white. Around its edges Rufus was able to pick out individual silhouettes with the familiar dished head shape of Sus domesticus. In the open rangeland of Texas this herd would have been considered large, but not astonishing. Certainly more than twenty animals but not more than thirty. Here on the lake, surrounded by houses, it seemed pretty huge. Rufus was gaping at it, beginning to doubt the evidence of his senses, trying to work out how they had reached this place and where they were getting food, when one silhouette much larger than the others hove up out of the mass and waddled to higher ground.
Rufus had seen enough of pig body language to know that this creature had been alerted by something. Most likely their scent, guessing from the direction of the breeze. The giant hog swung its head back and forth, and Rufus knew that if he were closer he’d hear it snuffling air into its nostrils. Seen in profile the head was flatter, less dished than that of Sus domesticus. This animal was closer to a Eurasian wild boar.
Reggie chose that particular moment to crack open a can of beer.
Snout turned to look right at them.
Even if the rifle had been mounted to that scope, Rufus would not have taken the shot. An errant round would pass right over the point of land where Snout was standing and carry for half a mile toward the campground beyond. And they were out of range for a pistol shot. “Take her in!” Rufus said to Beau, who was at the wheel. “Get on in there!” Beau shoved the throttle forward and swung the boat around, but the next time Rufus got the inlet into his sights, the swine were gone. He could see a few stragglers disappearing into the scrub farther inland, but Snout was nowhere to be seen.
This happened around midnight. Over the next sixteen hours, matters then developed in a way that a hypothetical journalist or
detective might later have been able to piece together with pushpins and yarn on a wall-sized map of Lake Waco, with spreadsheets and timelines, but to Rufus at the time it was just chaos. Just things happening too fast for him to react.
Maybe the worst decision he made was to stay calm. Which seemed reasonable enough. For years he’d been hunting Snout all over Texas. Now he knew almost exactly where the creature was. It could only move so fast. He and his herd would leave in their wake a wide trail of shit and damage; it would be as easy as tracking an armored division across a golf course.