This world's remaining strange mysteries exist among the nooks and crannies of civilization.

In nations like the United States, most enquiring eyes remain focused along the coasts or dwell upon geological wonders such as the vast mountain ranges, canyons and the great rivers of the West.

But those places have been plundered of their secrets as the world becomes evermore entrenched in the 21st century and humanity's faith that increasingly ever-present technology has exposed and defanged all those creatures that used to bump in the night; making them shrivel in the glare of halogen spotlights. Or, at least, in the glare and flash of a cell-phone camera.

But tucked away in the otherwise boring parts of North America, such as the marshy and mucky and generally flat and uninteresting terrain of northeastern Indiana and northwestern Ohio, some of Nature's magic still exists.

Magic, that is, in that local folks with their large faith in God and little understanding of science, geology and biology are quick to assume as supernatural what trained scientists could explain with careful observation and scientific testing - or so they think.

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The beginning of this story was inspired by my childhood in Northeast Indiana.

Back in the late 1700s, one of the largest contiguous swamps existed between Toledo, Ohio and Fort Wayne Indiana, bisected by the Maumee River.

It was called the Great Black swamp because it was so thick with huge trees - one of the largest temperate rain forests and wetlands of its time so thick that in broad daylight, very little sun reached the swampy ground.

Full of quicksand traps and thick clouds of insects, the "Black Swamp" name also befitted its reputation as a deadly killer to hapless travelers. Also, illnesses spread by insects such as malaria and various fevers killed off Native Americans and European settlers by the thousands.

The Black Swamp also was home to many now-extinct animals, such as the Indiana Panther.

Over that past two centuries, the swamp was systematically drained and turned into rich farmland.

But scattered about the land in small pockets of a few acres here and there, some remnants of the Great Swamp still exist in the form of a haunting hollow - and in hundreds of small muck-bottomed "bottomless lakes" that dot the landscape.

It is in these places that the Great Swamp holds on - resisting attempts at draining and sometimes, reaching out and lashing back at attempts to tame it by swallowing a hapless lone deer hunter in a long-forgotten quicksand sinkhole.

That is the setting of this story - Nature - with a capital N - refusing to be tamed and the remains of the Great Swamp's fight to survive and regain its footprint from the parasite that is mankind.

updated Nov 14, 2008 by Davodd