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  Catching a truly big fish had always been one of our major goals in life, and lake trout are big. The Pactola Lake record was twenty-five pounds. We’d tried casting from the shore a couple of times over the years, caught some rainbows and German browns but never a lake trout. As everybody knows, you have to fish deep for lake trout, deeper and deeper as the summer goes along. They like to hang out down where the water is coldest. With a boat, we could get out on the lake and fish the deep water.

  After chowing down on granola, we threw our tent in the trash and bicycled down to the lake. I started pumping up the Challenger with its little plastic pump. The ribs of the inflatable floor took shape nicely. Slowly but surely, the perimeter tube began to rise. While I pumped, Quinn assembled the two-piece oars and fooled with our fishing gear. The lake was mirror-calm and the sun was shining bright.

  Our raft looked awful small as we walked it out to knee-deep water, but we weren’t talking about it. Quinn got in first. I handed him the Eliminators, then slipped the oars through the plastic oarlocks and climbed aboard carefully. The outside tube wasn’t really substantial enough to sit on—the lake would have poured in. As pictured on the box, we sat on the floor facing each other, my legs inside Quinn’s. My backpack, with tackle and Fred inside, sat between us. We might’ve looked silly, like two men in a tub, but nobody was watching and we were crazed with fish lust, which is indescribable if you aren’t a fisherman. It consumes you utterly, turns you into a prehistoric, spear-chucking caveman.

  Quinn hung on to the Eliminators as I rowed in the direction of the island that always appears on the Pactola postcards. It was still so early, there wasn’t a motorboat on the lake, but there would be anytime now. We were feeling lucky. Fishing tends to be best early, especially on sunny days.

  The going was slow because the oars and the oarlocks were so rinky. Finally we reached water deep enough to start fishing. Quinn was sure he had the hot ticket, a huge silver spoon with revolving red eyes. I selected a giant red and white Daredevil.

  We soon discovered we had a problem. We needed to keep the boat moving, but with those toy oars, we couldn’t get up enough speed to give the lures trailing behind us any action. We were getting some curious looks from the suddenly plentiful motorboats. After an hour with me working those oars fast as eggbeaters and still no bites, we headed for shore in utter defeat. “The Challenger was challenging, all right,” Quinn said sourly.

  “It isn’t built for speed, I’ll give you that.”

  “What’s it built for, Brady?”

  “Swimming pool.”

  The closest shoreline was a campsite where an old guy with a grizzled beard was sitting on a lawn chair in front of his camper and watching us come in. He wasn’t laughing, which was good. Fishing can make you feel murderous at times, especially when people are watching you make a fool of yourself.

  We staggered ashore. The old guy looked sympathetic. He asked if we wanted some fried chicken.

  “Fried chicken?” Quinn echoed. “We accept!”

  The old guy went into his camper and came back with enough fried chicken and potato salad to choke an army, along with sodas, pickles, and chips. Life was good again.

  “Call me Curly,” our benefactor told us. We got the joke—his head was slick as a billiard ball. Curly told us he was from Missouri, and that he hadn’t shaved since he left home in June. We told him we’d been trying to troll for lake trout.

  “Forget the lures, boys. I suggest you try worms. You won’t have to troll. Just sit out there and wait for them to bite.”

  When we mentioned we didn’t have any worms, Curly replied, “No problem. I’m an old worm grunter.”

  Worm grunter? That was a new one on us. As we got into the pickles and chips, the old-timer produced a heavy wooden stake, a sledgehammer, a pair of gloves, and a serious strap of metal, which he called a stob. Curly put his gloves on, pounded the stake into the ground, and began to rub the stob back and forth over the top of the stake, faster and faster. He was sure enough grunting all the while.

  Pretty soon Curly was so red in the face I thought I was going to see my first heart attack. What we saw instead, all around us, were worms coming up out of the ground—huge night crawlers. “Grab ’em, boys, grab ’em! Soon as I quit, they’ll dive back under!”

  We collected two dozen or so crawlers fast enough to avert Curly’s coronary, then put them in a paper box we had emptied of fried chicken. “Fish the lake bottom,” the old guy wheezed. “I hear it’s a hundred and fifty feet deep—that’s where the lake trout will be.”

