The Best Laid Brainstorms
The canoes were where they had left them.
Shakespeare tied the mare to Nate’s corral and carried everything he was taking to the Nansusequa dugout. The paddles and harpoons and net still lay on the bottom. He placed his rifle beside them. The rope, grappling iron, and dead chicken went in the bow. The parfleche with the food, in the stern. The lantern was last.
Shakespeare pushed the canoe out into the water and climbed in. He picked up one of the paddles and peered into the veil of darkness. The risk he was about to take gave him pause. But only for a few seconds. Squaring his shoulders, he commenced paddling.
At night the lake was deathly still. The ducks, the geese, the teal, all were silent. Were it not for the occasional splash of a fish, a person would never guess that the lake teemed with life during the day.
A brisk gust of wind sent goose bumps parading up and down his spine. He blamed it on the chill and suppressed a shudder.
The glow cast by his lantern illuminated a ten-foot circle. Beyond the light, all was liquid ink. He considered turning back and waiting until daylight. But if he did that, the others were bound to try and stop him. With any luck, he could do what he had to do and be back in his cabin by dawn.
It all depended on the fish. The thing had shown a fondness for waterfowl, so maybe fowl of another kind would appeal to its piscine taste buds.
The shore gradually receded. Shakespeare was alone with the canoe and the water and the dweller in the depths. He hoped that if the fish was going to attack, it would at least hold off until he was ready.
His plan was to paddle out to where he had seen the two birds taken. But in the dark, in open water, there were no landmarks, no means to tell where he was, other than the stars. He could approximate, but that was all.
The slight
Shakespeare hoped he was not wasting his time. He would never hear the end of the teasing if he spent all night on the lake and had nothing to show for it. He continued paddling until, as best as he could tell, he was about where the fish had taken the duck and the teal. Resting the paddle across the gunwales, he strained his senses for some sign of his quarry.
All was peaceful.
Working quickly, Shakespeare tied one end of the rope to the grappling iron. The rest of the rope he coiled in front of him.
The next step proved harder than he thought it would. The grappling iron had four hooks, or flukes. They were sharp enough that he figured it would be easy to impale the chicken. But when he tried, he could not get the rounded ends to penetrate deep enough to hold fast.
“I do not need this nuisance,” Shakespeare said. Drawing his knife, he made two deep cuts in the chicken, aligned the cuts with two of the hooks, and jammed the chicken onto the grappling iron. A few tugs satisfied him that the chicken would not slip off.
Lowering his improvised hook and bait over the side, Shakespeare fed out the rope until only a few feet remained. He needed to anchor it, but had nothing to tie it to. He briefly considered tying it to his leg, but the mental image of being yanked over the side persuaded him not to. The only other thing he could think of to tie it to was the spare paddle, which he wedged under him.
Years ago Shakespeare had heard that fish could sense prey from a long way off. The wriggle of a worm, the flutter of an insect’s wings, were enough to bring a hungry fish streaking in for the kill. He began wriggling the rope in the hope it would have the same effect on
Another gust of wind provoked a shiver. Shakespeare stared to the west. The gusts were stronger than usual. He wondered if a front was moving in. The last thing he needed was to be caught on the lake in a thunderstorm. Sometimes the waves rose two and three feet high. He debated going back, but decided if a storm did break, he would have enough advance warning to reach shore.
Shakespeare continued to wriggle the rope. The quiet of the night and the near total dark gnawed on his nerves. It occurred to him that the fish could be lurking outside the ring of light and he would not know it. He reached for the lantern to extinguish it, then changed his mind. Without the light he could not see the rope, and he must be ready when the fish took the bait.
Shakespeare’s uneasy feeling grew. He and the canoe were an island of light in an ocean of dark. The glow could be seen for miles. Possibly even from the bottom of the lake.
None of them knew how deep the lake was. Once, shortly after they built their cabins, Shakespeare and Nate had lashed together the logs they had left over and ventured out on the lake on the raft. Nate had the notion to find out how deep the lake was by tying a rock to a hundred-foot rope and lowering the rope until it struck bottom.
It didn’t.
They added fifty feet, then fifty more, and when that was still not enough, Nate went to Bent’s Fort for the express purpose of buying a hundred more. Surely, they had reasoned, three hundred feet would suffice.
It didn’t.
The lake was more than three hundred feet deep. Shakespeare did not know how that compared to other mountain lakes, but three hundred feet was damn deep, deeper than most fish ever went. The thing he was up against was extraordinary if, in fact, it normally dwelled at the bottom.
To the best of Shakespeare’s logic, there were three possibilities. Either the fish was an oversized member of a known species, it was of a species yet to be officially discovered, or it was a holdover from an earlier era, a relict from the time when, according to many Indians, the land and the water were overrun by huge animals of all kinds.
Shakespeare could not say what the fish was, but he hoped to have an answer by the rising of the sun.
Time passed. The swaying of the canoe lulled Shakespeare into lowering his chin to his chest and closing his eyes. He had no intention of drifting off, but before he could stop himself, he did.
Suddenly Shakespeare’s head snapped up and his eyes opened. He tried to figure out what had woken him. The lake was as still and dark as it had been before, save for the splash of a fish.
Shakespeare started to succumb to drowsiness again. Another splash, louder than the first, brought him out of it. Acting on the assumption that the bigger the fish, the bigger the splash, he gazed about for the source.
The rope had not moved. The chicken still dangled in the depths. Leaning back, Shakespeare sighed. He had forgotten how much waiting there was with fishing, whether the fisherman was after bass or sunfish or catfish—or monster fish.
Shakespeare wondered if the monster might not be a catfish. They sometimes grew to exceptional lengths. He was not sure exactly how big they could get, but he seemed to recollect hearing that twelve feet was not out of the question.
The dugout swayed slightly.
Stiffening, Shakespeare raised the lantern. The wind was not strong enough to account for the movement. He peered over the side, but it was like gazing into a black well. “Was it you?” he asked the water.
As if in answer, the dugout abruptly rose half an inch, then settled back down again. In reflex, Shakespeare grabbed the gunwales. He waited for another bump or the rising of a swell, but nothing happened.
Not so much as a twitch from the rope.
Shakespeare picked up a harpoon, then put it down again. The cocoon of water the fish displaced when it moved at high speed had deflected Zach’s cast. What made him think he would fare any better? He drew a pistol instead.
The lake was still again. Above him a multitude of stars sparkled. More wind renewed his concern about an incoming front. Once again he debated heading for shore and safety.
Then the rope moved. Not much, no more than a shake, but something was interested in the bait.
Scarcely breathing, Shakespeare glued his eyes to it. It moved again and his heart jumped. It occurred to him that maybe a smaller fish was nipping at the chicken, and his elation vanished. It surged again when he realized a small fish could not move the rope like that. It would take a fish of considerable size. It would take
