Hot sun on his head awoke him. The cooling shade shifted a little toward the east even though it did not come down from straight overhead and would not for over an hour or two. He hocked his watch and ring the last time he needed money. Anyway, as much time as he'd spent in the sun, he didn't need a watch to tell time.

It hurt him when he had to let it go. It was a thin, gold watch on a chain his daddy gave him before he died. Come to think of it, he died with a bellyache same way it looked like he was going.

Thing about it was his people did not believe in doctors at all. "Son, you start messing 'round with doctors, they will take everything you own and leave your family digging up payments."

Jim would not have gone if it had not been him being a Veteran and all gave him privileges over at the big, sprawled‑out hospital at Temple. Maybe they could done him some good if he had insisted they do something the first time he went. From the way they talked, he doubted it. Probably, they would done some fancy cutting and used him for a guinea pig and all.

Soon as he got his eyes adjusted from his pain‑induced nap, he started looking around checking on his fishing pole and things. So far nothing seemed to bothered his bait. The line jerked and eddied with the current and the pull of the live minnow.

He hated checking on the catfish strung on the line. "Looks like the two of us got us some kind of a gut ache, Fish." He was really going batty talking to a fish, but it seemed like there was a telepathy going on between their two brains.

Really, it did seem there were brain waves trading back and forth between him and the struggling fish. Two creatures in pain, one brought on by the other, nevertheless both were on a string they could not get off without dying.

The catfish held its head far enough out of the water so its liquid eyes could stare at its hated captor. After a moment, it sank back into its world beneath the murky water where it wanted to be free.

There was a time or two the man thought strongly about letting his twenty or so pound fish go on downstream. "You'd been a bass, you'd have died long before now. No staying power at all even though they can fight harder than you. Guess both of us are kinda the same, Catfish, short on fight but long on stayin' power."