When Is a Man Read Online Free Page A

bottles marked with millilitre increments and filled with amber-coloured clove oil, a few drops of which had been added to the water inside the cooler to serve as an anesthetic. Another tool looked like a pricing gun at a retail store, loaded with transparent filaments tipped with round, blue plastic ends, each marked with a five-digit number.
    â€œBring the lantern so you can see what I’m doing.” Tanner stood at the edge of the creek with his headlamp. Dark things thrashed and churned inside the weirs—fish jockeying for position as they tried to continue upstream. Their meaty backs and slender dorsal fins bisected the inky surface.
    â€œJust a handful,” said Tanner. “None in the downstream. They’re starting to head up now, you see. By the end, it’ll be the other way around.”
    He focused his headlamp onto the middle of the creek, where an unnatural ripple bumped against the wire fence. “He’ll be in the weir by morning.” He pulled on a thin pair of latex gloves and motioned for Paul to do the same. “Otherwise your hands take the slime off their body, which is bad. This won’t take us long,” he added. “But you’ll get the idea.”
    Tanner netted one from the upstream trap and held the thrashing prize in front of him as he scrambled up to the station and dropped the trout into the cooler. The fish bucked against the white walls at first but quickly calmed, moving its tail in steady flicks. The smell of clove oil clung to Paul’s shirt. A minute passed, and then Tanner nudged the fish and provoked a sluggish reaction. He rolled it on its side. “See how he’s all hook-jawed. That’s the kipe.”
    There it was, the cold, nocturnal creature that would be his only company for more than a month: the lean, toothy jaw, the muscular olive-green back, white and reddish spots haloed with blue along its sides, the white-tipped pelvic fins, the belly flushed orange and red. The trout, its face reptilian and mechanical as a plumber’s wrench, filled Paul with a quiet despair.
    Tanner lifted and cradled the fish over to the table. His friend was deep in his element, almost jubilant with familiarity, muscle memory carrying him easily through each task.
    â€œHow it’s done,” grunted Tanner. In a few smooth motions he jotted the fish’s weight on the lined waterproof paper, then held the measuring tape from the farthest tip of the tail fin to the knobby end of the kipe and recorded the length. He grabbed the tagging gun, lifted the dorsal fin between thumb and forefinger, then punctured the fatty area below the fin. “At an angle, not deep.” The blue plastic jutted from one side. “Write the tag number down, and you’re done.”
    With the trout back in the net, Paul followed Tanner down to the weirs again. In the shallows on either side of the fence, they’d arranged piles of rocks to create a breakwater where the fish could recover from the anesthetic away from the current. “One hand beneath its head, the other at the base of the tail. Rock him gently back and forth in the water. Get the oxygen moving through his gills.”
    â€œDo bears ever come down at night?”
    â€œNope. I don’t know, the noise and the lantern probably scares them.”
    â€œMaybe you’ve just been lucky.”
    â€œMaybe. Okay, let him sit now, he’s fine.”
    He watched Tanner process another trout and envisioned a typical night’s work. At its best, the gratifying rhythm of skilled labour, like carpentry; at its worst, the monotony of the assembly line. He lifted the third fish from the cooler, and the body pulsed and quivered in his hands like a spastic muscle. The cold seeped through his thin gloves. He tried the tagging gun, hit too high up the fin, and the rectangular end of the filament stuck out the other side. Tanner snipped it off with cutters, pulled the tag free, and Paul tried