Allegheny Front

TELEMETRY

ON A GOOD DAY, SURGERY LASTS three minutes or less. Today’s takes longer. Kathryn has an audience.

They don’t touch the fish at this point — they try to handle them as little as possible — but for the girl, Kathryn makes an exception. She wets her hand in a clear plastic bucket and lifts the stunned fish from the net. A wild brook trout, with a beating heart no bigger than a ruby. The girl leans in to wonder at the gently heaving side, the cool, vermiculated skin. It comes to life and squirms in Kathryn’s hand. She grips down — gentle, but firm. The girl squeals a little. She can’t be more than seven. She has the kind of light blond hair that darkens with age. In ten years she’ll pick up a picture of herself and see a stranger.

“Wet your hand,” Kathryn says.

Kathryn has to stop thinking of her as the girl. Her name is Shelly. Kathryn’s never been able to see children as real people. She wonders what this says about her. Shelly puts a tentative finger to an adipose fin, a sleek belly, a black mouth.

In Kathryn’s first summer on Back Allegheny Mountain, the trout and the bright scalpel made her squeamish. Fear of killing something so delicate, so rare. Two years later, the work is rote. She has to remind herself of the beauty of the place: its rich pelt of red spruce and wildflowers, its pools of glacial blue, each set like a sapphire in the spiky ring of a beaver dam. She doesn’t notice the sweet balsam on the wind, or the river smell, equal parts iron and moss. The odd bear will wander through camp and savage a cooler, reminding her of what the mountain still is. The Monongahela National Forest begins a mile downstream. A ski resort owns this land, ten thousand acres. So far, they have left this part undeveloped — or underdeveloped, as the Chamber of Commerce says.

“You better toss him in.”

A male voice behind them. Gary, bossy as always, is standing knee-deep in the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River. It laps at crudely mended neoprene waders. Lifting the electroshock wand high overhead, he reaches a free hand down to the river. He takes a palmful of water and rubs it over his face. Water droplets gather in a patchy beard, each a prism.

“By the book, by the book,” he crows. “What would the University Animal Care and Use Committee say? Ain’t you a member of said committee?”

Kathryn rolls her eyes. Shelly smiles at that. Kathryn dumps the trout into another plastic bucket, cold creek water dosed with a clove-oil solution. An anesthetic and antiseptic. Shock, drug, cut. A wonder it doesn’t kill them. The trout swims in a lovely sinuous line, resting on nervous fins. Sleek skin the color of mint and coal-fire. The trout lists to its side, loses equilibrium, and floats to the surface. Kathryn scoops it up.

Her scalpel licks its side, below the ventral line. A clean incision, millimeters.

“Give it here.”

She takes the telemetry device from Shelly’s palm. A mechanized pill, clear and crammed with minute machinery, with a fiber-optic tail. It recalls the sterility of good hospitals, all mankind can accomplish. Kathryn slides it into the incision. Shelly winces.

“Don’t worry,” Kathryn says. “He can’t feel a thing.”

“Fish don’t hurt?”

“No. Not that. He’s just sleepy.”

Initially the trout drove her crazy. The movements seemed erratic. Had the telemeters malfunctioned? Did the new cell-phone tower throw them off? Kathryn had ice-pick headaches and spent a lot of time in her sleeping bag. Patterns then emerged. To say the least, this population is mobile. Maybe the highest rates ever recorded in the mountain chain. Besides the odd flutter of anxiety, she is confident in her numbers.

Kathryn whip-stitches three sutures to close the incision and eases the trout into a bucket of plain river water. As they wait for the clove oil to wear off, she explains their research to Shelly, how they track the movement of brook trout between the main stem and the tiny tributaries. How far do they go? Do they migrate because of rising water temperatures? Is there an identifiable trigger?

“If you come back tomorrow, I’ll show you how. We use a radio transmitter. It’s fun. It’s like on TV.”

“Thanks for showing me, Kathy.”

“Kathryn. It’s Kathryn.”

She smiles at the girl quickly, ferociously — a bad habit of hers.

Shelly blushes, then runs off in a gawky clatter of limbs. Dumbfounded, Kathryn watches her go. Grasshoppers fling themselves out of her path. One hits the river. A trout snaps it up.

Gary says, “Strike another blow for women in the sciences.”

Kathryn laughs, a good sport, though she’s disappointed. She wanted to plug a laptop into the generator and show off her program: those dreamy wandering lavender dots, x-axis and y-.

The trout has righted itself. After taking measurements on a digital scale, Kathryn walks it to the water and works it back and forth in the current. Number 30. Gills flare. In a realization she can almost feel, the trout kicks off in a little starburst of relief. The trout’s lie is no bigger than a bathtub. She lifts her tickled palm.

