“Rhonda,” he called, breaking the rhythm for just a moment.
A woman in his boat turned. “What?”
“Take the bow. If you spot anything in the water, spear it. We could use a decent, fresh meal tonight.”
“Yes, sir!” she said with a smile.
The woman climbed up through the center of the boat and replaced the man who’d been stationed there with a blaster for most of the day.
Ganley watched her get settled, then tie one end of a rope to a ring on the blunt tip of her spear and the other end to the bow of the boat. Then she got into position, spear raised and ready to be thrown at anything that might swim by.
“Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!”
Ganley had called over four hundred strokes, and Rhonda’s throwing arm hadn’t wavered. Ganley had been impressed with her moves when he’d screened the volunteers, and he’d later found that there was no one better in the ville with a spear. And now he could see why. She was like a cat who would wait hours for a mouse to peek its nose out of a hole. The second it did, the cat would pounce and the mouse would never know what hit it.
“Stroke! C’mon, just a few more hours. Stroke! Rhonda will have us a supper like never before. Stroke!”
And then, as if the fish had been waiting for the proper introduction, Rhonda thrust her spear into the water.
The paddles stopped moving, and necks craned for a glimpse of the water in front of the boat.
“What is it?” Ganley asked.
“Sturgeon,” Rhonda answered, pulling on the rope.
“Excellent!” Sturgeon was a large bony fish with five rows of bony plates down its back. They’d said that in predark times the fish’s sucking mouth had been used to feed off the bottom, but now its wide mouth had adapted to the times and was used for scooping up dead fish floating on the top of the water. “How big?”
“Couldn’t tell. Only saw one of its plates.”
This far out there was no telling how big the sturgeon could get. The lake was big enough, and the supply of dead fish almost unlimited because of rad poisoning.
The crew on the boat waited as Rhonda continued to pull in the line. But before she got the fish to the boat, there were shouts and a commotion coming from the crew of the second boat How big was it? Ganley wondered. And at that moment, the sturgeon’s enormous tail flipped up out of the water, rocking the second boat and throwing several of its crew into the water.
Seeing that, Rhonda began stabbing the enormous fish in the back, again and again. Blood began to spurt up from the back of the giant fish and into the boat. Several of the other crew drew their blasters. “No!” Ganley ordered.
Rhonda was leaning over the bow of the boat, moving her spear up the fish’s body, and was now poised to strike its head. She reared back and plunged the spear deep into the sturgeon’s brain.
The fish convulsed several times, throwing up a red froth under the other boat and hampering their efforts to pull it out of the water. Finally the giant fish was still and floating on the surface of the water. It was twenty-five-feet long, its bony ridges breaking the water like armor plates on a war wag.
“Tie off the tail!” Rhonda called to the other boat.
“We can’t take it with us,” Ganley said.
“I know that, but we have to eat.” Rhonda tied off the snout and the giant fish was suspended between the two boats.
Rhonda secured her spear to the boat, tied a mesh bag to her waistband, then unsheathed her knife and dived in the water.
Ganley watched her expertly cut more than a dozen steaks from the fish’s tender underbelly and toss them into the boat. And then, she disappeared under the water for several minutes only to reappear with a smile on her face and a bag full of caviar.
Ganley couldn’t believe he almost hadn’t allowed the woman to come along on the trip.