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from hummock to hummock of grass in the flooded meadows near the road. But soon the water was deep enough that we went in up to our knees.
    Bob began cursing up a storm, and I begged him to quiet down. We needed to be at least a little stealthy on our approach. His low-top hiking boots flooded much more quickly than did my water-resistant army boots. At least it was cold enough that we didn’t need to worry about snakes. Not much, anyway. In addition to pigs, Back Bay is notable for representing the northernmost point of the range of the cottonmouth (also known as the water moccasin). We just hoped it would be too cold for any to be active.
    Things turned ugly once we got into the bush. A wicked maze of thorns and low-branched bushes stood in our way, intermingled with fallen trees from past storms. I pulled out a pair of garden pruners from my pack and began clipping my way through the scrub. It was rough, but I knew it was unlikely that any thorns would kill me. In fact, I must confess to taking a certain bizarre pleasure in wading through the worst sorts of swamps and briars when circumstances call for it. There’s a kind of freedom in being soaked to the bone, filthy, and scratched all to hell. Maybe it’s because, barring a calamity, things aren’t likely to get any worse.
    Bob, on the other hand, pointed out that he was a good six inches taller than I am and roughly two hundred years older. It was a lot more difficult for him to get through the route I was taking. Within ten minutes of pushing through the scrub, he refused to go any farther, and we turned around to find another way to our destination.
    In chronological years, Bob is only about twenty-five years older. He studied field biology in college before switching to major in wildlife illustration. He did the illustrations for my last book. It’s handy being able to cart around your illustrator with you on the road; all you have to do is promise him all kinds of fishing and wild pigs and some adventures.
    After wading across what can best be described as a shallow pond and walking a mile or so through marsh grasses, we found what may have once been an access road to the dunes, but which had been flooded by the recent rain. Because we were already soaked, we slogged down the long, narrow marsh into the general area of the tertiary dunes.
    The dunes were crisscrossed with pig tracks and signs of their rooting. This is one of the problems with wild swine in a habitat like this; they dig through the dunes to eat sand crabs and the roots of some of the plants that hold the dunes together. The fear is that this action, over time, will lead to the destruction of those dunes and perhaps to the disappearance of the entire landmass into the sea.
    It was clear that there had been pigs out here all night. Set yourself up in the dark on one of those ridges with a rifle and a spotlight, and you’d have no trouble knocking the population down. But that isn’t allowed, despite the absence of any houses to worry about hitting. I wondered why.
    It was a beautiful place. There aren’t many spots here on the East Coast where you can walk among the dunes by the ocean without seeing a trace of humans. Instead there were sea oats and raccoon tracks and the thick smell of salt and scrub pines and a touch of honest seaside decay on the wind.
    After an hour and a half of ambush and a few attempts to drive any hidden pigs out of the brush and into Bob’s line of fire, we packed it in. Hunting pigs in a place like this, in the middle of the day, was turning out to be a fool’s errand. As their tracks showed us, once the sun was well up in the sky, the pigs moved down into the same tangled mess of thorns and scrub that had turned us back initially. Visibility in that environment is limited to five or six feet, and it would be impossible to kill the pigs there without baiting them into an ambush.
    We were required to check out of the wildlife preserve at the same utility building