Paul Zindel: Loch

“You’re late again!” Cavenger glared from the control console. “We’ve started the sonar check.”

“Sorry,” Dr. Sam said, sliding into his seat at the recorders.

“Are the trawler nets ready?” Cavenger demanded to know.

“Yes sir,” Randolph, a radio specialist, said quickly.

“Tell the fleet to start engines!” Cavenger shot the order out as he stood up to check the port and starboard flanks.

“Start engines!” Emilio, Cavenger’s head trouble-shooter, passed the command.

The simultaneous roar from the engines of the yacht and fourteen skiffs echoed off the mountainsides. Cavenger yanked the microphone out of Emilio’s hand. “Low idle!” he yelled. The tumult from the engines dropped quickly.

He handed the mike back to Emilio. “I want to go in sixty seconds,” Cavenger said as he sat his thin, frail body back down in the black-leather swivel chair. With bald head and sunken eyes, he looked ghostly in the flickering of the sonar screens. Emilio, short, stocky, in his forties, sat on Cavenger’s right. On his left was John Randolph, a retired Air Force pilot and radioman. Haskell, the ship’s captain, was at the wheel. Behind them all, out of the power loop, was Dr. Sam, adjusting the styluses on the sonar graphic recorders.

The clanking sounds from the pair of shabby old brown fishing trawlers stabbed through the air as they flanked the fleet. Both trawlers were already in motion as planned, with a dozen Portuguese fishermen feeding out hemp netting from huge, rusted spindles.

“Are you ready, Sam?” Cavenger demanded to know.

“Ready,” Dr. Sam said.

Emilio looked at Cavenger.

“Go!” Cavenger ordered.

The water in the bay churned as the engines kicked their strength into the string of propellers. The boats lunged forward, shooting back trails of the peat-black deeper waters toward the shore.

“The line’s scraggly!” Cavenger complained. Randolph snapped to and took to the open deck with a power megaphone.

“Stay back of our bow!” he called off the port, then starboard, reinforcing the command with arm signals. The experienced skippers quickly firmed the lines until the boats looked like a wedge of flying geese, with The Revelation in the lead.

“Stay under seven knots if you want maximum sonar density,” Dr. Sam reminded.

The only boat to break the line was the catamaran. Loch swung down from the raft to watch Sarah circling The Revelation . She throttled the dual giant outboards of the cat, forcing Erdon to hold on to the video mount for support. Emilio moved out onto the open deck of the yacht to glare at her. She slowed down fast, allowing Erdon to get on with his shoot. Sarah saw Loch watching, let out a yelp, and gave him a big wave.

Zaidee looked up from Crashers and saw Sarah showing off. “Puberty must really suck,” she muttered.

Ten minutes into the search, Loch and Zaidee knew it was safe to make the transition from the rear deck to the control room, where they could watch Dr. Sam work. Once a search was under way, Cavenger and his crew were always much too busy even to notice them. As they entered the control room, the ocean of lighted dials and the BLIP … BLIP … BLIP of the monitor screens were hypnotic. Zaidee gave a thumbs-up to her dad and snuggled into a chair by the door. Loch moved farther into the room and slipped onto the seat next to his dad.

“Hi,” Loch whispered.

Dr. Sam gave them both a wink, then dropped his stare back onto the graphic recorders. The dozen styluses scratched ink zigzags on the rolls of graph paper marching forward beneath them, a permanent record of the lake floor and everything in between.

“I want the nets full out.” Cavenger snapped his fingers. Randolph broadcast the order to both trawlers.

“I told you to use steel netting,” Dr. Sam reminded Cavenger.

“Too expensive,” Cavenger shot back.

“Not if we find what you’re looking for.”

“Suppose I worry about that, Sam,” Cavenger said coldly, reaching his skinny hand to his neck, checking his shirt collar.

“If it’s any type of plesiosaur, it’s going to have teeth,” Dr. Sam said.

“You underestimate what fifteen million years of evolution, trapped in a lake like this, can do to an animal,” Cavenger said. “The same goes for whatever’s in Loch Ness, and that cousin of Nessie’s they’ve been spotting in British Columbia. Somebody’s going to catch one soon, and you’ll see what happens when you cramp any kind of beast long enough. It’s not going to evolve. A trapped beast devolves, it goes down the ladder of evolution. Like you, Sam,” Cavenger said, laughing.

Loch’s fingers tightened into a fist. He hated it when Cavenger put his father down in front of everyone, and he did that a lot. Maybe what Loch hated most was the way his father just took the abuse.

“You’re right about that, Mr. Cavenger.” Randolph backed Cavenger up as usual. By now he knew Cavenger’s every pet theory like a catechism. “It’s what happened to the sturgeon, right?”

“You bet it is.” Cavenger nodded. “Sturgeons were killers of the seas. A few million years trapped in glacial freshwater, and what do they end up as-pole fish with a suctorial, toothless mouth. Anything we find in this lake will be lucky if it doesn’t have to drink its food through a straw!”

Loch wasn’t going to sit still and let that one go by. “My dad and I catch a lot of northern pike with teeth as big as a barracuda’s.” Dr. Sam knocked his son with his knee as Cavenger swiveled in his chair. His nasty little eyes glared at Loch; then he chuckled, saying to the others, “Like father, like son.”

“And like father, like daughter ,” Zaidee spoke up from the back, as ticked off as Loch. She threw open the laptop and started playing Crashers again.

“We’ve got something,” Cavenger cut in, his eyes back on the master screen in front of him.

Emilio squirmed in his seat. “Something large, submerged, at two o’clock.”

“It’s alive,” Cavenger said.

Dr. Sam checked the zigzags, then glanced over to the sonar screens to confirm his reading. “No, it’s not. It’s a log.”

“How do you know?” Cavenger asked condescendingly.

“Because I’m trained to read sonar, and because the old logging mill’s dead off Boat Fourteen’s starboard,” Dr. Sam replied.

Randolph turned from the radio board. “Boat Fourteen reports eye contact. Confirms it’s a log.” Loch smiled and hit his father a silent high five as Cavenger stood and looked out toward the shore. “What’s a goddam logging mill doing on this lake anyway?”

“There used to be a water flow out the west end, a river that flowed down to Lake Champlain,” Randolph said.

“A deep river?” Cavenger wanted to know.

“Yes, pretty deep.” Emilio spoke up. “But they’ve installed a salmon grid on it now. Works like a dam.”

“They built the grid last year,” Dr. Sam offered.

“That’s why the thing is here then,” Cavenger said, excited.

At the wheel, Captain Haskell looked puzzled. He had learned over the years that as far as Anthony Cavenger was concerned, it was better not to draw him out on much. But his curiosity got the better of him. “What thing? Why is what here?”

Cavenger smiled. “It’s trapped. Our little creature is trapped.”

The north sky filled with dark clouds as the storm front marched over the mountain ridge. Just past the midpoint of the lake, the sonar picked up a surface disturbance in front of Boat One. The signal indicated something large and moving. As the boat closed, a cluster of swimming beavers was sighted. The beavers smacked the surface of the water with their tails and dove beneath the surface, splintering the signal.