Gary wades out and unhitches his pack, dainty for a big man. He respects the equipment. They drive back to camp in her big, bouncing Ford. It parts the field like a frigate. The other member of their team, Michael, the one Kathryn is sleeping with, is still asleep in her tent.

That afternoon, the girl begins stealing. Michael notices first. He finds plastic tubs open, ones they are fastidious about closing. Nothing expensive — a bag of dried apples, a warm bottle of beer. The next day, a flathead screwdriver. At first they think it’s the girl’s father. They don’t know his name. Why not a shotgun, why not the GPS?

And Michael says, “Of course it’s the kid. She walks past a thousand-dollar laptop for a bag of cereal.”

“Shelly?”

Gary gawps at them. “You’ve got a double agent on your hands.”

They glance over at the only other camp, a good hundred yards off. Muddy blue jeans strung on a line. A resiny ax wedged in a hemlock. The pup tent is bedraggled, decades old. A sharp contrast to the researchers’. Kathryn’s truck is solid with gear. Enough to invade a small Arab nation, Michael says. This makes her feel bloated. Those bins packed solid with food, electronics, clothes. A glut of technology. Who needs all this shit?

Ever since the pair showed up three days ago, the researchers have sensed something off. First, a man near thirty and a little girl alone — you assume the worst, no matter how unfair that is. They don’t wear hiking boots, but tennis shoes. They don’t have a good way to cook their food, just a fire-ring. They are poor. They never came over to say hello — the researchers are desperate for new voices, new faces. Kathryn finally caught the girl watching them and coaxed her over. Her dad has a bruised look around his eyes. At night they hear him talking to himself, or to Shelly, except some nights he does not. He has an army-surplus pack, Korean War vintage.

It’s near four when the team makes dinner. They’re too disturbed to focus. Gary says, “I’m marching over there and asking them lend of my screwdriver. I need it.”

“Marching over there?” Michael says. “Leave it alone. They don’t have shit.”

“I’m pissed. I buy good tools. The best. Consumer Reports and everything.”

Kathryn says, “Just let it go. Don’t be the world’s youngest fussy old man.”

As soon as she says that, Gary softens, cools, as bland as candle wax. She hates that about him. They spent the first summer here alone, having a grand old time until he drunkenly propositioned her. He was only half joking. She laughed at him. She regrets that. He stalked off to his tent, and they never discussed it. Michael joined in the second year, after his own work fell apart like so much wet cardboard. (He’s now exploring the effects of woody debris on trout habitat, a topic Gary calls flimsy, if not to Michael’s face.) Michael was studying strip-mining effects on the next watershed over, until he gave a bitter, truthful interview to a newspaper. Consol Coal banned him from its property. Turns out he was sneaking through a hole in the fence, for which he still faces trespassing charges. They have chilling surveillance video of him taking water samples. The department chair bailed Michael out of the Upshur County jail. The chair couldn’t have been more proud. He asked — told? — Kathryn to make some room. She invited Michael on before realizing, far too late, that Gary hated him with the dull white fury of an acetylene torch. Both are younger than her, just master’s students. Michael is inspired, combative, a sloppy researcher — everything workmanlike Gary is not. Michael is handsome, everyone’s favorite. Gary, soft and baggy, is tolerated. Worse, the spite isn’t mutual.

Kathryn says, “I’ll buy you a new screwdriver.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’ll let you chop onions,” she says with her sweetest smile.

“The woman said.”

“Fuck you.”

She says it with cheer. Since the president of Harvard made his comments, they have been paying ironic tribute to Kathryn’s role as “woman scientist.” Michael fixes on them the cockeyed, pedantic look of a deranged professor. He says, “Domesticity suggests peace. All sociology tells us so. It is the realm of the calmer emotions.”

Michael seems more charming than he actually is, when she grits down and listens to what he says. She wonders if this is a tic of evolution — that easy, flashing smile, meant to attract her, distract her, like aluminum foil to a crow. The easing of standards.

Cooking does calm them. Michael leaves to filter water. Gary handles knives. Kathryn primes the portable stove and cups a lit match against the wind, bearing it like an acolyte.

She didn’t plan on sleeping with Michael, not up here, not ever. A way to pass the time, she notes glumly. He lives with a girlfriend in Morgantown, a nice third-grade teacher with a flapper haircut, prettier than her. But who isn’t nice? Kathryn wonders. We’re all nice. Nice, nice, nice. He’s six or seven years younger than Kathryn — that’s what stings. It feels so cheap, so glitter-and-trash. She should feel worse about the girlfriend.

