The Swamp Guide – Part 1: Bayou

"Hush," said Tasha. "He doesn't like to be looked at."

Renée held her breath, camera raised, in the bow of the flat-bottomed boat. The bayou lay still and green around them, thick with cypress and Spanish moss, mirrored in black water. Mist drifted between the trunks. A heron, tall and white, stood motionless in the shallows, beautiful as a drawing.

She was thirty-four, a wildlife photographer from Vancouver, in a long-sleeved shirt and a wide hat, with a camera bag and three days of mosquito bites. Tasha, thirty, poled the boat from the stern, barefoot, tanned, in cut-off jeans and a faded T-shirt, with long braids tied back and a laugh as deep as the swamp.

"That's the one," whispered Renée.

"Reddish egret. They dance."

"Will he?"

"If we're quiet."

They were quiet for forty minutes. The boat drifted. A frog croaked. The mist lifted slowly. And then the egret spread its wings, ragged and chestnut, and began to dance: hopping, spinning, flinging its head, chasing minnows in a crazy shimmering ballet. Renée took two hundred photographs without breathing.

"Oh my," she said, finally.

"I told you."

"I've been trying to photograph this for six years."

"You needed a local."

"I needed you."

Tasha grinned, ducking her head. For a week they were in the boat from dawn to dusk. Renée learned the names of the plants, the birds, the dark water. Tasha learned that Renée hummed when she was happy and cursed when the light was wrong. At dusk, they tied up at a little pier and ate crawfish at a plank table with the sun going orange behind the cypress.

"Can I ask you something?" said Renée.

"Yes."

"What do you love most about this?"

"That it never stays the same," said Tasha. "Every morning I think I know it. Every morning it surprises me."

"Green?" said Renée, a cypress, a leaf.

"Green," said Tasha, laughing. "Very green. We go again at five."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Golden Hour on the Water.