“The pricks,” says Nedermeyer. “We just bent over and let them do it. Begged them to.”
“The river can come back,” Gary promises.
Kathryn disagrees. Downstream of here, the resort sloughs too much sediment into the water. It smothers fish eggs in the nest, even in minimal amounts. The only thing that could fix this place is another orogeny, new mountains, glaciation — a cataclysm. But she says nothing.
Nedermeyer croons, “Just give it time, give it time. And this one here wants to leave!”
He winks at Kathryn. Her eyes go glassy with embarrassment.
Michael flips an omelet expertly. When it’s slightly brown, he takes a fork and tips it turtle onto Shelly’s plate. She reaches for the catsup and sets out, as Michael says, to ruin a perfectly good omelet. She puts back the catsup. He says, “I was just teasing. Take it.”
Nedermeyer asks, “How much river you working?”
“Spruce down to First Fork.”
“Super-interesting. I run radar in the navy. Nuclear subs.”
“Did you?”
They readjust their feelings toward him. He laughs that musical laugh of his.
“I’d love to see what you do. Shelly says you hurt them, but you’re awful nice about it.”
They decide to tag a fish for the hell of it tomorrow and show off their gear. After dinner, Nedermeyer says, “This is a whole lot of fun. I wish we could pay you back. Me and Shelly appreciate this.”
Gary says, “You’ll figure something out.”
After inserting the telemeter, Michael slips a dazed nine-inch brook trout into the water. A slash of bronze takes the poor thing and disappears.
“Jesus! Looked like a fucking water spaniel. About took your hand off, didn’t he?”
“Get me the pack,” Michael says.
A German brown trout so big the electric shock doesn’t even stun it, just sends it jumping and shirking and headshaking, dousing them all. Kathryn leaps on it with both hands. When she lifts the thrashing hook-jawed brown, it disgorges the bedraggled brook trout they just tagged. Michael saves the telemeter, slitting open the sutures. With a digital camera, they take hero shots gripping the fish — a grand female with scarred, scored flanks — and measure her. Over eight pounds, with a girth of fifteen inches. Statistically speaking, a larger fish than this river can support. Like finding a battleship in a parking garage. After wrecking the native trout population, the timber outfits introduced the fast-growing hatchery browns, and they’ve been here since, in token numbers. Cannibals. They promise to mail Shelly a copy of her picture.
“That’s the fish of a lifetime,” Nedermeyer says. “A guy’d kill for that. You see a lot like this?”
Gary says, “No. Not at all. We’ve caught some nudging twenty-four inches under the trestles, but nothing like this. Can you imagine her in the fall? She’d carry three pounds of eggs.”
Nedermeyer drinks from a battered water bottle, one taken from the researchers’ camp. He doesn’t bother hiding it. Maybe Shelly told him it was a gift. He hands it to Michael, who takes a drink and says, “Let’s track this one, too. For the hell of it.”
“We don’t do invasive species,” Kathryn says.
Gary cries, “Listen to the hissing of the sacred geese! Come on. It’s a salmonid. I’m just curious. Please. Don’t kill my joy. I’m an invasive species myself, of Eurocentric origin. Let us deduce the secrets of the dirty German fish.”
“Absolutely not. It’ll throw off my numbers.”
Michael lifts the trout, not quite as gingerly as he would a delicate native, to show off its leopard-spotted sides — cracked peppercorns, sunbursts of red, coronas of blue. The underbelly like rich, burnt butter. Brown: such a miserly name. The Linnaean, Salmo trutta, is so much to be preferred. And the melodic freshwater morpha: fario, lacustris.
Nedermeyer asks, “You mind if I fish around here?”
The gleaming eyes of an excited fisherman. Here we go, Kathryn tells herself. He’s seen the unused fly rods Gary and Michael brought to the mountain. Like all men in coldwater fisheries, they grew up loving to fish. After a year in the program, they’re sick of it. In three summers, Gary has fished all of twice. The electroshock wand makes fishing silly. It drains the river of mystery, of secrets, when you know what lives there. But even Gary and Michael are giddy now.
Kathryn says coolly to Nedermeyer, “I didn’t know you came here to fish.”
“I didn’t know this river had big-ass trout in it. Damn.”
Michael and Kathryn exchange looks. “Well,” she says, “we can’t stop you. I mean, we’re using these fish to do research. I wouldn’t want you frying up a mess of our test subjects.”
“I’ll throw big streamers for big fish. Not your itty-bitty ones. Can I borrow your rod?”
The odds of catching the big female are slim, especially in the clear, skinny water of July. Kathryn knows they’ll never see the trout again. Let him have his pointless fun.
And why did she go into the field? A twinge of pleasure, of knowledge. Her dad would pull over to the side of a bridge, and they would watch from above, before he slipped down the bank to catch them. She was charmed by the motions of trout. How they take their forms from the pressures of another world, the cold forge of water. Their drift, their mystery, the way they turn and let the current take them, take them, with passive grace. They turn again, tumbling like leaves, then straighten with mouths pointing upstream, to better sip a mayfly, to root up nymphs, to watch for the flash of the heron’s bill. The current always trues them, like compass needles. When she watches them, she feels wise.
Michael slips the trout back into the water. Gills rustle, blood-rich. The fins toggle.
“Fuck it,” Kathryn says. “Why not? Oh. Sorry, Shelly.”
“For what?”
Two days later, when Nedermeyer manages to catch that massive trout, they have a late Fourth of July party in celebration. It’s enough to feed the five of them, if not fill them. Kathryn sulks a little — not that she’s anti-fishing, she just didn’t want to see it killed — till Gary reminds her it’s an invasive species, a trashy European fish that pops her precious native brook trout like potato chips. A massacre artist! The Ted Bundy of fish! In the scheme of things, a minor sin. She decides to get kind of drunk and let live. They couldn’t believe it when Nedermeyer carried the trout into camp. It was long as a lady’s stocking. Shelly danced about it, clapping hands.
“What can I say? I got good luck.”
After scaling it, Nedermeyer fills the body cavity with sweet onions and a strip of bacon. He wraps the trout in tinfoil and cooks it over the fire on a blackened grillwork. He disdains their portable stove. With raw fire, he bakes potatoes and cinnamon apples and roasts field corn, showing Shelly how to blacken each ear just so. For all his roughness, he’s a good, doting father. Kathryn fleetingly pictures having a child with him — a thought that dances through her brain like a feather on the wind. The trout’s flesh is pink and flaky like a salmon’s and falls apart. It has been eating crawdads, and the beta-carotene gives the flesh highlights of reddish richness. With the tines of a fork, Nedermeyer lifts out a delicious cheek and pops it into Shelly’s mouth.
It’s been a decade, at least, since any of the researchers have eaten trout.
Afterward, they fire off leftover Roman candles, taking care to stomp out loose fires that flare in the grass. Balls of light skitter and douse themselves in the river. Gary pulls out his gas-station harmonica and plays the four songs he knows. The wind begins to blow.