Across the field, the man dumps armfuls of branches into the fire-ring, then pours kerosene on them. Their dinner will consist of cans. Maybe they have nowhere else to go.

Shelly steps out of the tent. She’s been sleeping. She waves at Kathryn. Kathryn doesn’t know what to do, except wave back. The man does too.

“All hail the good thief,” Gary says as he whets the knife.

After dinner, Gary scours their pots with sand. When he gets back, he says, “I want to shoot some guns.”

“I’m not in the mood,” Kathryn says.

“I’m in the mood.”

“It’s okay,” Michael says to Kathryn. “You don’t want to bother them, do you?”

“I don’t like kids and guns in the same space.”

“I’ll go talk to them. I’ll ask if it’s okay.”

Gary says, “I don’t give a damn. I hauled three gross clay pigeons up here and we are going to shoot every one. We are going to drink beer and we are going to shoot guns. It’s Friday night and we are Americans.”

“Easy. Five minutes.”

As Michael crosses the field, Kathryn packs away the stove. Gary goes round to the far side of the truck, where she can’t see him, and sifts through boxes. He slides a double-barreled twelve-gauge out of a soft case and cracks it open. The metal sounds crisp.

It’s a safe place to shoot. They camp in “the field,” the timber ghost town of Spruce. Nothing’s left but scorched foundations, a lone switchman’s shack, and the odd pile of rusted peavey-heads in the weeds. At four thousand feet, Spruce was once the highest incorporated town in the east. Fifteen hundred people lived up here — with hotel, church, and post office — but they never buried anyone, the true measure of settlement. Spruce lasted twelve years. It’s an old story, no secret place. In spring and fall, fishermen bound for Shavers walk seven miles up the ruined track. Kathryn has finagled a gate key to the private road — she’s the only native in the department and knows how to talk — and fishermen are amazed to find a big, dual-wheeled truck parked up there. “How’d you get on that road?” they ask, salivating. “Connections,” she says. In bright summer, trout grow wary, and fishermen leave. The researchers have it to themselves. Until that man and his girl appeared.

Birds shatter from the field.

He shot me.

He didn’t, no, he shot a beer bottle on a stump. Battering off the ridge, echoes recede in waves. Gary pops open the breech, and twin trails of gun smoke drift. Kathryn has to sit. She pats herself down. She clutches her head, as if to keep it from being unscrewed.

“Sorry! Kathryn, look at me. I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you saw me. I did.”

Michael returns with man and daughter in tow. “Hi!” Shelly says to Kathryn.

The man sticks out his hand. “I’m Russ,” he says, “Russ Nedermeyer. Good meeting you.”

Names and bottles of beer are introduced all around. Nedermeyer keeps on talking. He has an Eisenhower jacket, a brown crewcut under a ball cap, and a five-day beard — in an odd way, he looks clean-shaven just the same. It’s his stride, crisp and confident, and he wears a camouflage t-shirt, the kind sporting-goods stores sell from a cardboard box. It sags over a slight belly and blue jeans gone white and soft. Kathryn can tell he’s local. He has that accent, somewhere between a twang and a brogue, a run-on voice with words tripping over each other and along. Not southern, but musical and watery, like stones knocking underwater. An accent Kathryn has taken pains to cull from her own throat. She wants to be taken seriously.

Gary says, “You all are on vacation up here.”

It’s not a question.

Nedermeyer grins. “That’s right. Shelly and me are having a big time.”

“You like to shoot?”

“Love it.”

Everyone makes sure to keep Shelly back, and she revels in the attention. They sink each leg of the clay-pigeon thrower and point it at the forest. The string has dry-rotted, so Gary’s bootlace is volunteered. Discs are flung in wild, wobbling arcs, slivers of toxic orange against the blue. They shoot for an hour. Shoulders purple and ache sweetly. Nedermeyer cancels one and cancels the other. He can’t miss. He knocks double after double from the sky, the best shot by far.

“I was a piss-poor shot till the navy. You be surprised how much the navy makes you shoot. You wouldn’t think that, would you? Maybe we ought to bet money on this. No?”

Between shots, he delivers a running monologue on their family life. Some of it makes Kathryn blush, with Shelly there listening. “Her mom’s on drugs. She’s living in Baltimore, it’s a damned crack house, she don’t even get visitation. Wish I was lying to you.”

That’s hard, they all agree.

Nedermeyer makes a little shrugging hitch with his shoulders. “Her decision. Last time I went, there had to be eight guys in there, smoking the pinkest biker rock you ever seen. Air tasted like Drano on the back of your tongue. Don’t marry young, is all I can say. I got Shelly out of there. Judge drug his feet on it like you wouldn’t believe. No telling what she saw.”

Separately, the adults imagine the vile things Shelly encountered.

