“You’ve lost it!” Erman jeered.

He could not have lost it; the pond was not big enough. But another time he would mark its location with some kind of buoy, probably a piece of wood tied to the basket by a string long enough to allow the wood to float on the surface.

If there was another time.

At last his hands came in contact with the basketwork.

He sent up a silent prayer.

He found the neck of the trap and upended it so that the entrance was at the top, then he lifted.

It seemed heavy, and he worried that it might somehow have got stuck.

With a heave he pulled it above the surface, water pouring away through the small holes between the woven twigs.

When the water was gone he could see clearly into the trap. It was full of eels.

Eadbald said delightedly: “Would you look at that?”

Cwenburg clapped her hand. “We’re rich!”

“It worked,” Edgar said with profound satisfaction. This haul would allow them to eat well for a week or more.

Eadbald said: “I see a couple of river trout in there, and some smaller fish I can’t identify.”

“The tiddlers will serve as bait next time,” said Edgar.

“Next time? You think you can do this every week?”

Edgar shrugged. “I’m not certain, but I don’t see why not. Every day, even. There are millions of fish in the river.”

“We’ll have more fish than we can eat!”

“Then we’ll sell some and buy meat.”

They headed back to the house, Edgar carrying the basket on his shoulder. Eadbald said: “I wonder why no one did this before.”

“I suppose the previous owner of the farm didn’t think of it,” said Edgar. He thought some more and added: “And no one else in this place is hungry enough to try new ideas.”

They put the fish into a large bowl of water. Cwenburg cleaned and skinned a big one, then roasted it over the fire for breakfast. Brindle ate the skin.

They decided they would have the trout for dinner and prepare the rest for smoking. The eels would hang from the rafters and be preserved for the winter.

Edgar put the small fish back in the basket as bait and returned the trap to the pond. He wondered how much he would haul up the second time. If it was even half as much as today’s catch, he would have some to sell.

He sat looking at the ditch, the riverbank, and the pond. He had solved the flooding problem and might even have ensured that the family had enough to eat for the foreseeable future. So he wondered why he was not happy.

It did not take him long to figure out the answer.

He did not want to be a fisherman. Nor a farmer. When he had dreamed about the life ahead of him, he had never envisaged that his great achievement would be a fish trap. He felt like one of the eels, swimming round and round in the basket and always missing the narrow way out.