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filled my nostrils and I found it hard to breathe.
    Only then did I realize my predicament. I was bound up like a mummy in the bottom of a dugout canoe, and the pricks of light were tiny holes in some kind of bag that covered my head.
    My first reaction was to cry out, but the moment I tried to open my mouth I learned that I was gagged as well.
    The canoe rocked under the thrust of heavy paddle strokes, pushing the dugout forward in unbroken cadence. I might have struggled, but I had the sense to know that any attempt to break free would be pointless. Clearly the men who’d taken me were not given to my concerns. If they’d asked me to climb into their canoe I would have been in no position to refuse. They could have thrown me a rope and dragged me to shore and bound me up there.
    Instead they’d smashed my head and hauled me aboard like a large fish. For all I knew, they thought I was dead. Showing my discomfort now might only earn me another blow to the head.
    So I lay still and focused all my will on suppressing the waves of terror washing over me.
    The air was hot—no August in Atlanta could possibly compare to that heat. A steady chorus of insects surrounded us, punctuated by the calls of birds as we passed their perches. Trees. I could hear no crash of waves on any nearby shore.
    We weren’t out to sea. We were on a river driving into the jungle. To what end, I couldn’t begin to comprehend. Were we in Australia? I doubted it. These natives were vastly different from any photographs I’d seen of aboriginals.
    The only possibility I could think of was New Guinea, north of Australia, the fanciful paradise I had dreamed of.
    The eastern half of the island was hospitable, yes, but the southern coast of western New Guinea, known as Irian Jaya, was vastly unexplored and reported to be one of the most forbidding regions on the planet, inhabited by a mysterious and harsh people.
    My dilemma felt surreal to me. That I, an American citizen from Georgia, could possibly be bound and gagged in a canoe like cargo, refused to rightly align with my reality.
    That I had lost my son aligned even less.
    An image of Stephen’s tiny form drifted through my mind. He was lost to the sea, consumed by the deep, gone from this world. Had he struggled? I prayed he hadn’t awakened before drowning.
    The men whose cargo I’d become could burn my body, cut me into pieces, feed me to their dogs—it hardly seemed to matter. In fact, I think I might have preferred it. My life without my son was no life at all.
    Still the paddles gurgled through the water. Still the canoe surged forward.
    Grief and exhaustion finally coaxed me to sleep and only then did I find any peace.
    I dreamed that I was back in Georgia, a young girl playing tag around the large cottonwood in our backyard, chasing my sisters, who squealed with the certain knowledge that I would catch one of them, because I had always been the fastest runner. A spring breeze sweet with the scent of peach blossoms rustled through the tree. The grass was cool under my bare feet. We were joined by Betsy, the eleven-year-old colored daughter of our maid, who could outrun even me. She became it and then I joined my delighted cries with my sisters’.
    I was in church Sunday morning, wearing my favorite yellow dress, holding the microphone with a white-gloved hand, singing a solo of “Amazing Grace,” my mother’s favorite hymn. The enraptured congregation of two hundred faithful watched me, awed by my pure, angelic voice.
    “She’s even better than her mother,” they whispered. “And she’s got the looks. She’s going to be a star one day, you just watch.”
    We were on the south porch, Stephen and I, he cooing while birds chirped in the cottonwoods, I sipping a cup of hot tea with my mother, who had died before Stephen’s birth. Dreams could not hold the dead in their graves. Father sat across from us, smiling around his pipe.
    I was lying in the bottom of a dugout canoe driving deep