Readjusting to this, Kathryn looks at the girl. No response. Shelly’s heard all this before. Yellow piles of shotgun hulls accrue at their feet, and Shelly makes a game of racing forward between shots and gathering them up. Nedermeyer hands the shotgun over to Kathryn.

“Knock them down,” he says. “Shelly! Get back from there! Throw-arm on that thing’ll break your effing leg.”

Kathryn shoots a dozen times, missing all but three. She’s distracted.

“You lost your touch,” Michael tells her.

“It comes and goes.” She hands the shotgun back.

Nedermeyer guesses, correctly, that Kathryn grew up shooting. “I can tell.”

Gary drinks beer and makes small talk with the girl. He’s good with children. It’s surprising. Kathryn feels a little off balance. Maybe she’s drinking hers too fast.

Nedermeyer tells them, “God, I love this. Been too long. Too long. We used to hunt grouse. Raised English setters. My dad, I mean. No more birds to speak of. Pull!”

Kathryn smiles in spite of herself. Nedermeyer is half the people she went to high school with: a garrulous semi — con man, damn good with tools, maybe a little into drugs, basically harmless. A serious talker. He’s a new type for the others. They spent their years in the labs and classrooms of a tamed college town. They don’t know the local animals. Gary’s from the suburbs of Minneapolis, and Michael grew up in DC, the only white kid in his school.

It’s inevitable, so Kathryn asks Nedermeyer where he’s from.

They grew up a few miles apart, in Tuscarora County, to the north.

“What’s your last name?”

“Tennant,” she says.

“Aw, shit. I know your dad.” Then, more softly: “Well, I knew him.”

Kathryn’s heart thrills and saddens at the same time. Nedermeyer doesn’t say anything else. He senses not to. She sees that in his face. He offers the box of shells. She waves it off.

Gunpowder curling in her nose. It reminds her of squirrel hunting with her father. No one thought it strange, he had no sons. Her mother would boil two eggs in the dark kitchen, and Kathryn would stick her hands in the pockets of the oversized hunting vest and clutch them for warmth. Once they cooled, she peeled each egg in the woods for a late breakfast. Her father smiled as she popped each yolk, a miniature sun, into her mouth. Before each shot he’d whisper, Plug your ears. Sitting on a log with him, she could feel the dull, muffled percussion through her seat, her spine. Bodies fell from the trees. Gathering them into the game bag in her vest. Feeling them lose warmth against her back. Soothing, and strange.

Nedermeyer closes the shotgun with a muted thunk. “Nice piece,” he says to Gary. “I like this gun. I like a twenty-six-inch barrel. Nice and quick. Whippy. A bird gun. It’s choked improved cylinder and modified? Classic. No sense changing it.” He makes a show of looking at the barrel, reading embossed letters. “I never heard of Ithaca before. That a new make?”

“No. The Japanese make it.”

Nedermeyer slaps his head and makes a goggle-eyed funny face. His daughter laughs. Kathryn suddenly loves the man.

He looks around. “The mountains,” he says. “I love it up here. Even in July. Couldn’t live nowhere else. I’m done moving. When I was in the service, it’s all I thought of.”

They take in the ridgeline, the blue dusk. In the distance, far above the stands of red spruce, the best in the state, the cell tower lights. This is the signal, night is here, time for sweaters. The temperature can drop forty degrees when the sun goes down. Time for tin-punch constellations, and busy satellites tearing arcs in the sky. Even with the resort and the tower, this is the clearest night you can hope for east of the Mississippi, as close as you get to that ancient blackness.

Gary says, “Tell Kathryn that. She’s moving.”

“Moving? Where to?”

“I’m not sure. I was offered a position. At Arizona State.”

Nedermeyer whistles.

“That’s what I thought,” she tells him.

“What your folks say?”

“Good question.” She visited Tempe for a week, taught a class, presented her fisheries research. They loved her — in the swelter, the flatness. Concrete sprawl nibbling at desert, air-conditioning blasting you with its chemical bite. Everyone looking unhealthy and heat stunned and bleached. She could always come back east in the summer, stay with her mom. She tells herself this as if it solves everything. She doesn’t answer Nedermeyer’s question.

Gary’s half-drunk. He says, “You folks hungry? We’re making dinner.”

Michael and Kathryn look at him with curiosity, but he just grins back. So they make a second dinner, and the five of them eat together, filling out the portable table for the first time.

