“I share your indignation. The way some people carry on about nearly drowning is ridiculous. But I agree with your husband on this.”
Zach draped an arm around Lou’s shoulders, and glared. “You and your stupid water devil.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I nearly lost her,” Zach said. “And we would not have been out here but for you.”
Shakespeare winced. “I grant you that. But your logic is faulty. If I were to suggest we go hunting, and while we were up in the mountains a Blackfoot put an arrow into your leg, would that be my fault?”
“Don’t try to confuse me,” Zach said.
“I will not accept blame that is not wholly mine. If your spleen is agitated, I suggest you direct it at the fish.”
Nate glanced over his shoulder. “You keep calling it that. What makes you so sure?”
“I saw it, Horatio. As I am living and breathing again, I saw it. A fish such as mortal eyes have not beheld since the dawn of creation.”
Zach snorted.
“He is not the flower of courtesy,” Shakespeare quoted. “Scoff if you will, Zachary, but you saw the size of the thing even if you did not get a clear look at the thing itself.”
“A fish,” Nate repeated.
“You sound disappointed,” Shakespeare said.
“I was half hoping it was something else,” Nate said. “Something more.” The legends of the water creatures, so common among so many tribes, had led him to think they would encounter the new and unknown.
“What more do you want?” Shakespeare asked. “A fish that size qualifies as a marvel.”
Nate did not see how. Exceptionally large fish were often reported to inhabit lakes and rivers, to say nothing of the gigantic denizens of the seven seas. He mentioned as much.
“I grant you it is not as big as a whale,” Shakespeare said. “And I seem to recollect hearing that some sharks grow over twenty feet long, and that there is a critter called a whale shark that grows to pretty near sixty. So maybe our monster is puny compared to them, but it is still a monster.”
“It is a fish,” Nate said, stroking his paddle. “You said so yourself.”
“What difference does that make? It is a name, nothing more. That which we call a rose by any other word would—” Shakespeare stopped abruptly.
Waku had shouted and was jerking his arm. “Look! Look there! It come again!”
Not quite forty feet away was another swell. Their aquatic nemesis was pacing the canoes.
Lou gripped Zach’s arm and swallowed. “What is that thing up to now?”
“Don’t worry,” Zach said, squeezing her. “It won’t attack us again.” But he did not feel as certain as he tried to sound.
“That blasted critter is taunting us,” Shakespeare said. “The fiend is rubbing our noses in our defeat.”
“It’s a fish,” Nate said again.
“Fish, smish. Have you not been baited by bears? And what about those wolverines that stalked us? Or that time you waged war against a demon of a mountain lion?”
“They were not fish.”
Shakespeare let out an indignant harrumph. “Were I a finny dweller of the deep, I would take exception to your slander. To hear you talk, all fish are by nature dullards and do not share a whit of brain between them.”
“They are fish.”
“By God, say that one more time and I will scream!” Shakespeare declared. “Honestly, Horatio. I don’t know what has gotten into you.”
Nate twisted around and gave a pointed look at Louisa and then at McNair. “What was it you once said to me?” He paused. “Now I remember. A great deal of your wit lies in your sinews.”
“Zounds,” Shakespeare said. “Hoisted by my own petard. Does this mean you have changed your mind about smiting the brute?”
Nate resumed paddling and did not answer.
“Verily, this does not bode well.”
Zach said, “I know I have changed my mind. All this over a fish? I don’t care how big it is.”
“And you don’t care about what it did to your wife, either?” Shakespeare asked.
“Don’t get me started again.”
The swell continued to pace them until they drew near the west shore, close to Nate’s cabin. When they were an arrow’s flight out, with typical suddenness the swell shrank to nothing.
“Good riddance!” Lou exclaimed.
The canoes scraped bottom and they clambered out to drag them up onto land.
Shakespeare shook a fist at the lake, bellowing, “You have not seen the last of us, fish! We are in this to the death!” He smiled at the others. “Are you with me?”
No one answered.
Devious to The Bone
Shakespeare McNair took to lying in bed as eagerly as he would to lying on broken glass. He could not wait to get up and get on with his campaign against the lurker in the depths, but his wife insisted he rest while she went to make tea. He wanted coffee, but she said tea would be better for him.
“This is a fine state of affairs,” Shakespeare groused to her departing back, “when a man my age is treated like a one-year-old.”
From the doorway Blue Water Woman replied, “I would put—what do white women call them? Ah, yes. I would put diapers on you if we had any.”
“I wouldst thou did itch from head to foot,” Shakespeare quoted. “And I would not lift a finger to help you scratch.” But his barb was wasted; he was alone. With a sigh of annoyance he clasped his hands behind his head and propped his head in his hands and his hands on the pillow.
Shakespeare felt terrible about the outcome of the day’s effort: Louisa nearly drowned, him only slightly less waterlogged, and two canoes destroyed. “Not exactly a success,” he said to the ceiling. He had planned so carefully, too. The extra canoes, the harpoons—they should have been enough, but they weren’t. They should have done the job, but they didn’t.
The fault did not lie with them. They had done all that was humanly possible. Their mistake, if it could be called that, was in going out to engage an enemy they knew nothing about. Ignorance had been the cause of their downfall. ‘Know thy enemy’ was coined for a reason.
What did they know? Shakespeare asked himself. What had they learned so far? He mentally ticked off the short list: they knew the creature was a fish, they knew harpoons were useless against it, and they knew it would fight, and fight fiercely, in defense of its domain.
“Not much, is it?” Shakespeare continued his conversation with the rafters. Certainly, none of their paltry knowledge would help him destroy the thing. Frowning, he closed his eyes and tried to relax, but he was asking the impossible of his racing mind.
“There has to be something,” Shakespeare said. Again he went over his list: it was a fish, it had the temperament of a mad bull, it was more intelligent—in his opinion—than any fish he ever heard of, it liked to eat ducks, it stayed in the—
Shakespeare sat up. “It likes to eat ducks,” he said out loud. Or was it, he mused, that the thing was partial to meat covered in feathers? He chuckled, an idea taking form. He was still contemplating when Blue Water Woman returned, bearing a tray with the cup of the tea she had promised, along with a steaming bowl of soup.
“What is this, wench? The condemned man is treated to a last meal?”
“What are you babbling about?
“Were I a building, I would be on the verge of ruin,” Shakespeare said, moving his arms so she could set the tray in his lap.
“Does this have anything to do with your silly notion that you are being treated like a child?”
Shakespeare tugged at his white mane. “You don’t see infants with a mop of snow.”