Each day for fourteen days we searched. Lyon trawled the riverbed with his nets; Monte snuck into the emptied knots of trees; Candace spun beaconing hymns through the dusk. We made god's eyes and evil eyes and dream catchers . . . we planted four-leaf clovers and bamboo. However it was, our dear Egret did not come back. I missed him in pulses, my heart at the mercy of sorrow's ebb and wax. I missed his corybantic gestures, his eyes always wide and bright. Maybe most I missed his slumberous nuzzling at the witching hour. But we moved on with more living, as all good people do.

Then this evening, from outside the cabin: hard lines of immediate rain and a muscular rocking. The lot of us punched to-and-fro into curved walls, thoroughly interrupted in our electro-gypsy-dubjam session . . . instruments soaring round the room, making contact, crunching into sad, peppery bits. Next, a sickening sound — the hull sucking water as if Sahara-parched. Screams white, mouths white, eyeballs filling as white as the arrows of lightning loving the river on which we floated and in non-monsoon times maintained our poor but merry existence. I scuttled across vertical boards formerly horizontal. I scrabbled with stripped mind, thinking only: get the children. At the stern, Wisteria's red curls were everyplace like electrified. Pie had been tossed atop the toilet and was howling flame-blue terror. The children, the children, a breakneck refrain. Monte and Candace snatched their Wisteria. Lyon and I seized our Pie. Out the door to the pier, dashing to the bank.

Suddenly wails (out-pitching the storm) forced our heads around. A blackened creature emerged from the hull hole. It was Egret. An Egret with algae-eaten face and skin cellophaned to bone. An Egret three-quarters dead. But one-quarter alive, and returned to us by the squall! We scooped up his wretched frame all-angles and ran to shelter, grinning through the torrents to have back our tempest-blessed baby.