Next to her the old man grinned. "Ain't this the life?"

"Ain't it though." She yawned hugely. The sun poured down over everything like warm gold. Wavelets lapped at the hull, an ephemeral zephyr dusted her cheek. A small swell raised the hull and for a moment the Freya strained against the force of the incoming tide. Kate opened one eye, but the bow and stern anchors held and she closed it again. She heard a deep sigh, and let her hand slide down from the arm of the chair. With an almost voluptuous groan, Mutt rolled over on her side, legs in the air. Scratch my belly, please. Kate smiled, her eyes still closed, and complied.

There was a faint shout somewhere off to starboard.

Nobody moved.

There was another shout, louder this time, followed by others, growing in volume and alarm.

Mutt huffed out an annoyed breath and raised her head to look at Kate. Kate sighed heavily, opened her eyes and looked across at Old Sam, one deck chair over. Old Sam swore creatively and rose to walk to the railing, shading his face with one hand. Off the port bow he saw a bowpickerthe Tanya, he thought, narrowing his eyeswith two sweating, straining, swearing men in the bow. Most of the net was in the water and the men seemed to be playing tug-of-war with it. They pulled back on the net, the net pulled them and the boat forward, they pulled back, the net pulled them forward. Old Sam watched, amazed, as the bowpicker left a wake of tiny whirlpools, moving drunkenly but steadily southward, toward the mouth of the bay and Prince William Sound beyond.

"Goddam," Old Sam said respectfully.

Kate's chair creaked and footsteps sounded on the deck behind him. "What?"

The crow's-feet at the corners of the old man's bright brown eyes deepened. "Well, either Captain Nemo needs a shore launch, or Doug's got himself a halibut tangled in his lead line."

Kate squinted in the light. "It's pulling them against the tide." They watched, fascinated, as even the cork line was dragged below the surface. The net jerked suddenly and the bowpicker lurched left to scrape its port side along the starboard side of the Angelique. Rhonda Pettingill, looking up from untangling a fifty-pound king from her gear, was too astonished at the sight to do anything but stare. When the Tanya cut the cork line of the Marie Josephine, Terry and Jerry Nicolo were more forthcoming.

"Well, shit," Old Sam said, and scratched behind one ear. "Why don't they just cut 'er loose?"

"Urn," Kate said.

He looked over at her. "What?"

She shoved her hands in her back pockets, one hip cocked, as she admired the tan of one splayed knee. "The Tanya just lost a set of gear last week, didn't they? Got hung up on a deadhead off Strawberry Reef?" She let him think about it for a minute. "And you know how anal Doug gets about losing to a fish anyway."