Swamp Rats by Jill Penrod

Author:Jill Penrod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sweet romance, clean romance, coming of age
Publisher: Jill Penrod
Published: 2017-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

“PRINCESS, YOU WON’T believe it,” Cree said a while later, jumping out of the boat and running up the yard toward me. It was early evening, and the boys and I sat outside with books. “There’s electricity in the swamp.”

I shook my head. “What?”

“To the north. Not too close, but with that last storm it’s not hard to get there. Anyway, a man to the north moved into the swamp to harvest gator. Apparently people in the cities have decided gator is the new best thing, and he’ll pay for gator tails. If I can get the gator to him within a few hours of killing it, he’ll trade things for it.”

I looked at him, not sure this was a good thing or not. “How long does it take to get there?”

“If I killed a gator in the morning, I could take it out and get home by dark.”

“How often would you need to go?” I asked.

“Not often. Gators are everywhere, Princess.”

“And gators are dangerous,” I said. I shouldn’t have said it, because he was instantly angry.

“There is nothing I could say that would make you happy about me leaving to trade,” he spat. “Princess, we’ve had this conversation a thousand times, and we’re never going to fight it out. What if Zac hadn’t had that medicine in his house? Not long ago I traded for some more. If you ever find that bush again that hurt you, you’ll be glad I traded for it and didn’t let you die the next time. Even if I’d been here, I didn’t save you. The medicine did. We need things like that.”

He was right. He was completely right, and I had to get over my fear and let him be Cree. To ask him not to be Cree was unfair. And, he’d been good about keeping his promises. This was a way he could fairly easily, and it wasn’t right for me to try to stop him. At the same time, I thought about his confession that his favorite pastime wasn’t trade but helping people live in the swamp. He wanted to feel important, and this wasn’t the kind of job that would do that for him.

I didn’t try to stop him. He was still upset with me for asking him not to spend so many days trading, and this idea gave him great hope, as he could stay close to home, collect gator tails, and then spend shorter times out trading. And, if I’d not seen a gator attack up close, and if I’d not buried the bleeding body of a dog and watched Papa shoot twice to kill a gator, I might have shared his hope. Instead, I watched him sling both a rope and the gun over his shoulder, and I said nothing as he took the raft up the river, past my house, and around the northern bend.

I heard shots soon after he left, and I jumped, for he was close. I was with the boys in

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