Westover got a shock when he stumbled onto the monster, for all that he knew one had been through here. He had been following the high ground toward the hills, alternately splashing through waist-deep water and climbing onto comparatively dry knolls. To right and left of him was the sullen noise of the river in flood, and behind him, too, the rising water he had barely escaped. The night was overcast, the moon a faint disk of glow that left river and hills and even the mud underfoot invisible. H