• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 952 0

on Asian rivers she had never seen its like. It was made of thick, strong nylon, and all along its length, at intervals of a yard or so, were weights — small fragments of broken tile. Stranger still, there were no hooks. Instead, spaced between the weights were bits of fish bone and dried cartilage, tied to the line with cord. It was difficult to see how the tackle worked: the expectation seemed to be that a fish would just attach itself to the line and permit itself to be reeled in. But surely no fish would do that. Then what could he be fishing for? She was at a loss for an answer. It was clear in any event that the line presented no threat to the dolphins and she could see no reason to object to his laying it so long as the boat kept to the right course.

She went back to the bow and readied herself to proceed with her mapping. With her monitor in hand she directed Fokir to the position from which they were to start. Then, just as Tutul was dropping the first weight in the water, she dipped the echo sounder and pressed the button.

The initial run was about a half mile long, and by the time they reached the end the whole line had been paid out. It was after they had turned to retrace their course that Piya discovered what the line was for: it was pulled in with a live crab hanging on to every ninth or tenth morsel of bait. The creatures had snapped their claws on the cartilage and would not let go. Fokir and Tutul had only to peel them off with a net and drop them into a pot filled with leaves. The sight made Piya laugh: so this was where the word “crabby” came from, a creature so stubborn that it would rather be captured than let go?

It took only a few more runs to confirm Piya’s guess that the dolphins had congregated in a declivity. Her soundings showed that the riverbed dipped by a good fifteen to twenty feet there, more than enough to provide for the dolphins’ comfort when the water was running low.

But it was not just for dolphins that the pool was a hospitable habitat: crabs too seemed to flourish there, and Fokir’s catch grew steadily with each successive run. At the start she had thought they might end up disrupting each other’s work — that her soundings would get in the way of his fishing or the other way around. But to her surprise no such difficulties arose: the stops required for the laying of the line seemed to be ideally timed for the taking of soundings. What was more, the line acted like a guide rail, keeping the boat on a straight and unvarying tack, and at the end of each run it led them right back to the precise starting point. In other circumstances Piya would have had to use the Global Positioning System to be sure of this, but here the line served the same purpose. She needed her monitor only to make sure that each run began at a point fifteen feet farther along the quadrant. This was just as much to Fokir’s advantage as it was to hers, since it ensured that his line never fell twice in the same place.

It was surprising enough that their jobs had not proved to be utterly incompatible — especially considering that one of the tasks required the input of geostationary satellites while the other depended on bits of shark bone and broken tile. But that it had proved possible for two such different people to pursue their own ends simultaneously — people who could not exchange a word with each other and had no idea of what was going on in one another’s heads — was far more than surprising: it seemed almost miraculous. Nor was she the only one to remark on this: once, when her glance happened accidentally to cross Fokir’s, she saw something in his expression that told her that he too was amazed by the seamless intertwining of their pleasures and their purposes.

When the crab pot was full, Fokir covered its mouth with an aluminum plate and passed it to her so she could release the catch into the hold. Looking in, she saw that there were some fifteen crabs inside the pot, eyeing her balefully, snapping their claws. When she tipped the pot over they tumbled out in a chain and disappeared into the hold