They begin sharing meals each night, but Shelly keeps on stealing. She and her father stay on for a week, then two. At first they share token supplies with the researchers — a sliced loaf of store-bread, peanut butter — till they run out of food. No one mentions it. Stranger things disappear: a battered water bottle, a bottle opener, a new jug of bleach for sterilizing materials. Nothing expensive: fly rods, the Bushnell rangefinder, and laptops stay put. It feels more like a game than a violation. A magpie of a girl. It doesn’t matter. In a week, Kathryn will make the thirty-mile trip to Elkins for supplies.

At this point, her research demands no more than two or three hours a day, so she spends time with Shelly — maybe she’s stealing out of boredom. Kathryn takes her swimming in the afternoons, something they both love. The others stay behind to play cutthroat euchre.

Kathryn lends her a towel, and they walk to the flat rock by a ruined trestle. The Shavers Fork of the Cheat is a shallow river, and even out in the channel, the water comes only to Kathryn’s breastbone. They bring biodegradable soap. They step over a pile of broken crawdads where coons made a meal. The sun is glorious. Mica glitters in the rock.

Kathryn feels hesitation — taking off her clothes with someone else’s child — but in a moment, they’re naked. She can’t imagine doing this in any other context. Shelly’s body is just becoming girlish, winnowing itself out of a child’s frame, but naked, she still has a child’s lack of self-consciousness. She doesn’t know to be ashamed. At seven? Kathryn worries for that, wondering if it has to do with how Shelly was raised. For her part, Shelly gazes full on at Kathryn, a grown woman, unabashed. Esteeming her, the loose breasts, the trim nest of hair. Kathryn doesn’t mind, children are curious, but when they’re in the water, she takes care not to touch the girl, not to graze a swimming leg. The rock is pleasant and hot. She loves being naked in the sun. If Gary would leave. Maybe he’ll volunteer for Elkins. She tries not to think of sex. She hopes Michael doesn’t ask about her father.

They ease in over rounded, mossy stones and find the water pleasantly cool, a touch under sixty. Shadows dart to the edge of the pool. Kathryn soaps herself, then hands it over. She wonders if Shelly would have washed otherwise. If Nedermeyer would have cared.

Shelly puts her hand to the current and carves out a white plume of water.

Kathryn closes her eyes for a moment — just a moment — and sinks under. Back at camp, surely, over cards, Nedermeyer is telling them about her father. It can’t be helped. It nettles just the same. Hell, Nedermeyer is probably related to someone at Green Valley Mine — probably related to her. No more than ten thousand people in Tuscarora County. When Kathryn was an undergraduate, her father died in the mines. Everyone knows how the miners were trapped behind a coal rib for eleven hours, before the expired rescue masks failed and methane saturated their lungs. Her mom: You have to come home, you have to come home. Kathryn remembers the phone call. At ten in the morning, she was still in bed, groggy from a party, hungover. She still feels guilty, it’s the one thing that can make her throat burn, make her cry. Kathryn borrowed a roommate’s car and drove half-drunk, the windows down. She arrived in the clothes she’d slept in, smelling of stale beer. The mine under a siege of news trucks. Shouts. The ragged sound of weeping. Parked cars lining the highway.

In the last minutes, her father scrawled a note in huge, amoebic letters: Don’t worry for us. We’re not hurting. It’s just like falling asleep. I love you all and I will see you in the next world. I will wait on you. Now her mother lives in that grim pillbox of a house, where her father’s hats are lined up neatly on pegs, his work boots nocked in a stand by the door.

A computer says her new office would be 2,100.6 miles from where she sleeps on this mountain. Her mother’s house, 43.1. She can leave all this behind. In one swipe of the ax.

Shelly snaps her awake with an awful, gut-shot howl. Oh God, she’s drowning.

Kathryn claws wet hair from her eyes. A snake shatters the water, a bolt of silver in its mouth. Then Shelly laughs at herself, and Kathryn does, too. It races off.

“He ate your fish!”

“That’s okay. We’ll track him, too.”

Thirty fish tagged per summer. They make adjustments for mortality. A crass statement: “Adjustments for mortality.” Science and its flat, brutal affect.

They climb onto the rock and dry themselves. Kathryn asks for the soap.

“I think I lost it.”

It’s hidden, of course, under Shelly’s folded clothes. Kathryn feels ill, and feels like she would never want a child of her own: the winsome liars. After a long grating pause, she says, “Shelly, if you need anything from me, you just ask, okay? Just ask me. If you want to have lunch or go swimming or get a ride back to town. No games, okay? Don’t be shy.”

Shelly says okay. Her voice is hollow.

“You don’t have to take things.”

Kathryn can feel it on her skin. That stinging blush. They are being watched.

“Get dressed. Quick. Someone’s coming.”

They drag on clothes. They listen. They stare at the laurel hell on the far bank. Nothing.

Kathryn tells herself it was a bear, a bobcat, a doe.

