A flatboat crowding close behind them chose to veer wider around the rocks. With a loud clunk, it shuddered almost to a stop, then began to swing around its bow. Cries of dismay and a lot more swearing followed as its crew fought to keep it from turning broadside to the current. Berry looked at Dag and raised her brows high. He touched his temple back at her.
“Well, live and learn,” Berry repeated, in quite another tone.
Fawn stared back at the receding Lakewalker ferry landing, wondering if they were being watched by irate council eyes. They passed rocks, clogs of dead trees and debris including a bloated sheep, and less visible hazards, then the river widened and the odd swirls like soup boiling disappeared. The surface smoothed.
“Ease up, boys, we’re over the Riffle and away at last,” said Berry. “It’s a straight reach for the next three miles.”
Dag and Bo stood down from their sweeps. On the easy stretches, Fawn understood, the oarsmen would take turnabout, and the boat would float along all day without stopping. Dag came over, sat down beside her, stretched out one leg, and gave her a hug around the shoulders. “All right, Spark?”
“It’s wonderful!” She stared at Pearl Bend, already falling behind on the far shore, and back to the boat boss, now leaning happily on her oar. “We’re going so fast!”
Berry’s agreeing grin stretched as wide as the river. “Fast as a horse can trot!”
11
The Fetch made thirty river miles before the dank autumn dusk, when they tied to the bank for the night in the middle of, as nearly as Fawn could tell, nowhere. Berry explained regretfully that she didn’t want to try running downriver in the dark—Whit’s appalling suggestion. In addition to the hazards of rocks, stumps, sand bars, ledges, and wrack, the river divided frequently around shifting islands. A boat choosing the wrong side might find itself stuck in a channel that petered out into impassible thatch, and its crew plagued with the arduous task of towing it up around the head of the island again, difficult enough for a keelboat, designed for such work, worse for a balky flatboat. Boats had been abandoned in such situations, Berry said. Fawn poked Whit to silence when he began to volunteer Dag for a night pilot. Even were Dag’s groundsense recovered to its full one-mile range, some of these islands were as much as five miles long. And the river was quite scary enough in daylight.
After that, Fawn was too busy fixing dinner to worry further. With the excitement of the day wearing off, everyone seemed glad to turn in early. In addition, Fawn suspected Dag was still bone-weary from healing the Pearl Bend woman, at some level underneath the mere physical. He seemed to wrap himself around Fawn in their bedroll more for comfort than anything else; from the intensity of his clutch he was feeling low on comfort tonight. She wondered if having Remo aboard bothered him. A curtain gave no privacy from groundsense. Although since farmers couldn’t veil their grounds at all, she supposed Remo must have shut himself off, as Dag often did, to spare himself the abrasion. Weary herself, her musings trickled into sleep.
They made a dawn start, and by midday, the clouds had thinned and the sun came through, if still a bit pale and watery, which Fawn thought lifted everyone’s moods. At Berry’s suggestion she experimented with the clever iron oven that fitted in the Fetch’s hearth, and was able to produce pies for lunch without stopping the boat. Or setting it on fire, a fact of which she was more proud than of the pies, which, truly, everyone ate with flattering appetites. In the afternoon, she found Dag taking a break from his oar, lounging on the bench on the front deck keeping pleasantly idle company with Copperhead, Daisy-goat, and the chickens. She leaned over the rail and eyed the smooth, brown water. The Fetch seemed to be outracing a sodden log, but that floating leaf was definitely pulling ahead.
“Dag,” she said, “do you think you could catch us enough fish for dinner?”
He opened his eyes and sat up. “What kind?”
“I don’t even know what kinds there are in this river. Bo was going on about how much he liked a good channel catfish fried up in a cornmeal crust. Do you think you could get enough of them to feed eight?”
His slow smile tucked up the edges of his mouth. “I could try, Spark.”
He rose and stretched, only to drape himself over the side of the boat just behind the pen, his left arm trailing down. His hook barely grazed the water. Fawn watched in sudden doubt. When he’d persuaded that big bass to leap so startlingly into their laps at Hickory Lake, they’d been in a much smaller boat, with lower sides. The Fetch’s rail seemed awfully high to expect any fish to jump over. Were catfish even the jumping sort? Fawn had a dim idea that they lurked about on the river bottom.
When nothing happened in about ten minutes, Fawn considered wandering back to her domain by the hearth to think about what she could do with bacon for dinner, again, except she was afraid Dag was falling asleep. Granted he would doubtless wake up when he hit the water, and he could swim better than she could, and if she grabbed for his legs he might simply pull her over with him, but still. But then he stiffened, muttering, “Ha.” She craned her neck.
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.”