“Don’t worry,” Kathryn says. “He can’t feel a thing.”
“Fish don’t hurt?”
“No. Not that. He’s just sleepy.”
Initially the trout drove her crazy. The movements seemed erratic. Had the telemeters malfunctioned? Did the new cell-phone tower throw them off? Kathryn had ice-pick headaches and spent a lot of time in her sleeping bag. Patterns then emerged. To say the least, this population is mobile. Maybe the highest rates ever recorded in the mountain chain. Besides the odd flutter of anxiety, she is confident in her numbers.
Kathryn whip-stitches three sutures to close the incision and eases the trout into a bucket of plain river water. As they wait for the clove oil to wear off, she explains their research to Shelly, how they track the movement of brook trout between the main stem and the tiny tributaries. How far do they go? Do they migrate because of rising water temperatures? Is there an identifiable trigger?
“If you come back tomorrow, I’ll show you how. We use a radio transmitter. It’s fun. It’s like on TV.”
“Thanks for showing me, Kathy.”
“Kathryn. It’s Kathryn.”
She smiles at the girl quickly, ferociously — a bad habit of hers.
Shelly blushes, then runs off in a gawky clatter of limbs. Dumbfounded, Kathryn watches her go. Grasshoppers fling themselves out of her path. One hits the river. A trout snaps it up.
Gary says, “Strike another blow for women in the sciences.”
Kathryn laughs, a good sport, though she’s disappointed. She wanted to plug a laptop into the generator and show off her program: those dreamy wandering lavender dots, x-axis and y-.
The trout has righted itself. After taking measurements on a digital scale, Kathryn walks it to the water and works it back and forth in the current. Number 30. Gills flare. In a realization she can almost feel, the trout kicks off in a little starburst of relief. The trout’s lie is no bigger than a bathtub. She lifts her tickled palm.
Gary wades out and unhitches his pack, dainty for a big man. He respects the equipment. They drive back to camp in her big, bouncing Ford. It parts the field like a frigate. The other member of their team, Michael, the one Kathryn is sleeping with, is still asleep in her tent.
That afternoon, the girl begins stealing. Michael notices first. He finds plastic tubs open, ones they are fastidious about closing. Nothing expensive — a bag of dried apples, a warm bottle of beer. The next day, a flathead screwdriver. At first they think it’s the girl’s father. They don’t know his name. Why not a shotgun, why not the GPS?
And Michael says, “Of course it’s the kid. She walks past a thousand-dollar laptop for a bag of cereal.”
“Shelly?”
Gary gawps at them. “You’ve got a double agent on your hands.”
They glance over at the only other camp, a good hundred yards off. Muddy blue jeans strung on a line. A resiny ax wedged in a hemlock. The pup tent is bedraggled, decades old. A sharp contrast to the researchers’. Kathryn’s truck is solid with gear. Enough to invade a small Arab nation, Michael says. This makes her feel bloated. Those bins packed solid with food, electronics, clothes. A glut of technology. Who needs all this shit?
Ever since the pair showed up three days ago, the researchers have sensed something off. First, a man near thirty and a little girl alone — you assume the worst, no matter how unfair that is. They don’t wear hiking boots, but tennis shoes. They don’t have a good way to cook their food, just a fire-ring. They are poor. They never came over to say hello — the researchers are desperate for new voices, new faces. Kathryn finally caught the girl watching them and coaxed her over. Her dad has a bruised look around his eyes. At night they hear him talking to himself, or to Shelly, except some nights he does not. He has an army-surplus pack, Korean War vintage.
It’s near four when the team makes dinner. They’re too disturbed to focus. Gary says, “I’m marching over there and asking them lend of my screwdriver. I need it.”
“Marching over there?” Michael says. “Leave it alone. They don’t have shit.”
“I’m pissed. I buy good tools. The best. Consumer Reports and everything.”
Kathryn says, “Just let it go. Don’t be the world’s youngest fussy old man.”
As soon as she says that, Gary softens, cools, as bland as candle wax. She hates that about him. They spent the first summer here alone, having a grand old time until he drunkenly propositioned her. He was only half joking. She laughed at him. She regrets that. He stalked off to his tent, and they never discussed it. Michael joined in the second year, after his own work fell apart like so much wet cardboard. (He’s now exploring the effects of woody debris on trout habitat, a topic Gary calls flimsy, if not to Michael’s face.) Michael was studying strip-mining effects on the next watershed over, until he gave a bitter, truthful interview to a newspaper. Consol Coal banned him from its property. Turns out he was sneaking through a hole in the fence, for which he still faces trespassing charges. They have chilling surveillance video of him taking water samples. The department chair bailed Michael out of the Upshur County jail. The chair couldn’t have been more proud. He asked — told? — Kathryn to make some room. She invited Michael on before realizing, far too late, that Gary hated him with the dull white fury of an acetylene torch. Both are younger than her, just master’s students. Michael is inspired, combative, a sloppy researcher — everything workmanlike Gary is not. Michael is handsome, everyone’s favorite. Gary, soft and baggy, is tolerated. Worse, the spite isn’t mutual.
Kathryn says, “I’ll buy you a new screwdriver.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I’ll let you chop onions,” she says with her sweetest smile.
“The woman said.”
“Fuck you.”
She says it with cheer. Since the president of Harvard made his comments, they have been paying ironic tribute to Kathryn’s role as “woman scientist.” Michael fixes on them the cockeyed, pedantic look of a deranged professor. He says, “Domesticity suggests peace. All sociology tells us so. It is the realm of the calmer emotions.”
Michael seems more charming than he actually is, when she grits down and listens to what he says. She wonders if this is a tic of evolution — that easy, flashing smile, meant to attract her, distract her, like aluminum foil to a crow. The easing of standards.
Cooking does calm them. Michael leaves to filter water. Gary handles knives. Kathryn primes the portable stove and cups a lit match against the wind, bearing it like an acolyte.
She didn’t plan on sleeping with Michael, not up here, not ever. A way to pass the time, she notes glumly. He lives with a girlfriend in Morgantown, a nice third-grade teacher with a flapper haircut, prettier than her. But who isn’t nice? Kathryn wonders. We’re all nice. Nice, nice, nice. He’s six or seven years younger than Kathryn — that’s what stings. It feels so cheap, so glitter-and-trash. She should feel worse about the girlfriend.
Across the field, the man dumps armfuls of branches into the fire-ring, then pours kerosene on them. Their dinner will consist of cans. Maybe they have nowhere else to go.
Shelly steps out of the tent. She’s been sleeping. She waves at Kathryn. Kathryn doesn’t know what to do, except wave back. The man does too.
“All hail the good thief,” Gary says as he whets the knife.
After dinner, Gary scours their pots with sand. When he gets back, he says, “I want to shoot some guns.”