inks he sees, down
below him the bare top-limbs upstretching like drowned men's fingers,
all coated with the mud of years and bandaged with pennons of the green
lake slime. In still other places the lake is shallow for long
stretches, no deeper than breast deep to a man, but dangerous because of
the weed growths and the sunken drifts which entangle a swimmer's limbs.
Its banks are mainly mud, its waters are muddied too, being a rich
coffee color in the spring and a copperish yellow in the summer, and the
trees along its shore are mud colored clear up to their lower limbs
after the spring floods, when the dried sediment covers their trunks
with a thick, scrofulous-looking coat.

There are stretches of unbroken woodland around it and slashes where the
cypress knees rise countlessly like headstones and footstones for the
dead snags that rot in the soft ooze. There are deadenings with the
lowland corn growing high and rank below and the bleached,
fire-blackened girdled trees rising above, barren of leaf and limb.
There are long, dismal flats where in the spring the clotted frog-spawn
clings like patches of white mucus among the weed stalks and at night
the turtles crawl out to lay clutches of perfectly round, white eggs
with tough, rubbery shells in the sand. There are bayous leading off to
nowhere and sloughs that wind aimlessly, like great, blind worms, to
finally join the big river that rolls its semi-liquid torrents a few
miles to the westward.

So Reelfoot lies there, flat in the bottoms, freezing lightly in the
winter, steaming torridly in the summer, swollen in the spring when the
woods have turned a vivid green and the buffalo gnats by the million and
the billion fill the flooded hollows with their pestilential buzzing,
and in the fall ringed about gloriously with all the colors which the
first frost brings--gold of hickory, yellow-russet of sycamore, red of
dogwood and ash and purple-black of sweet-gum.

But the Reelfoot country has its uses. It is the best game and fish
country, natural or artificial, that is left in the South today. In
their appointed seasons the duck and the geese flock in, and even
semi-tropical birds, like the brown pelican and the Florida snake-bird,
have been known to come there to nest. Pigs, gone back to wildness,
range the ridges, each razor-backed drove captained by a gaunt, savage,
slab-sided old boar. By night the bull frogs, inconceivably big and
tremendously vocal, bellow under th