When they get back to the field, Michael has the stove primed, and Gary’s setting out plates. Nedermeyer isn’t around. Was he watching them?

He steps out of his tent palming a huge Vidalia onion he forgot he had.

They make omelets for dinner. Nedermeyer laughs at that, but they need to use the last of their eggs. Red peppers, green peppers, yolk yellow — all the colors of life.

He asks, “How you all paying for this operation?”

Gary — because he wrote the application — brags on the funds they’re receiving from the Fish and Wildlife Service, plus a grant from Mead-WestVaCo, a paper conglomerate trying to clean up its image. Trout Unlimited wants to “rebuild” the river, a multimillion-dollar project. A hundred years ago, companies dynamited the boulders and channels to turn the main stem into one big flume. The only deep pools left are a dozen places where railroad trestles cross the river, totally manmade. The winterkill is staggering.

“The pricks,” says Nedermeyer. “We just bent over and let them do it. Begged them to.”

“The river can come back,” Gary promises.

Kathryn disagrees. Downstream of here, the resort sloughs too much sediment into the water. It smothers fish eggs in the nest, even in minimal amounts. The only thing that could fix this place is another orogeny, new mountains, glaciation — a cataclysm. But she says nothing.

Nedermeyer croons, “Just give it time, give it time. And this one here wants to leave!”

He winks at Kathryn. Her eyes go glassy with embarrassment.

Michael flips an omelet expertly. When it’s slightly brown, he takes a fork and tips it turtle onto Shelly’s plate. She reaches for the catsup and sets out, as Michael says, to ruin a perfectly good omelet. She puts back the catsup. He says, “I was just teasing. Take it.”

Nedermeyer asks, “How much river you working?”

“Spruce down to First Fork.”

“Super-interesting. I run radar in the navy. Nuclear subs.”

“Did you?”

They readjust their feelings toward him. He laughs that musical laugh of his.

“I’d love to see what you do. Shelly says you hurt them, but you’re awful nice about it.”

They decide to tag a fish for the hell of it tomorrow and show off their gear. After dinner, Nedermeyer says, “This is a whole lot of fun. I wish we could pay you back. Me and Shelly appreciate this.”

Gary says, “You’ll figure something out.”

After inserting the telemeter, Michael slips a dazed nine-inch brook trout into the water. A slash of bronze takes the poor thing and disappears.

“Jesus! Looked like a fucking water spaniel. About took your hand off, didn’t he?”

“Get me the pack,” Michael says.

A German brown trout so big the electric shock doesn’t even stun it, just sends it jumping and shirking and headshaking, dousing them all. Kathryn leaps on it with both hands. When she lifts the thrashing hook-jawed brown, it disgorges the bedraggled brook trout they just tagged. Michael saves the telemeter, slitting open the sutures. With a digital camera, they take hero shots gripping the fish — a grand female with scarred, scored flanks — and measure her. Over eight pounds, with a girth of fifteen inches. Statistically speaking, a larger fish than this river can support. Like finding a battleship in a parking garage. After wrecking the native trout population, the timber outfits introduced the fast-growing hatchery browns, and they’ve been here since, in token numbers. Cannibals. They promise to mail Shelly a copy of her picture.

“That’s the fish of a lifetime,” Nedermeyer says. “A guy’d kill for that. You see a lot like this?”

Gary says, “No. Not at all. We’ve caught some nudging twenty-four inches under the trestles, but nothing like this. Can you imagine her in the fall? She’d carry three pounds of eggs.”

Nedermeyer drinks from a battered water bottle, one taken from the researchers’ camp. He doesn’t bother hiding it. Maybe Shelly told him it was a gift. He hands it to Michael, who takes a drink and says, “Let’s track this one, too. For the hell of it.”

“We don’t do invasive species,” Kathryn says.

Gary cries, “Listen to the hissing of the sacred geese! Come on. It’s a salmonid. I’m just curious. Please. Don’t kill my joy. I’m an invasive species myself, of Eurocentric origin. Let us deduce the secrets of the dirty German fish.”

“Absolutely not. It’ll throw off my numbers.”

Michael lifts the trout, not quite as gingerly as he would a delicate native, to show off its leopard-spotted sides — cracked peppercorns, sunbursts of red, coronas of blue. The underbelly like rich, burnt butter. Brown: such a miserly name. The Linnaean, Salmo trutta, is so much to be preferred. And the melodic freshwater morpha: fario, lacustris.

Nedermeyer asks, “You mind if I fish around here?”

