Gull gave his head a sympathetic wag. "I wonder sometimes myself how accurate those fish counts can be. You know, there was a trader from Andromeda riding deadhead on the last SeaLandSpace freighter through here, he was telling me"

A movement caught her eye and she looked up to see Old Sam heading down the ramp. "Oops. There's my boss. Gotta go. Thanks again for the truck."

Gull waved her off with a regal hand, very much master of all he surveyed. "Okay, Kate. See you."

She caught up with Old Sam as he was about to board the Freya. "Hey, Sam."

"Hey, girl." Nimble in the face of eighty winters, Sam hopped over the gunnel and landed lightly on the deck.

She followed him into the galley, and sat down as he began assembling the ingredients for dinner. With something of a shock, Kate realized that it wasn't even six o'clock. It had been a full day. "Listen, Sam?"

"What?" he said, pulling a package of mooseburger out of the sink where he'd left it to thaw at breakfast. He turned a burner on and got out a frying pan.

She sidled in next to him and made her own patty. She liked hers thicker than he did his. "Could we maybe head back for Alaganik after dinner?"

He paused. "Why? It's early yet. And we don't even know what hours the period's going to be, let alone is anybody fishing it."

"There isn't one," Kate said. "It was on the radio in the harbormaster's office."

"No period?"

Kate shook her head.

"Why the hell not?" Old Sam said indignantly. "Christ on a crutch, what about all the fish we saw heading north yesterday? And hardly anyone with a net in the water?" He slammed his patty into the frying pan with unnecessary force, and the resulting sizzle nearly took off his eyebrows. "It's those goddam sport fishermen, is what it is, and their idiot escape demands. That goddam Bill Nickle won't be satisfied until the only red taken from the Sound is taken with a silver spinner."

Kate set her patty down next to his. The subsequent tantalizing aroma made her mouth water. There was nothing better than mooseburger, especially in the middle of the summer, when it seemed you would never get the smell of fish out of your nostrils or the fish scales out of your hair. Frying mooseburger was the smell of fall, and dry land beneath your feet, and settlement time.

Kate waited until they'd eaten before broaching the matter of their departure a second time. Old Sam was much more approachable on a full stomach. For that matter, so was she.

"We might as well put 'er in dry dock," he said glumly, "all the fish we're likely to haul in this year. Hardly worth the price of copper paint."

Kate wasn't sure she'd ever seen Old Sam glum before. A mischievous, sometimes malicious, always impudent elf of a man, he enjoyed life and irritating the people in it too much to squander time brooding. As annoying as he usually was, she found she didn't like it when he wasn't. "Listen, Sam, I need to talk to some people on the Alaganik beach. Maybe even some of the drifters." She paused. "It'd be a lot easier to have the Freya as a base of operations."