"These animals may carry something your existing fish have never encountered," she said. "And your fish may carry something that could harm them. We don't know which direction the risk runs."
Ethan asked whether he could help count them. Mara gave him a notebook with a grid she had drawn in pencil and taught him how to estimate groups in defined observation zones. Within an hour he was working with a concentration that reminded me of Miriam in her classroom. He took the task so seriously that he barely noticed when Claire arrived with breakfast.
Mara used a sampling net near the bank and recovered one tagged fish for a brief examination. It was a trout with clear eyes, strong fins, and a small metal identification number just behind the dorsal fin. She read the number aloud while Ethan wrote it down, then showed us another mark beneath the fin. It was not the sort of tag a neighborhood pond contractor typically uses when stocking recreational fish.
"This is an individual broodstock identifier," she said. "It tells me somebody cared which fish this was, not just how many were in the truck."
"Broodstock?" I asked.
"Mature fish selected for breeding. They may be valuable because of their performance and family history, not because they're especially pretty. But a tag by itself doesn't establish current ownership or a price. We need the original records."
That distinction became important over the following weeks. A fish can carry a number without belonging to the person who recognizes it, and a historical breeding project can have a grand name without a valuable living population left behind. Mara refused to guess. She photographed the tag, recorded the fish's condition, and released it into the cool water under her permit.
By lunchtime she had a preliminary count range. At least two thousand fish appeared to have been moved, perhaps closer to twenty-five hundred, including young fish and a much smaller group of tagged adults. She estimated the adults numbered somewhere above one hundred, but said the number could change substantially once we had proper transfer paperwork. The species mixture alone made her suspicious, because a reputable hatchery would normally supply a destination plan and a carrying-capacity assessment before putting that much stock into one pond.
"Whoever did this was thinking about emptying the source," she said. "I don't see any evidence they thought about the receiving water."
I could have told her that was Karen's method in most matters. Instead, I took her into the kitchen and showed her the first invoice. She circled the contractor's name, Mountain Aquatic Services, and asked whether I had ever heard of it. I shook my head.
Daniel arrived while we were still at the table. He had a heavy briefcase, a yellow pad, and the strained look he wore when he had spent a night finding things he wished were not there. He placed a printed map between Mara's notes and my coffee cup. It was a modern county parcel map with Silver Ridge Estates in one color, my ranch in another, and a long narrow drainage corridor marked across the boundary.