Ice Fishing

Monty Whittaker sets down his work at the train set in Whit's End and announces that he is finished. He has spent all week building a model train engine, and he is certain it is the finest one in the shop. Connie Kendall comes over to look, mistakes the engine for a caboose, and finally lands on the kindest thing she can think of: if Monty likes it, that is all that matters. Monty is not really building for himself, though. He wants to see his sister try to top this one, because a model train car is one of the very few things Jenny has not already done since the two of them arrived in Odyssey a few weeks ago. He leaves the model in Connie's care and goes looking for his grandfather.

Downstairs he finds Tom Riley and Eugene Meltsner bent over a train car of their own, and Eugene is praising its perfection of line and curve and its meticulous attention to detail while Tom insists that "it's real good" covers the same ground in fewer syllables. The car belongs to Jenny. It is an authentic 1:32 scale model of a Southern Pacific Railroad passenger car from 1885, and she built it in a single afternoon. Monty says she did a great job, as usual, and quietly goes hollow.

Tom, meanwhile, has decided that what Eugene needs is a few days away from musty books and dark classrooms, and he proposes an ice fishing trip for the four of them. Monty leaps at it - the wilderness, plenty of fish, and no sisters. Only after everyone has gone does Connie show Whit the two train cars side by side, and the two of them work out why the trip sounded so good to Monty. Jenny is not coming. It is one place where he will not have to compete with her.

At Summit Lake, the highest lake near Odyssey, Tom's plan to toughen Eugene up begins to wobble. Eugene unpacks a weather gauge that measures temperature, wind speed, barometric pressure and humidity, reports a comfortable twenty degrees Fahrenheit and a safe one to three mile an hour wind, and cheerfully explains how quickly exposed skin can freeze. He has also brought several boxes of helpful appliances. Tom, holding out for man against the elements, tries to start the campfire by rubbing sticks together, produces almost nothing, and then watches Eugene light it with a bang loud enough to send Tom to his tent.

Out on the ice the next day, Monty catches two fish, more than anyone else so far, but what he really wants is Old Grundy, the legendary fish that is older, bigger and smarter than any other in the lake and that no fisherman has ever landed. If he could bring Old Grundy home, he tells his grandfather, people would finally stop calling him Jenny's brother. Whit listens, then scoops up a handful of snow and asks Monty what he sees. Thousands of tiny snowflakes, and no two of them alike. People are the same way, Whit says: of the billions who have lived, no two are identical. The Bible says God made him in his mother's womb and knew him before he was born, and God's love for him is not measured against Jenny's violin playing or her train cars or anybody's fish. Monty only has to be the best Monty Whittaker-Dowd he can be. Monty thinks that sounds a little corny. Whit admits it may have sounded better last week when he said it to Connie.

The lesson takes hold sooner than expected. When Tom grumbles that somebody really ought to set Eugene straight, Monty points out that maybe that is simply the way Eugene is, since everybody is different. Moments later Eugene comes staggering up under an enormous pile of fish. He caught them with a piece of wood and a string, having reasoned out that ice tends to be thinner where large schools of fish stir the warmer water below, and drilled his hole accordingly. Tom decides he has done enough fishing for one trip. Monty, asked whether he still wants Old Grundy, shrugs and says he does not need him now.

Then Eugene mentions a rather persistent fish he kept having to throw back, roughly thirty-five to forty inches long, bristling with old hooks and marked with an orange pattern. He finally carried the creature to another part of the lake to be rid of it. Tom heads for the truck without another word, and Eugene, genuinely puzzled, hurries after him asking what he said.