She lifted one fish by the belly, not squeezing, just showing me the size. And these are not trash fish. Some of these are marketable young stock. Whoever dumped them did not understand what they had behind us. A bass rolled near the bank, pale side flashing, then went still.
Troy waited in with the dipnet, and scooped it out. He held it up, water dripping off its tail. It was one of mine from the batch I had been raising all season. Not the most valuable fish in the pond by itself, but it was the first dead one I could recognize. That made the whole thing stop being a mess and become a loss.
Nenah saw my face and softened her voice. "If we move fast, we can save part of this." But if the county freezes movement because of that contamination claim, you may be stuck watching them die in place. My phone rang before I could answer. It was the buyer I had been preparing for, a hatchery operator up near Waco.
He had received Diane's notice forwarded by someone in Blue Cedar. He was polite, which somehow made it worse. Caleb, I cannot send a truck into a disputed contamination issue. He said, "Call me when you can prove what happened and what is still clean." The line went quiet.
There went my scheduled inspection. There went my timeline. A ranch does not bleed money dramatically. It leaks it through canceled loads, delayed checks, extra fuel, dead stock, and equipment running all night. I looked at the pond my father had dug, at Troy holding my dead fish, at Nenah kneeling beside a net full of someone else's mistake, and I stopped thinking about getting Diane to apologize.
Apologies do not put oxygen back in water. "Can you estimate what is in here without counting every fish?" I asked Nenah. She nodded. "We sample by net.
Count the sample and multiply it across measured pulls. Like estimating jelly beans in a jar, only wetter and more expensive." "Then that is what we do." I turned to Troy. No fixing the gate yet.
Chain it from our side. Set the tubs by the dam and keep every dead fish separate from every live pull. Then I opened my camera again and started recording. The first if Diane wanted to call my pond a hazard, I was going to document exactly who created it, what it was worth, and how much of it was dying by the hour. My plan fit into one sentence.
Turn Diane's hazard back into an inventory. If she wanted the county, the residents, and my buyer to look at my pond, then I wanted them looking at numbers, not rumors. Troy and I worked from opposite banks while Nenah called out counts from the first sample net. The seine slid through the shallows with a gritty whisper. Cork floats bobbing, lead line dragging mud.
Every pull came up alive with motion. Silver sides, green backs, open mouths, tails hammering the mesh. Nenah counted a measured section, marked the size class, and wrote it on a damp clipboard. Again, she said, "We did it again." Then again, not because I enjoyed lifting nets under a Texas sun, but because a rancher learns early that a loss is just a sad story until you can put a number beside it.