And then he was jerked half over the thwart, with a startled scream of “Blight!”

Fawn lunged, managing to get her hands around his belt. She snatched one look over the side before she leaned frantically backward, feet skidding on the deck. A huge gray splashing shape seemed to have half-swallowed Dag’s hook, and was trying to yank him into the river. In order to eat him, near as Fawn could tell. She supposed turnabout was fair play, but she wasn’t willing to give up her best husband to some awful river monster. “Dag, let go of it! It doesn’t matter! I don’t want a fish dinner that much!”

“I can’t! Crap! The blighted thing’s stuck on my hook!” Dag clawed futilely at the buckles on his arm harness, then managed to get his knees down far enough to clap them to the inboard side of the hull and give a mighty heave. Fawn added what weight she had.

Several feet of flailing gray wetness rose from the brown water and arced through the air to land on the mid-deck with a thud that shook the whole boat. Dag, still attached to its mouth-end, perforce fell with it, and Fawn with them both. She scrambled back on her hands and knees. The startled Copperhead tromped his hooves in the straw of his pen, jerked his head, and whinnied, and Daisy-goat bleated in fright, whether of the plunging horse or of the river monster Fawn was unsure.

“Whit!” Dag yelled. “Bring a mallet! Quick!”

The uproar brought the entire crew of the Fetch rushing to the bow. Whit, Hod, and Hawthorn jammed up in the front hatch. Berry, Remo, and Bo peered down over the edge of the cabin roof. Whit vanished, Hawthorn fell through, and Hod, eyeing Copperhead’s antics, hung back. Fawn bounced to her feet for her first clear view of the most enormous fish—if it was a fish—she had ever seen or imagined. It was nearly as long as she was tall. Its head was huge, eyes glaring yellow, mouth wide and ugly, and Dag’s left arm was still stuck partway into its gaping gullet. Red gills flexed, and its long barbels snapped like whips as it heaved and flopped. Dag was jerked around with it.

Whit reappeared with a shiny new shovel grabbed from Berry’s stock of Tripoint goods, and proceeded to try to beat the fish to death, or at least into submission, urged on by Dag: “Hit it again, Whit! Harder! Ow! Aim for its head, blight you!”

The catfish finally stopped moving, mostly, and Dag drew a long breath, sat up, and carefully worked his hook free from inside the thing’s mouth. If the monster had succeeded in pulling him overboard, would it have taken him to the bottom and drowned him before he could get loose? Fawn felt faint. Dag shook out his arm, looked around at his riveted audience, and cleared his throat. “There, Spark. Fish dinner for eight.”

“Thank you, Dag,” Fawn choked. Which won a flash of a smile back, the strain in his face easing. He almost succeeded in looking as if he’d meant to do all this, but she thought he might be picturing that trip to the river bottom, too.

“Fish dinner for forty-eight, more like,” said Whit, measuring out the gleaming corpse. “How much does this thing weigh?”

“Looks like about a hundred, hundred-twenty pounds, to me,” drawled Bo. An expert opinion, Fawn presumed. Whit whistled.

“Well,” said Berry, looking down at Fawn and shaking her head. “You did tell me your husband could catch fish, I’ll give you that. Never seen anyone use live Lakewalker for bait, before.”

“How do you fit it in a pan?” Fawn nearly wailed. She pictured it draped across her skillet with an arm’s length hanging over each side. She wouldn’t be able to lift it. Could it be cooked on a turnspit, like a roasting pig?

“Whit and Hod will clean it and cut it up for you,” said Dag genially. He stretched his back and climbed somewhat gingerly to his feet, wiping his hook on his trousers. “I’m sure Bo will be happy to tell them how.”

Whit’s look of big-eyed enthusiasm faded a trifle, but he didn’t protest. He and Hod hauled the catch to the back deck to butcher under Bo’s amused supervision.

Briefly alone with Dag in the kitchen-and-living-quarters while he tidied himself, Fawn reached up and gripped him by the shoulders. “You do know, you don’t have to go and do any stupid fool thing just because I ask, don’t you? I rely on you to be the sensible grown-up around here!”

He slipped his arm around her back, and protested, “I didn’t think a fish dinner was an unreasonable request. Not on a river, leastways. If we were in the middle of a desert, now, that would have been a right cruel demand.” He blinked innocently at her.

Demonstrating cruelty, she poked him in his bruised stomach and scowled.

He glinted his eyes at her in a very unfair way, but said, “I admit, it did get a little out of hand.”

“If you’re saying that thing nearly swallowed your arm, I saw.” She gripped him again and shook him, or tried to. “You could have picked out a smaller one. You don’t have to prove anything to me!”

His answer was a silent laugh as he dropped a kiss on her curls. She gave up and relaxed into his offered cuddle, even though she wasn’t sure whether it was intended as apology for scaring her out of her wits or just as distraction.

She added more pensively, “I don’t mind the idea of eating a fish, though on the farm it wasn’t a dish we fixed too often. But I’m not sure I like the idea of a fish big enough to eat me.”

“Oh, there are channel cats bigger than that one. And there are sea sturgeon that come up the lower Gray that are easily ten times that size.”

“Don’t tell me!” said Fawn. “First swamp lizards with giant teeth, now fish big enough to swallow the Fetch? What parts are you taking us to, anyhow? I’m making a new rule. You don’t bring any more fish onto this boat that are bigger ’n me! You hear me, Dag Bluefield?”

All she got back was a smirk and a hug. Which had its own satisfactions, but wasn’t precisely an answer.

For dinner, Fawn fried up catfish fillets till everyone aboard was stuffed to the gills and groaning. The white flesh was sweet and succulent, but it went on forever. Breakfast was the same. Mid-river lunch was cold catfish sandwiches. And dinner. And another breakfast. After which Whit led a rebellion and sneaked the remains over the side, where they would feed its cannibal catfish cousins, Fawn supposed. Torn between indignation at the waste and profound relief, she said only, “Huh!”

To which Whit replied, “Yeah, well, be more careful what you ask Dag for, eh? That fellow scares me, some days.”

In the late afternoon, Dag asked Berry if they might pull in briefly at another Lakewalker ferry camp, this one on the south side of the Grace. Berry, Fawn knew, was anxious to ride this rise past Silver Shoals, lest the Fetch be grounded above that hazard and have to wait again for the next upstream storm. But she eyed Dag and nodded, saying only, “Make it quick, Lakewalker.”

The deserted landing was nothing but a bare patch on the bank, the camp up over the bluffs invisible from shore. This ferry served not a wagon road but merely a patrol trail, and so had few farmer customers. Dag hiked off alone, inviting neither Fawn nor Remo, not that Remo would likely have accepted.

The Pearl Riffle patroller had obeyed Berry’s boat-boss orders without comment or complaint, but had kept equally silent between work shifts. Whit’s most ham-fisted overtures of would-be friendship seemed to slide right over him. Fawn didn’t think he even talked to Dag, though she did catch him watching the older man as if he were trying to figure something out and couldn’t. Hod was skittish around Remo, but then, Hod was skittish around everyone.

Hawthorn took the goat ashore to graze for an hour. Remo volunteered to do the same for Copperhead, which surprised Fawn, till she noticed it gave him an excuse to settle down well away from the rest of the crew. Whit followed Berry around. Fawn, between chores at last, announced, “I think I’ll walk up to meet Dag.”