The gleaming eyes of an excited fisherman. Here we go, Kathryn tells herself. He’s seen the unused fly rods Gary and Michael brought to the mountain. Like all men in coldwater fisheries, they grew up loving to fish. After a year in the program, they’re sick of it. In three summers, Gary has fished all of twice. The electroshock wand makes fishing silly. It drains the river of mystery, of secrets, when you know what lives there. But even Gary and Michael are giddy now.

Kathryn says coolly to Nedermeyer, “I didn’t know you came here to fish.”

“I didn’t know this river had big-ass trout in it. Damn.”

Michael and Kathryn exchange looks. “Well,” she says, “we can’t stop you. I mean, we’re using these fish to do research. I wouldn’t want you frying up a mess of our test subjects.”

“I’ll throw big streamers for big fish. Not your itty-bitty ones. Can I borrow your rod?”

The odds of catching the big female are slim, especially in the clear, skinny water of July. Kathryn knows they’ll never see the trout again. Let him have his pointless fun.

And why did she go into the field? A twinge of pleasure, of knowledge. Her dad would pull over to the side of a bridge, and they would watch from above, before he slipped down the bank to catch them. She was charmed by the motions of trout. How they take their forms from the pressures of another world, the cold forge of water. Their drift, their mystery, the way they turn and let the current take them, take them, with passive grace. They turn again, tumbling like leaves, then straighten with mouths pointing upstream, to better sip a mayfly, to root up nymphs, to watch for the flash of the heron’s bill. The current always trues them, like compass needles. When she watches them, she feels wise.

Michael slips the trout back into the water. Gills rustle, blood-rich. The fins toggle.

“Fuck it,” Kathryn says. “Why not? Oh. Sorry, Shelly.”

“For what?”

Two days later, when Nedermeyer manages to catch that massive trout, they have a late Fourth of July party in celebration. It’s enough to feed the five of them, if not fill them. Kathryn sulks a little — not that she’s anti-fishing, she just didn’t want to see it killed — till Gary reminds her it’s an invasive species, a trashy European fish that pops her precious native brook trout like potato chips. A massacre artist! The Ted Bundy of fish! In the scheme of things, a minor sin. She decides to get kind of drunk and let live. They couldn’t believe it when Nedermeyer carried the trout into camp. It was long as a lady’s stocking. Shelly danced about it, clapping hands.

“What can I say? I got good luck.”

After scaling it, Nedermeyer fills the body cavity with sweet onions and a strip of bacon. He wraps the trout in tinfoil and cooks it over the fire on a blackened grillwork. He disdains their portable stove. With raw fire, he bakes potatoes and cinnamon apples and roasts field corn, showing Shelly how to blacken each ear just so. For all his roughness, he’s a good, doting father. Kathryn fleetingly pictures having a child with him — a thought that dances through her brain like a feather on the wind. The trout’s flesh is pink and flaky like a salmon’s and falls apart. It has been eating crawdads, and the beta-carotene gives the flesh highlights of reddish richness. With the tines of a fork, Nedermeyer lifts out a delicious cheek and pops it into Shelly’s mouth.

It’s been a decade, at least, since any of the researchers have eaten trout.

Afterward, they fire off leftover Roman candles, taking care to stomp out loose fires that flare in the grass. Balls of light skitter and douse themselves in the river. Gary pulls out his gas-station harmonica and plays the four songs he knows. The wind begins to blow.

A clean linen moon rises over the mountain’s worn crest. Swaying a bit, Michael leaves to piss and wash his hands at the river. He’s gone a long time. The music manages to be rude, brassy, and sweet. They hear Michael out in the weeds. The world is raucous with tree frogs.

On a night like this, with music and chill summer air, Kathryn loves West Virginia. There are places on the map called Tennant Run, and a Tennant Cemetery in a hollow back of Circleville. Tuscarora County, where people are old-time Republicans and German stock, like her mother, a Propst. The boulderfields, the spaces empty of people — a lonesomeness city-dwellers could never comprehend. Sometimes it seems you know animals more intimately than people. Beaver heads cutting wake in the water, bear shit jeweled with seeds, deer quenching themselves in the river’s cool. Her family has lived here for three hundred years. But the place is wretchedly poor and backward and may never be right. She’s thirty-one, unmarried and maybe doesn’t want to be, with a little tuck in her smile. In a way, Nedermeyer is more correct for her — at least, that’s what her home tells her she deserves. Her relatives call her one of those professional students, with a touch of teasing, a touch of scorn, a frost-core of jealousy. Even her mother. You got any men following you around? No? I can’t believe that.

Michael returns, carrying an empty jug he found in the weeds. Clorox. He throws it and hits Nedermeyer square in the chest. In a second, they are standing face to face.

“You dumped bleach in the river. Under the railroad trestle. Come on!”

“Hold on now, I caught that fish, you saw me.”

