Something Fishy

Chapter 15: In Which I Accidentally Lead a Parade

At first, all I noticed was a slight squishing under my feet as I ran along the side of the river. This slight squishing soon became loud squishing. Then I was ankles-deep in water, then calf-deep, then knee-deep, then thigh deep, and all of a sudden I was swimming. The river, it seemed, had completely overflowed its banks, and now flooded the surrounded woods. I could feel a current tugging me back the way I had come from, but it wasn't strong enough to be trouble. Not yet, anyway.

A large silver trout brushed against my cheek and I shuddered, swimming faster. However, it soon became clear that I was not going to make it to Troutface unscathed – or, I supposed, un-scaled. Just as I was snorting at the hilarity of my terrible pun, a large magenta trout slammed into my face.

I don't know how much you know about trout, but let me tell you this much – they're not magenta. And they don't usually weigh more than seventy pounds. This trout, however, must have weighed at least a hundred.

"Wilbur?" I managed to inquire quizzically before I was slammed underwater. The magenta trout floated over my head, heading downstream. My hand, it seemed, had punched a hole in the costume and now was trapped, and I was being dragged along with it. Luckily, before I went too far back downstream, the two of us crashed into a tree.

Holding onto the tree with one arm, I was able to pull my hand free and surface. Gasping for air, I took a better look at the magenta trout.

"Hello, Wilbur," I said.

Wilbur looked dazed. "It's you," he said. "What are you doing?"

"I was swimming." To the Cattery, so I could rescue my friends from a dungeon where they were imprisoned by a man who I just spent half an hour with in an ice cream truck and who I am now collaborating with to dig a channel from the river to a lake, I thought, but swimming was easier to explain. "Gotta work on my cardiovascular strength, or whatever. Were you swimming as well?"

"Swimming?" Wilbur, also clinging to the tree trunk with one arm, shook his head vigorously within the giant magenta trout head. "I was stuck in a conversation with those two policemen about the socioeconomic factors that contribute to the frequent unavailability of trout kebabs when an enormous wave of water knocked me over. As you can see" – here he tried to wave his free arm, but, due to the constricting nature of his costume, it moved about four inches – "due to the constricting nature of my costume, my arms can only move about four inches, and I am essentially a magenta, vaguely trout-shaped torpedo, shooting downstream, unable to control my movements in any significant way."

He looked so saddened that I was tempted to pat the head of his costume, but felt that might come across as too forward. Also, there were more than a few slugs attached to it.

"Don't worry," I told him, and decided I needed his help. "Perhaps you can help me. I need to get back to the Cattery to rescue Uncle Fry and Prudence and Ron and Cassidee. Then we can hunt down some policemen and bring them down here to arrest The Boss."

"What?" he said.

"I don't have time to explain," I said. "Follow me."

I did end up having time to explain, though, since it was a long swim upstream, and an even longer walk once we finally reached the one small patch of dry ground in the entire town, an abnormally tall, abnormally narrow hill, so naturally it was named Trout Hill. Yeah, I know.

Atop Trout Hill, the entire population of Troutface had gathered, wet and bedraggled and looking a lot like something out of a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie, except with more fishing poles. It was not hard to spot the two policemen from earlier, who appeared to still be discussing the socioeconomic factors that contribute to the frequent unavailability of trout kebabs.