I photographed everything before touching it. The invoice, the tracks, the lock, the bank, the surface of the water, and the tags on whichever fish came close enough for my phone camera to capture. Then I stood looking at the pond, trying to decide what immediate damage might already have been done. I knew enough about stocking to know that large numbers of new fish could upset the balance of oxygen, habitat, and food even if every animal arrived healthy.
The spring water entering at the north bank remained clear, but the southern cove had begun to cloud. A few fish were holding near the surface, opening and closing their mouths in a way that worried me. I did not try to scoop them into buckets or move them to another stream, because that would only add more unknowns. Instead I called the county's fisheries office, described what I was seeing, and asked whether someone could advise me about immediate water-quality checks.
The woman who answered took the report seriously when I mentioned the tags. She told me not to move any fish until the source and status were identified, and she arranged for a specialist to call back. Her first concern, though, was the same as mine: the sudden density of animals in a pond that had not been prepared to receive them. She recommended monitoring the shallow areas closely and seeking qualified help for oxygen testing while the formal questions were sorted out.
Then I called Daniel Reed. Daniel had handled my property work for years and possessed the rare ability to tell me I was being foolish without making me want to hang up. He listened through the entire story, asking only when the contractors had come, what Karen had said, and whether I still had the invoice. When I reached the part about individually numbered metal tags, his voice changed.
"How many did you see?" he asked.
"Five clearly enough to photograph. Probably more out there."
"Do the tags have letters as well as numbers?"
"Yes. A short series, then a number."
I heard the tapping of his keyboard. "Send me the clearest pictures you've got. Don't let anyone back through that gate, and don't assume those fish belong to you just because somebody put them in your water."
"Karen's certainly acting as though they belong to me now. She sent me the bill."
"An invoice doesn't transfer title to living property," he said. "And it certainly doesn't authorize somebody to enter your land. Robert, there could be more than one problem here."
I sent the photographs and went to find my old pond records. They were in a steel cabinet in the workshop, behind receipts for tractor parts and twenty years of property-tax statements. As I sorted them, I realized how much documentation I had for the fish I had legally introduced. Every stocking notice, every delivery quantity, every water assessment had a date and a name attached. Karen had sent thousands of unidentified fish with less paperwork than I used to buy a spare hydraulic hose.