  We had to admit we didn’t have any bait holder hooks or weights to get our lines down to the bottom.

  “Got plenty,” Curly said. In no time at all he had us totally rigged up. He even packed our crawlers with wet moss. We thanked him and climbed back into the Challenger.

  15

  You Guys Got a Problem

  QUINN HAD A TAKE-NO-PRISONERS set to his jaw as I rowed us around and beyond the island. “We’re going for deep water,” my cousin declared. “I mean, deep water, where monsters dwell.”

  “Extreme fishing,” I chanted. “This is gonna be epic. Today we bust a blue whale.”

  We’d soon be out among the motorboats, but we weren’t worried about getting sunk and dismembered—they were fishing. They’d killed their big outboard motors and switched to their little electric trolling motors. Two or three miles an hour was all they were going.

  The only boat roaring around on the lake was one pulling a water-skier, a mile away at least. Pactola is nearly three miles long, and they had plenty of water to play with. A lot of days you won’t see anybody waterskiing on Pactola. It can get windy and the water is way cold. The Carver boys sometimes skied it, though. I was hoping this wasn’t them.

  Quinn was on the same wavelength as he squinted into the distance. “That better not be the Corpse Hunter.”

  “If it is,” I said, “they’ll never know we’re out here.”

  That name we’d made up for their boat—Corpse Hunter—was a closely held secret. You didn’t kid Buzz and Max about their father being the coroner. Not that they didn’t sometimes talk about the “stiffs,” as they liked to call them. You got the idea they’d seen more than a few. They’d even shown us the hook that their daddy drags behind the family motorboat to snag corpses off the bottom of the lake.

  “No worries,” I declared. “What are the chances that’s them? They’re home finishing their catapult.”

  I quit rowing. It was time to deploy Curly’s night crawlers. I chose two of the juiciest and baited the hooks. We lowered away, Quinn off of one side, me off the other.

  It took a good while for our weights to hit bottom, and then we waited. We remembered to loosen the drag on our reels. The line was only 8-lb. test. A big lake trout would snap the line in a hurry if it couldn’t run with it.

  The wind came up a little, but we were still comfortable in our T-shirts. A fisherman on a boat a hundred yards away was hooked up with a rod-bending fish. It had to be a lake trout. The battle went on for a good ten minutes before one of his buddies netted the lunker and brought it over the side. The sound of their celebrating made us feel empty and rotten. We were suffering some serious fish envy.

  “They caught it trolling with a big old spoon,” Quinn said darkly.

  “We trust in worms,” I maintained. “You know what, Quinn? We didn’t bring a net. How are we gonna get a big one into the boat?”

  “If we get a fish on, maybe we can holler to one of the other boats and they’ll loan us theirs.”

  “Good plan.”

  That plan had no future. Here came the boat pulling the water-skier, down toward our end of the lake. There went all the boats that were fishing, toward the water the ski boat had vacated.

  Before long we were hit by the wake from the speeding boat. The first wave had come from a distance and wasn’t all that powerful, but even so it splashed over the side of our raft. We motioned for them to back off. />
  If they’d seen us, they didn’t let on. They kept coming. There were two guys inside the boat, a driver and a passenger. The water-skier, a big guy, was skiing slalom, snowboard-style. You had to be good to do that. He was wearing a wet suit and kicking up quite a plume. “That skier has a buzz haircut,” I reported.

  Quinn took another look, then groaned. “That’s Buzz, no question about it. Maybe the Corpse Hunter hasn’t recognized us. Try not to look at ’em.”

  “Believe me, I won’t.”

  “Hey, Brady, check out my rod tip!”

  My head jerked around. The tip of Quinn’s Eliminator was getting some action. He saw it, and I saw it, and neither one of us said another word.

  Down went Quinn’s rod tip again, but not convincingly. It was just another nibble. Another little piece of the worm had just been bitten off.

  For about five seconds, nothing. Quinn and I exchanged glances, wondering if his fish was going to come back for the big chomp. Sometimes they don’t.

