in her throat. That sound had been known to stop a brown bear in its tracks; unintimidated, the halibut heart kept on beating without pause. A rumbling growl and Mutt backed away on stiff legs, yellow eyes never leaving the palpitating lump of red flesh, and retreated to the bow, where she stayed until they got back to Cordova the next morning.

Kate felt like joining her. Cut out from its chest, separated from its body which even now was being boned and sliced into steaks behind her, the organ beat on relentlessly, heaving up and down on the black-painted surface of the gunnel. "How long's it keep doing that?" she said.

Old Sam shrugged. "I seen 'em beat for hours after getting cut out of a body. Just ain't ready to give up, I guess." He grinned at her. "Bothering you, girl?"

Kate drew herself erect and lied like a trooper. "Of course not."

Old Sam laughed, and the damn halibut heart kept beating while she hauled buckets of water up over the side to wash down the deck. It kept beating as she wrapped and stowed the halibut fillets in the walk-in freezer next to the engine room below aft, and it was still beating when Old Sam moved them back to their original anchorage just in time to meet the first laden bowpicker as she waddled up, hold spilling a mound of fish from gunnel to gunnel.

"Okay, girl, get them hatch covers off," Sam bawled from the bridge. "Time to hunt and gather."

They were lucky in (hot the fish were running so well, encouraging the fishermen to off-load full holds into the Freya and go back for more. If the fishing had been slow, the holds of the smaller boats would not have been filled by the end of the period, and they would have hauled their own fish back to the canneries in Cordova, where they would have earned a penny extra a pound, a penny Old Sam regarded as by rights belonging to him. Since Kate was earning a deck boss share, she felt kind of proprietary about it herself.

The hatch covers, long boards twelve feet in length, came off to reveal the square mouth of the Freya's hold. With a revulsion Kate didn't understand herself she moved the still-beating halibut heart to the stern, out of the way and, truth be told, out of her sight.

She would have thrown it overboard if Old Sam hadn't been watching her every move with a gleeful eye. Old Sam would have thrown it overboard if he hadn't taken a perverse delight in how much it bothered her. Between the two of them, the halibut heart was destined to thump up and down on the gunnel until the end of the season.

She laughed at herself, at the both of them, until a hail from an approaching boat reminded her to get to work before Old Sam had even more cause to flex his testosterone, and she trotted forward again to catch the line tossed her by Tim Sarakovikoff. He skippered a trim little bowpicker called the Esther, named for his mother, who would be proud when she heard her namesake had been first in the period to come alongside.