Fish Read Free

there.”
    “We have enough to carry. How are you going to carry a fish?” She looked at me, amused.
    “More importantly, how are you going to catch it, you silly fool?” muttered Dad as he tied up the last bag.
    “If I can catch it, I can take it,” I said, looking for a bucket or something to put it in.
    “I never said that. Honestly …,” said Dad.
    Mum handed me a small cooking pot with a handle. “Here you go. Somehow don't get muddy. Be quick.”
    “I don't think it will fit in there. It was much, much bigger—really,” I added as they looked at each other.
    “You will make a brilliant fisherman,” said Dad.
    “You have the right attitude already. Hurry now—and if you get muddy, you'll have to
stay
muddy. There are no more clean clothes. You'll have to walk to the border muddy, sleep muddy and …”
    I left them pulling the bags around to the doorwayto pack on the one remaining donkey, which a guide was bringing. Earlier, I had found it impossible to get to the water's edge. Why did I think I could catch this fish now?
    Sure enough, another patch of mud in the ring around the edge of the puddle seemed to have dried up. In fact, now I looked into the water, I saw it was hardly water at all—it was almost liquid mud itself.
    I poked with my stick gently, trying not to slip. For a moment, I saw nothing. Then, with another stir of the stick, a strange little black shape opened up in the thick muddy water right near my feet. A hole—it opened and shut again, like an eye blinking.
    The fish's mouth! I put down the kitchen pot carefully, filled with nice, clean bottled water, keeping my eye on the muddy patch of water where the mouth had appeared.
    Gulp! There it was again. Desperately grabbing for air, the fish had come up to the surface at the edge. I had no net, but somehow felt I wouldn't need it. Granddad had told Dad stories about people whotickled trout. You could just pick them up, right out of the water, if you went about it the right way.
    Slow and gentle, that was it. I crouched down, very, very slowly, and slid my hands into the water without making a ripple. The water was almost mud, and it felt like putting your hands into cold soup.
    Suddenly, I touched the fish. It sank away a little, but then struggled up to the surface again. I saw the open mouth, the mud-covered shape of an eye, and then my hands were around it. Gently but firmly, so it wouldn't get away, I lifted it out of the mud with both hands. It felt and looked like a huge piece of melted, slippery chocolate, but was cold, so cold. It flipped only once, in a tired way, as if it didn't really care whether I had caught it or not.
    Oh, I couldn't wait to get it in that clean water. I felt I was suffocating too. As I lowered it into the pot—the fish seemed far too big, yet somehow it fitted with ease—I let out my breath and realized I'd been holding it for ages.
    “There!” I said, and ran my fingers along its backand sides under the water, to help clean it. It wriggled a bit more vigorously now, and the mud drifted down to the bottom of the pot, leaving its scales shining and bright.
    I picked up the pot, because I was aching with crouching down, and carried it away from the puddle and the mud. Once on the path, I held the pot up to the light so that I could see the fish better.

TWO
    Really, it was only brown, with a silver white underneath, but as it turned and moved the brown changed into speckles and spots of gold and green and even blue and red.
    I carried the pot carefully up the path toward the house. It was hard not to spill the water, as the pot would swing and bump into my leg. I started to see Mum's point about the difficulties of carrying a fish all the way across the border.
    When I reached the house, a stranger—not an old man, but older than Dad—was there with a little grayish brown donkey. Mum and Dad were passing bags to the man, who was expertly strapping them onto the donkey's back.
    You might have said,