In the morning, crews would return with maps that light up like heat vision, hunting burrows you can’t see when the water comes back. They’d mark the python dens, revisit the predator pits, seed the scars with time and patience. The swamp would take what help it could get and do the rest when we weren’t watching.
And the next time the water dropped, it would tell another truth. Different faces, same story: what lives under the surface is what decides everything.