Orphan's Triumph

FORTY-SEVEN

COLD PRICKLED MY NAKED ANKLES as I waded against the incoming tide. Twenty yards seaward from the shanty, I reached the nearest tide pool, where the water deepened until it chilled my knees. Trident at port arms, like the fisherman we had passed in the estuary the previous afternoon, I peered down into water as clear as aquamarine gin. Multicolored invertebrates, some spiked, some tentacled, clung to the rock bottom like an animate English garden. Among them crabbed trilobites the size of flat shrimp. All crust and no filling, the little ones were also too quick to spear, and I bypassed them.

It took me ten minutes to spot a six-pounder, fat and spiny. I slid to one side, so my long shadow thrown by the rising sun wouldn’t cross him, then drew back the trident.

I held my breath, then lunged at breakfast. As the trident’s tines splashed into the water, the trilobite shot away. Into its place, where my trident’s tines struck, flashed a dull red streak.

“Damn!” I lifted my trident two-handed, like a full pitchfork. Impaled on the three tines squirmed a three-foot-long replica of the lobe-finned giant that hung above Celline’s mantel. Fins as sturdy as stumpy legs, which enabled the lober to wriggle across rock from pool to pool and meal to meal at low tide, thrashed, and a mouth filled with needle teeth snapped. No wonder lober fishermen wore leather armor.

My accidental catch weighed ten pounds if it weighed one, and lobers were better eating even than trills. The fish’s struggles subsided, and I cocked my head and said, loud as if the fish could hear me over the tidal rush, “See? If you hadn’t gone after the little fish, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

The tidal rush had not only grown louder, it had grown irregular, a rhythmic splashing behind me.

I turned with the trident in my hands.

Twenty feet away, a rhizodont as big as the twenty-footer that hung above Celline’s mantel eyed me head-on. With two-thirds of its body above the waterline, its mouth gulped like, well, a fish out of water, and its pincushion of teeth dripped seawater like it was salivating over a snack.

Which it was.

“Crap.” Slowly I turned toward the shanty. What had I just told my victim about the perils of pursuing little fish?

The great fish lunged toward me, lurching on thick, lobed fins, flopping side to side like a GI low-crawling under barbed wire on his elbows. Semi-submerged bulk buoyed by knee-deep salt water, the fish closed the gap between us faster than a man can jog.

I sprinted away like my hair was on fire, screaming. But high-kneed in the tide pool, I was moving slower than a man can jog.

When the gap had narrowed to fifteen feet, I chucked the fish and trident back at the monster as a peace offering.

The trident wedged between teeth in the beast’s lower jaw like a canapé on a toothpick but didn’t slow the rhiz.

The shanty ladder was ten yards away, but the rhiz was now ten feet back.

My bare foot came down through the water onto something that exploded pain into my arch like a land mine. I stumbled and fell face-first into the shallows.