"Tough little bastard," she said.

"She's not so little," I said, removing the hook from the tarpon's mouth and then easing it back into the water. "And she's gorgeous."

When I looked back up Sherry was watching me.

"She, huh?"

Those first days while the iced beer was still cold, we sipped and ate onion and tomato sandwiches and napped in the quiet roll of the boat or stretched out on the small dock landing at the foot of my stilted shack. Sherry listened to the sounds of the animals that always surrounded us. I was surprised when she started asking me to name them that I could only guess a few. Splash of a red-bellied turtle. Kee uk of an osprey. Grunt of a mating gator. During the day we sat in the speckled light that passed through the tree canopy as though it were green cheesecloth. At night I read to her aloud from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and we made love on the mattress I'd pulled from the bunk bed down onto the floor.

But by the third morning, I detected a twitch in Sherry's ankle or a couple of extra sighs while we were lounging on the dock.

"How you doin'?" I asked.

"I'm fine," she said. But I knew the difference in tone between "I'm fine" with half a glass of beer and "I'm fine" and getting bored by the minute.

"Hey, I've got a friend, Jeff Snow, who has a place out farther west in the Glades and down south a bit," I said early in the day. "It'll take a three- or four-hour paddle in the canoe, but it's out in the wide-open marsh field and very different than here."

She cut her eyes at me, a look of interest, maybe in a change of scenery, maybe the challenge of a good physical workout.

"I mean, it's October, a perfect time out there because the temperature, even in the full sun, is pretty tolerable. In the summer I won't even go out there."