  This one did. When the chomp came, Quinn set the hook like a pro. Then, ziiiiiiiiiiing, the line went screaming off his reel. “Fish on!” Quinn cried. “Has to be a lake trout!” Quick as I could, I reeled in my own line so it wouldn’t get tangled with his.

  That first run nearly took all hundred yards off Quinn’s reel. Another few seconds and the 8-lb. test would’ve snapped. Luckily, the lunker did a U-turn. Quinn reeled furiously enough to keep tension on the line. His spool was half-full again when the trout ripped off another run. Quinn hung on like he was riding a bucking bronco. “This thing’s gotta be huge, Brady. A behemoth. Here, fishie, here, fishie.”

  The battle raged on with run after run. Quinn’s Eliminator was bent in an absolute horseshoe. “This is killing me,” he cried. “My arms are cramping like crazy.”

  It was easy to see why. Quinn’s biceps and forearms were like rope at the snapping point. The cords in his neck were tight as bowstrings, and his face was seriously purple.

  We heard the roar of the Carvers’ boat, knew they were getting closer. From the corner of my eye I saw Buzz at the end of the tow rope. The arc he was carving with his slalom ski was going to take him real close to us.

  As Buzz raced by, he was strong enough to hang on with only one hand. He waved big as life with the other and yelled, “DON’T HORSE HIM, QUINN!”

  A second later we got totally doused by the spray off his ski. Two seconds after that we got rocked by a major wake from their boat that left the Challenger half-full of water.

  “Thanks a lot!” Quinn yelled, but of course they couldn’t hear. Max, riding shotgun in the boat, was pointing back at us and laughing. The driver was big brother Cal—Silent Cal, as Quinn always called him. Cal must have been loving this, too. Speed and intimidation were his game, whether it was running the football and knocking guys down or climbing up their tailpipe behind the wheel of his 1970 Mercury Spoiler.

  I splashed water fast as I could out of the raft. “Fish still on?”

  Quinn nodded. “No thanks to them.”

  The Carvers veered off in another direction. We could only hope they were gone for good.

  Quinn began to gain on his adversary. At last we saw a flash in the dark green depths. A few minutes later we got a much better look. We saw the laker’s giant head, its long, beefy body, even the spots along its sides. “That’s no fish,” I said, “that’s a Jurassic ichthyosaur. We should give him a name.”

  “You give him a name. I’m busy.”

  “How about Stan, after the T-rex in the museum?”

  “Stan it is. Hey, Brady, we need a plan. Without a net, we’ve got no chance.”

  “No boats close now, except for the Corpse Hunter. They might have a net. Should I wave ’em over?”

  “Do it. Do it now!”

  I looked over and saw the Carver boat standing still. Buzz was climbing back in. I waved them over, furiously.

  No question about it, our monster was tiring. We got all sorts of good looks as he swam back and forth, sounded, then came back up and thrashed the surface.

  Here came the Carvers, in a hurry, but that’s what we’d asked them to do. Cal roared close, too close, then cut the power back suddenly. “You guys got a net?” I yelled.

  They looked around. “Sorry,” Max said with perverse satisfaction. “Usually we do.”

  “What a whopper,” Buzz gushed. “Like I said, Quinn, don’t horse him. Whatever you do, don’t horse him.”

  Stan came to the surface again, gave us our best look yet. “That thing’ll go over thirty pounds!” Buzz cried. “Pactola record!”

  The Corpse Hunter drifted closer yet. “Give Quinn some space,” I pleaded.

  “What’s the harm?” snapped Silent Cal, but he knew what I was talking about. When you’re trying to land a big fish, the last thing you want is an audience.

  I tried to put the Carvers out of my mind. “Try to work him against the raft, Quinn. I’ll flip him inside with my hands.”

  Max laughed. “This I gotta see. Hey, check it out, he’s barely hooked.”

  Three times Quinn got the big one close to my hands, oh, so close. Each time, Stan would summon strength and dive. The fourth time, Quinn guided his whale right alongside the raft. I reached out, but Stan’s big old eye saw my grasping hands and he went into a frenzy. The monster beat the water to a froth and twisted away. “Gimme one more chance,” I pleaded.

