what to do. He jumped just once, and he’s longer than Gelane’s leg.
Brace yourself, Pol, . you’re going to hear a lot about that fish.’
‘You do realize that what you’re doing is terribly dishonest, don’t
you, father?’
‘When has that ever got in my way
, Pol? Honesty’s a nice enough
thing, I suppose, but I’ve never let it interfere when I was doing
something important. That heavy thud on the other end of Celane’s
line and the sight of that monster blasting up out of the depths of
that Pool is going to keep Celane out of mischief for the rest of his
life, and that’s all I was really after. I’ll stay around here for a few
months, but I don’t think it’ll really be necessary. Go ahead and set
him up in business, Pol, but don’t expect much work out of him
when the fish are biting.’
I had my doubts about father’s little scheme, but the years proved
that he was right. Oddly enough, I married a man who’s almost as
much a fanatic about fishing as Celane was. I’m fairly sure, however,
that ‘the big one’ wouldn’t have gotten away from my Durnik.
A cabinet-maker in Eingaard had died the week before our arrival,
and I was quick enough to get to his bereaved widow before the
vultures swooped in. I bought the shop and the attached residence
from her before they had the chance to cheat her, and the price I
paid her was not only fair, it was generous. Owls, after all, are nicer
than vultures. The cabinet shop wasn’t large, but it was big enough
for a barrel-maker who hung a ‘gone fishing’ sign on his door quite
regularly.
Then winter arrived, and father said his farewells and went off
to see if he could locate Chamdar. Celane made barrels during the
day and manufactured fishing lures in the evening. Enalla wasn’t
too happy about her husband’s new obsession, but she brightened
up when I pointed out that a husband who thinks about fish all the
time isn’t likely to become involved with other women.
Aravina died in her sleep one night the following spring, and I
couldn’t really pinpoint the cause of her death. I could be
melodramatic and say that she’d died of a broken heart, but from a purely
physiological point of view, that’s an absurdity. Absurd or not,
though, I had a strong suspicion that her periodic bouts of
melancholia had in fact contributed to her death.
Gelane and Enalla mourned her loss, of course, but their lives
went on. Celane was a good enough cooper that his local customers
were patient with him when the fish were biting. Eingaard is fairly
remote, and its nearby streams aren’t heavily fished, so Celane
wasn’t the only businessman in town whose ‘gone fishing’ sign was
always handy. They’d gather in the local tavern after the sun went
down and talk for hours about their sport. The dry-goods store was
attached to the tavern, and I happened to be in that part of the
establishment one night while Celane was over in the tavern picking
UP tips on how to outsmart trout. The local fishermen were gathered
in a semi-circle around the fireplace with their feet up on the
hearthstone telling lies for all they were worth. ‘I saw old Crooked jaw
walking on his tail across that pond of his this morning,’ one of
them announced. ‘He seems to have come through the winter fairly
well.’
‘He always does,’ another fisherman noted. ‘There’s a lot of feed in
that beaver pond of his. There’s not much current to wash it away.’
‘Who’s Crooked Jaw?’ Celane asked, just a little timidly. He sat
in a chair away from the fireplace, obviously not wanting to push
himself in on the veterans.
‘He’s a big old trout who made a stupid mistake when he was
hardly more than a minnow,’ the first angler replied. ‘He took the
hook of some earl or something who didn’t know very much about
fishing. Anyway, as close as we can tell, the earl yanked a whole
lot too hard, and he broke that young fish’s jaw. That’s how the fish
got his name. His lower jaw’s all twisted off to one side. As far as
we know, Crooked Jaw spent all the time while his jaw was healing
up thinking about the mistake he’d made. Believe you me, young
feller, it takes a real clever lure to get Crooked jaw to even look at
it. He don’t hardly ever make no mistakes.’
‘Have all the fish around here got names?’ Celane asked.
‘Naw,’ another fisherman laughed, ‘just the big ones as is too
smart t’ get therselves caught.’
‘I hooked a fairly large one in the pool below that waterfall just
outside of town the first day I was here,’ Celane said modestly. ‘He
wasn’t on the end of my line very long, though – and there wasn’t
much of my line left after he broke free. I think he took about half
of it with him.’
‘Oh, that was Old Twister,’ another grizzled angler immediately
identified the fish. ‘That pool there’s his private property, and he
collects fishing line.’
Celane gave him a puzzled look.
‘All the big ones hereabouts have their own favorite pools,’
another old fisherman explained. ‘Crooked Jaw lives in that beaver
pond, Twister lives in that pool under the falls, Dancer lives near
the deep bend a mile or so above the falls, and the High jumper
lives in the riffle on the downstream side.’ He looked around at the
other anglers with an unspoken question in his eyes, and they all
nodded. ‘Why don’t you pull your chair closer to the fire, young
feller?’ the old man suggested. ‘I get a crick in my neck when I try
to talk to somebody back over my shoulder.’
And that was when Celane joined the local fraternity. He pulled
his chair up into the place the other fishermen made for him, and
then he spoke, politely, of course. ‘I didn’t quite follow what you
meant when you said that Twister collects fishing line,’ he said to
the grizzled man who’d identified the fish in question.
‘It’s a trick he’s got,’ the angler explained. ‘I think Twister’s got
delicate lips, and he don’t like the way a fishhook bites in. So what
he does is roll over and over in the water, wrappin’ the fish-line
around him. Then, after he’s got your line all snarled up, he swims
on downstream at about a mile a minute. Now, Twister’s a big,
heavy rascal, an’ when he hits the end of your line, he snaps it like
a cobweb. Happens all the time.’
‘That was Twister I hooked then,’ Gelane said excitedly. ‘That’s
exactly what he did to me.’ His eyes grew dreamy. ‘I’ll get him,
though,’ he predicted. ‘Someday I’ll get him.’
‘I wish you all the luck in the world, friend,’ a balding angler
said. ‘Old Twister’s almost pushed me into poverty just buying new
fishing line every time I walk by that pool of his.’
The ‘fishing club’ was comprised for the most part of local
businessmen, and when Gelane modestly admitted that he’d just set
up his barrel-works, he was immediately accepted as a kindred spirit
-which is to say that everybody realized that barrels took second place
in his view of the world. My father’s a sly one, I’ll give him that.
Nothing Geline could have done in Eingaard would have gained him
acceptance quite as quickly as picking up his fishing pole had.
When autumn finally rolled around and the fishing season more
or less ended, Celane went back to making barrels and attending
to various other domestic duties. He hadn’t as yet caught Old
Twister, but he did catch Enalla at an appropriate time, so by Erastide
she was quite obviously pregnant.
It’s a peculiarity of village life that nothing cements a family’s
Position in the community quite so much as the wife’s first
pregnancy. In a peculiar sort of way, the incipient infant becomes the
property of the entire village. The ladies all stop by to give the new
mother-to-be advice – most of it bad – and the men-folk spend hours
congratulating the father-to-be. We’d only lived in Eingaard for
about a year and a half, but in the eyes of our fellow villagers were
now ‘old-timers’. We’d merged with the rest of the village, and
there’s no better way to become invisible.
In the early summer of 4899 Enalla went into labor, and it was
an easy delivery. Enalla didn’t think so, but it was. The infant was
a boy, naturally. It almost always is in the Rivan line for a number
Of very good reasons, heredity being only one of them.
Gelane insisted that his son be named Carel, in honor of his own
father, and I really had no objection to that. It wasn’t a Cherek name,