"Then how could I ever make a business out of them?"
He tapped a later clause. It described the possibility of a new management agreement where stock had been transferred without proper authorization and an appropriate rights holder or successor could approve a qualified receiving operator. The clause wasn't a magic ownership switch, and it did not give me permission to start selling fish. But it gave us a legitimate path to discuss if the people holding the breeding rights were willing.
The problem was finding those people. Riverstone Fisheries had dissolved, Ridgewater Fisheries LLC had operated parts of the facility later, and various assets had passed through a cooperative arrangement whose papers had been poorly archived. Some historical records referred to physical fish at specific ponds; others referred to selection data, genetic lines, hatchery methods, or commercial licensing rights. Daniel spent days separating which rights applied to what, and I learned quickly that a fish can swim freely while the paperwork surrounding its offspring remains tangled for decades.
At last a useful name appeared. Riverstone Genetics Cooperative had transferred certain rights into a conservation and agricultural trust before the original company dissolved. The trust remained active, although it no longer operated a hatchery directly. Its regional representative was a man named Martin Cole, who had spent most of his professional life around aquaculture and was now in his seventies.
Daniel reached Martin by telephone and explained that registered fish carrying old Riverstone identifiers had appeared in my private pond after an unauthorized transfer from Silver Ridge. There was a long silence on the other end of the call. Then Martin asked for the tag numbers, and Daniel read out the first three.
Martin repeated one number quietly, as though checking it against a memory. "Where are these fish now?" he asked.
"At Mr. Hayes's pond, near the old Riverstone corridor," Daniel replied.
"I'll come tomorrow," Martin said. "Please don't let anyone move them before I get there."
The next day, Martin arrived in a dark green truck with an old leather document case on the seat beside him. He climbed down slowly, leaning for a moment against the door before straightening, but his eyes sharpened as soon as he saw the water. He asked no questions about Karen, the invoice, or the HOA while we walked to the bank. Instead, he looked for tags.
A fish broke the surface near the rocks, and Martin raised a compact pair of binoculars. When he read the identifier, he lowered them carefully. He looked older all at once, not weaker, just suddenly burdened by an old memory.
"Where did you get these?" he asked.
"Silver Ridge put them here. Three days of transport work, from the look of the invoice."
He turned toward me so quickly I thought he hadn't heard. "Silver Ridge did what?"
I told him everything from the moment I found the pond churning to Karen's attempt to return with a collection crew. As I spoke, Martin looked repeatedly toward the far ridge where the neighborhood stood behind the trees. I had expected him to be angry about the fish. By the time I finished, he seemed angry about something that had started long before those animals reached my water.