Standing beside pond two after the delivery, watching the fingerlings disappear beneath the water, she learned the first lesson of her new profession. Being prepared was not a condition she could reach and stop thinking about. It was something she would have to do again before sunrise, and then every day after that, for as long as those fish depended on her. The first night after stocking, Delaney slept badly even before anything went wrong.
Every sound in the rented farmhouse made her sit upright, convinced she had heard an aerator stop or a pipe burst, although she was still living in her apartment forty minutes away. She had put a folding cot in a former storage shed by the ponds for the nights she needed to be there, but it was cold, smelled faintly of mouse droppings, and had no running water. She promised herself she would stay only when necessary, which became an increasingly meaningless promise.
On Wednesday morning the fish appeared lively enough. Delaney checked the water temperature, recorded what she could about their feeding response, and called Roy with questions that sounded embarrassingly basic. Did fish sleep? Was it normal to see them gather near a shaded bank? How could she tell whether they were hungry or simply reacting to movement overhead? Roy answered each one, then asked what her dawn oxygen readings had shown.
"I checked the water yesterday afternoon," she said. There was a pause before Roy replied. "Afternoon is the easy part. Plants have been making oxygen all day. The question is what the pond does after spending the night breathing." He told her to take readings before first light, not after breakfast, and to keep them in a notebook rather than trusting her impression of the surface.
She bought a used monitoring meter from a neighboring operation and learned to calibrate it with the care she once reserved for her grandfather's orchard gauges. When she measured the shallow water at six the following morning, the number was lower than she expected. The fish still seemed active, so she made a note and planned to ask Roy about it later. The trouble with early mistakes, she would discover, was that they often gave you enough time to notice them without yet understanding their meaning.
At four on Friday morning she drove up the lane and saw pale shapes against the dark water. At first she thought the light from her truck was striking leaves or foam. Then one of the shapes rolled near the bank, and she recognized a fish floating on its side. There were more beyond it, dozens, hundreds, a heartbreaking accumulation along the shallow edge of pond two.
She parked without turning off the engine and ran into the mud. Fish gathered at the surface where the old aerator should have stirred the water, their mouths opening and closing near the air. The machine's motor had seized sometime during the night, and the calm, humid weather had left the pond with almost no natural agitation. Delaney grabbed the switch, tried it again, and heard only a dry, useless click.