He studied one photograph. "Whoever tagged this one had a system. Those letters look like a hatchery code."
"Daniel's working on that. In the meantime, we keep them alive."
Ethan looked over at me. "What if they make your bass sick?"
It was a good question, and one I had been avoiding because it frightened me. I had brought fish into the pond under controlled conditions years before, but these animals arrived without a health record I could inspect and without the gradual adjustment a responsible hatchery would have arranged. Whatever their eventual value, they could still destroy the population I already had if they carried disease or overwhelmed the water. I told Ethan that the county specialist was coming, and we agreed not to touch or feed the new fish until someone qualified had assessed the situation.
The specialist arrived the following morning in a county truck with a portable testing kit, specimen containers, and a patient manner that made me feel better before she said a word. Her name was Dr. Leah Benton, and she worked with the regional fisheries program. She had already received Daniel's photographs and had contacted the office responsible for historic aquaculture registrations. When she climbed out of the truck, she asked to see the source of the spring before we did anything else.
For nearly two hours, Leah walked the banks, checked water temperature and oxygen at different depths, examined available photographs, and compared the tag numbers with entries in the county and state records. She explained that the deepest part of the pond remained cold enough to provide some refuge for the trout, while the shallower margins were warming faster. The bass and trout did not all need exactly the same conditions, and a mixed population that had once been balanced could become unstable when an unfamiliar shipment was added without planning.
She did not make dramatic declarations. She made measurements and kept notes. At the end of the inspection, she asked us to sit at the picnic table beside the shed, where she could spread the records without the wind carrying them into the water. Ethan pulled up a third chair and immediately opened his notebook.
"Mr. Hayes," Leah said, "the tags appear consistent with a registered breeding population. Some of the fish are mature broodstock. Others may be younger animals associated with the same program, but we need a full inventory to separate them."
"What's a broodstock fish worth?" I asked.
"That's like asking what a breeding bull is worth without knowing its pedigree, health, or ownership. It depends on the individual animal and the records behind it."
She turned a printed sheet toward me. Several tags matched an older Riverstone Select entry, a line associated with tracked survival rates, disease response, and growth characteristics. The original program had selected fish over successive generations, not because each fish was a treasure by itself, but because the documented breeding population carried traits a commercial operator might value. A buyer would pay more for certified stock with records than for an anonymous fish of the same size.