With each fish Lucy caught, Sheridan's glare toward her little sister intensified, and she moved farther upstream away from her. It's not fair, Joe knew she was thinking.

"Dad, come here and look at this," Sheridan called, breaking into his rumination. He pulled the slack tight on his rod and looped his line through his fingers before walking up the bank toward her. She was pointing down at something in the water beneath her feet.

It was a dead trout, white belly up, lodged between two exposed stones. The fish bobbed in a natural cul-de-sac dark with pine needles and sheaths of algae that had washed down with the current. He could tell from the wet, vinyl-like sheen on the fish's pale underside and the still-bright twin slashes of red beneath its gills that it hadn't been dead very long.

"That's a nice fish," Sheridan said to Joe. "A cutthroat. How big do you think it is?"

"Thirteen, fourteen inches," Joe replied. "It's a dandy." Instinctively, he reached down for Maxine's collar. He could feel her trembling under her skin through her coat, anxious to retrieve the dead fish.

"What do you think happened to it?" she asked. "Do you think somebody caught it and threw it back after it was dead?"

Joe shrugged, "Don't know." On a previous trip, Joe had instructed Sheridan how to properly release a fish back into the water after he caught it. He had shown her how to cradle it under its belly and lower it slowly into the water so that the natural current would revive it, and how to let the fish dart away under its own power once it was fit to do so.

She had asked him about the ethics of eating caught fish versus releasing them, and he told her that fish were for eating but that there was no reason to be greedy, and that keeping dead fish in a hot creel all day and throwing them away later because they were ruined was an ethical problem, if not a legal one. He knew this is what she was thinking about when she pointed out the dead fish.