  Quinn turned our prize once more, and here it came, once more right along the raft. Now was the time to strike, and I struck. I pinned Stan against the tube and began to work him up and up so I could flip him inside.

  Stan was right there, completely out of the water, for a moment that will live forever in infamy. Our dream trout was in my hands, but the hook at the corner of his mouth was gone. Quinn’s line was blowing limply in the wind.

  I tried my best to hang on, but Stan was so strong and so slippery. With a whip of his spine he slipped free. As bad luck would have it he fell into the lake, not the raft. A few strokes of his mighty tail and Stan was headed for deep water. There he went, disappearing where the green water meets the black, and then he was gone.

  We were too stunned, too sick, to even speak. I glanced over at the Corpse Hunter and found them smirking.

  “Hey, look at your boat,” Buzz yelled. “You guys got a problem.”

  Buzz was right. The Challenger was deflating fast.

  “Fish hook must’ve got it,” Quinn said. We were wallowing in water. In a few seconds, the floor of the raft would be our only flotation.

  “Looks like you guys could use some help,” Buzz observed, and Cal brought the Corpse Hunter alongside.

  Quinn handed our rods up to Max, who was still smirking. “Hey, nice rods.” I’d never felt this humiliated in my entire life. In defeat, in helplessness, I handed my backpack from our sinking raft to Buzz’s outstretched hand. I still can’t believe what happened next. He fumbled it, just dropped it into the lake.

  Fred, I remembered a moment too late. Fred’s in that backpack!

  Just that fast, I went over the side. I kicked and dove and I followed my backpack down, down, down. It was sinking fast, into murkier and murkier water, but I kept stroking and kicking hard as I could. Strangely, I wasn’t feeling the cold or the pressure on my eardrums.

  A couple more kicks and I’ve got it, I thought, but the water was getting almost black. With a last lunge I felt the backpack slip through my fingers. Then it was gone, swallowed up by the pitch dark.

  It was a long, long way back up. How had I managed to dive so deep? I wondered how I could’ve done that, but then I knew. I didn’t understand, but I knew.

  I exploded through the surface, gasping for air.

  “Sorry about the backpack,” Buzz said as he hauled me aboard the Corpse Hunter. “How weird was that? That thing sank like a rock. Man, I can’t believe how long you were down.”

  “What was in it?” Max asked a little suspiciously.

  I had to think fast. �
��My inhaler,” I sputtered.

  “I can’t believe you aren’t breathing any harder, Steele. What about your asthma?”

  “I haven’t had an attack in, like, a year.”

  “Sank like a rock,” Max repeated suspiciously. “Hmmmm…”

  16

  Extreme Is the Word

  OUR RIDE BACK TO Hill City was clouded with gloom. Gloom and disaster and defeat. Thanks to my utter and clueless stupidity, Fred was now on the bottom of the lake. I’d had him only sixty-some hours, not even long enough to look into how much he was worth, and I’d already lost him.

  “Quite valuable,” I kept hearing the professor say.

  “He’s safe in my backpack,” I heard myself assuring Quinn.

  Back at the boat ramp, the Carvers had offered to throw our bikes in the back of their daddy’s pickup and drop us at home. This was totally rubbing it in. “No, thanks,” I muttered, and we got on our bikes. Out on the highway Cal honked as their pickup roared by towing the Corpse Hunter. Max leaned out the window and gave us a gleeful wave.

  The Carver boys were soon out of sight. Unfortunately they weren’t out of mind. I knew exactly what it was like inside the cab of that truck. We’d given them so much to hoot at and laugh about, it was pathetic.

  Quinn had a black cloud over his head, too. I could feel it from my vantage point as I pedaled behind his rear wheel. “I’m leading,” he had announced as were leaving Pactola. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Quinn had had it. He was disgusted, and I didn’t blame him one bit.

  As we pulled into Hill City, neither of us even glanced over at Grabba Java. It felt like we were riding in a dark tunnel. I was surprised when Quinn slowed down and stopped in front of the museum.

  I looked at my watch. Four o’clock. We were right on time for our appointment with the professor, but what was the point of going through with it now?