“I didn’t see shit! You killed that fish with bleach.”

“Shelly saw.”

Don’t look at her, Kathryn tells herself. This is happening too fast. Everyone knows this county has a grand tradition of fishing with bleach, quarter sticks of dynamite, bottles of carbide.

“There’s probably more dead ones. Probably ours.”

“Oh my God,” Kathryn says.

Nedermeyer begins to blush, and it’s hard to tell if it’s from anger or embarrassment. “I caught it legal. I been fishing all my life. It’s no trick.”

“A gallon of bleach. Do you have any idea how bad this is?”

Shelly has her hands over her ears. She’s crying.

“You can’t prove that.”

Gary smirks and Nedermeyer tells him, “Shut your mouth, fat ass.”

Michael lights into him. He calls him a redneck, calls him nine types of motherfucker. “People like you have ruined this place,” he says. “Ruined it.”

In a book or a movie, this would be the hinge of Shelly’s life. The public shaming. Lightheaded now, Kathryn tries to remember a time like this with her dad. All she can recall is a day they went fishing the Elk, and when they returned, a redheaded man with a crooked jaw was leaning against their truck. Thought he was my buddy’s. I was fixing to leave a note. He left, walking fast. They found scratches on the paint where he’d tried to pry open the lock with a penknife. Her dad said, Well, you just never know what to expect from people.

Nedermeyer says, “You finished your speech? You’re awful proud of it.” He looks to Kathryn and asks her, “Can’t you talk some sense into these people?”

She realizes this was supposed to happen, that she would be called upon. When nothing comes, he cries out, “I knew your dad!”

She doesn’t know what to say.

“Come on,” Nedermeyer says to his daughter. “I’m not about to expose you to this kind of shit.”

Nedermeyer takes her by the hand. Crossing the field, they leave the researchers to the ruins of their party, to a sudden nip on the wind. Rain. When it comes, the researchers listen to it hissing in the fire.

No one wants to be first to slink off to the tents. They stand in silence, till a cracking summer downpour drives them inside, after three weeks of dry, to listen to the wet and deafening roar.

The sun comes up white and indistinct, shining through a gauze of humid sky. The researchers drift from sleep at the same time into a sodden camp. Across the field, the rain-crushed tent shines in the sun. The man and the girl must be miserable.

Then they realize the tent has been abandoned, and the doors of Kathryn’s truck are hanging open.

What they see stuns them.

Their clothes scattered across the field like dead men. The shotgun buried to its chamber in the mud. Their logbooks heavy with rain. A lantern smashed like a melon on a rock. Their laptops flung in the river. Their research wrecked. Nedermeyer and his daughter long gone.

The researchers are numb. Michael says they should take an inventory, so they unload the truck, reckoning up the damage. With a quizzical look, Michael holds up an unopened jug of bleach he finds in the back. The one they thought Shelly stole. He found it under the seat.

By the dead fire, Gary picks up the Clorox from the night before and examines it.

“Oh no.”

“What?”

He tips it over and shows them 06/1995 embossed on the bottom. “It was trash,” he says in a small voice. “It wasn’t his. It’s been here forever.”

Back at the state university, the people at computing manage, somehow, to salvage the hard drive from one of the laptops. A minor miracle. Their summer, Kathryn tells everyone, is saved. Then she regrets telling anyone about it at all.

Her paper shows that brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, in the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River, travel an incredible amount — as far as fifty meters a day, and nearly six kilometers up- and downriver — though the ones residing in tributaries keep still, more or less.

Everyone calls it a very fine piece of work. She presents at conferences around North America. The people at Arizona State send her congratulatory notes.

But on that awful morning on the mountain, the project was doomed. Kathryn sprawled on the flat rock, sluggish with guilt and dew-heavy clothes, believing death to be easier than life. In the grand scheme, did it matter? A fish no longer than a salad fork, and botched research, and what a girl thinks of her father. Small things, really. The small geography of their lives.

But it would set her back a year, she thought, another year lost when she felt, rightly or wrongly, that she didn’t have many to spare. Kathryn felt sun on her wrists, her neck. She hadn’t felt this way since she saw the spidery blue tipple and knew her father was dying underfoot, somewhere, somehow, in that hug of stone. Was she standing on him? Drills, ambulances, mine executives giving their press conference — they meant nothing.

The private road was too muddy to drive on without tearing it up. That was the worst. The researchers had to wait another day to leave the mountain. Again the clouds rolled in.

Rain smacking nylon, the only sound in the world, and not a smudge of light, not even from the tower. Michael didn’t come to Kathryn’s tent that night. She was disappointed. She hoped he would, so she could turn him back. She had decided to leave this place for good.