Soon they were well out on the lake. The sun was half up, casting the sky in hues of yellow and pink. The waterfowl were astir. Ducks quacked and flapped, swans arched their long necks and raised their large wings, gulls squawked in raucous irritation. A pair of storks winged in low and alighted with admirable grace given their ungainly appearance. Fish were beginning to jump.
Nate straightened and scanned the lake from end to end. If Shakespeare was right, the thing would soon rise out of the depths to feed. They must be ready, or they would miss the chance. He checked on the others. Winona and Blue Water Woman were to his right, Shakespeare to his left, the others trailing.
Once the creature was sighted, Winona and Blue Water Woman would swing to the north of it, Shakespeare to the east, Zach and Lou and the Nansusequa to the west, and Nate to the south.
“We will surround the varmint,” Shakespeare had proposed. “The only way it can escape us will be straight down.”
Now, Nate stopped paddling and placed the paddle crosswise across the gunwales. The smell of the water, the lap of the wavelets against the canoe, and the shrieks of the gulls brought to vivid mind his last encounter. He hoped to God they fared better this time.
Nate did not like having the women along. Not because he felt he was any better at handling a canoe, or any tougher, or even because he was a man and they were women. He did not want them there because he cared dearly for them, and what they were doing was terribly dangerous. He gazed across at Winona and Blue Water Woman. Winona noticed he was looking at them, and smiled and called out.
“Is everything all right?”
With a lump in his throat, Nate smiled and nodded.
“Be careful, husband.”
“You too, wife.”
The part of the lake in their vicinity was still and serene. A few geese were to the southeast.
Closer were nine mergansers, the males black and white, the females a dusky gray. The flock swam past Winona’s canoe without breaking formation, their heads held high, their tails twitching.
Nate glanced down at the special weapons in the bottom of his canoe. Shakespeare had insisted that one weapon was not enough, so each canoe had a pair. He fingered one, praying his cast would be true.
The mergansers started making a racket.
Tensing, Nate looked up. The surface showed no sign of a disturbance below.
Squawking louder, the mergansers broke rank.
“What’s going on?” Louisa wondered.
Suddenly the mergansers scattered. Several frantically flapped their wings to get airborne.
That was when the monster struck.
Disaster
They all saw it.
One of the mergansers was starting to rise into the air, its webbed feet brushing the surface, when the lake bulged upward. The merganser uttered a sharp karr-karr-karr, its wings flapping furiously. In the blink of an eye it was gone, not so much as a feather to mark its demise.
His every nerve tingling, Nate King, who was nearest, paddled swiftly toward the spot.
Other mergansers gained altitude. Those that had not taken to the air were streaking through the water with fear-induced speed, their heads thrust forward, raising their cries to the sky.
A female was swimming in panicked flight directly toward the canoe Winona and Blue Water Woman were in. The terrified duck did not seem to see them. Both women were frozen by the tableau, their paddles in their hands.
Nate probed the water for the creature, but the glare of the rising sun hid whatever lay below.
Suddenly the female merganser, now only thirty feet from Winona and Blue Water Woman, let out with a karr-karr-karr of her own. The next moment she was wrenched under and was gone.
“Look out!” Shakespeare shouted.
A swell was rising in the spot where the duck had disappeared. As before, all that could be seen was the vaguest outline of a huge shape. With alarming rapidity, the creature bore down on Winona and Blue Water Woman’s canoe.
“Ma!” Zach hollered, and worked his paddle to go to her aid. Louisa immediately did the same.
Nate was using his own with all the might in his muscles. He saw Winona reach down for one of their special weapons, but before she could lift it and just when it appeared certain the creature was going to ram them, the swell shrank and the creature passed under them. The swell reappeared on the other side and began to circle the canoes.
Relief coursed through Nate. If anything had happened to his wife—-he could not finish the thought. She was everything to him. Were she to die, he would never recover, never be the same. Some losses were too horrible to be borne.
Zach stopped paddling now that his mother was safe, and Lou took her cue from him.
“That was close,” she said.
“Too close,” Zach agreed. He glanced at his father and then toward Shakespeare, who yelled something Zach did not quite catch, and jabbed an arm as if pointing at something.
“Zachary?” Lou said uneasily.
“What is it?” Zach responded, looking in the direction that Shakespeare was pointing.
“Dear God!” Lou said.
Zach rarely felt fear. Even in the frenzied heat of battle, he was always able to keep his wits about him and not succumb to fright. But he felt it now, a spike of raw, pure, potent fear that gripped his chest in a fist of ice.
The thing was coming toward them.
Louisa asked anxiously, “What do we do? Hope it goes under us, or get out of its way?”
Zach did not know. They could not outrun it. It moved three times as fast as they could ever hope to propel the canoe. And if they started to turn, it might ram them broadside. For a few seconds he was paralyzed with indecision, and then his instincts took over. He had one unfailing response to being attacked: he killed the attacker. Whether human or animal, it made no difference. If someone or something attacked him or a loved one, that someone or something died. It was as simple as that.
Nate and Winona added their shouts of warning to Shakespeare’s, Nate’s the loudest.
“Use a harpoon!”
Zach glanced down. It had been McNair’s idea to make them. As Shakespeare had put it when he brought it up at the meeting, “We shot the thing and it had no effect. It is so big we can’t be sure where its vitals are. So I propose we build us a bunch of harpoons.”
“Harpoons?” Dega had repeated quizzically.
“Whites use them to kill critters called whales,” Shakespeare had explained. “Whales look like fish but they are as big as this cabin, or bigger.”
“How whites kill?” Waku had asked.
“We go after them in boats and throw harpoons into them with ropes tied to the end, so if they try to get away they pull the boats after them.”
“But what be harpoon?” Waku was still confused.
“Think of it as a lance, only bigger and thicker. The tips are made of metal and stick in the whale and won’t come out.”
Now, with the swell sweeping toward him and his wife, Zach reached down and grabbed a harpoon. Over seven feet long and made of pine, it was as thick as his forearm. He had to use both hands to throw it. One end had been sharpened and then charred in a fire so it was rock-hard, the other had a hole in it.
Remembering Shakespeare’s instruction, Zach bent and snatched up the rope that was coiled in the bow. Quickly, he went to thread the rope through the hole. But he was not given the time.
“Zachary!” Lou cried.
The thing was almost on top of them.
The hiss of water was loud in Zach’s ears as he rose on his knees and raised the harpoon aloft. He could not see the creature, but he had a fair notion of where it was, and without hesitation he let his harpoon fly. The tip sliced into the swell about where the thing’s head would be, or so Zach hoped.