“I know. Isn’t that crazy?”

  She looked up at him again. He went a little weak in the knees. You are a happily married man, he told himself. If you want to stay a happily married man, keep your mind on business. She helped, tapping the pictures with a fingernail and saying, “What do you want me to do with these?”

  “Call a press conference—Monday morning. Let’s get Jefferson national notice for something besides growing weed,” Bill said. Police in Jefferson turned a blind eye toward that part of the state economy. The Feds loved them for it. He went on, “We’ll do it at the Capitol, at, say, nine o’clock. We’ll have the guy who caught it here. He’s a computer programmer. His name’s Greg Donovan. A game warden named Eric Bishop took the photos. And Merv McDougald is an ichthyologist from Jefferson State Ashland. He identified the fish. He damn near creamed his jeans when he did it, too.”

  Barbara grinned as she scribbled notes. “Donovan … Bishop … McDougald. Maybe I won’t tell the networks that last bit.”

  “Spoilsport.” Bill grinned, too. “We’ll have a Jefferson State anthropologist along, too—Steve, uh, Halvorsen—to talk about the legend of the speartooth. And you can tell people the governor’s car carried some of the speartooth’s remains from Grants Pass to Ashland.”

  “The Mighty Mo?” Barbara had ridden in the Eldorado lots of times. She wrinkled her pert nose. “What’s it smell like?”

  “Well, it was okay when I got back here yesterday afternoon. The guts and the head and all were in Hefty bags, and we had a ton of ice.”

  “Gotcha. If it gets bad, you can dump in a gallon of lemon juice. If anything’ll kill the stink from old fish, that’s it.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Anyway, can you fax those photos to the networks and the press agencies?”

  “I’ll try. I don’t know how well they’ll come out. They may just be big black squares on the page. If they are, people will think we’re playing April Fool’s games in November.”

  “If you talk to Al Rafferty, he’ll tell you the voters did that day before yesterday,” Bill said.

  “I sure didn’t vote for Reagan,” Barbara said.

  “Neither did I, but a whole bunch of people did.”

  “Didn’t they just?” she said mournfully.

  Bill went off to do other things, confident Barbara would take care of everything that needed taking care of with the speartooth. He found out how right he was a few minutes after he came back to his office from lunch. He was reviewing a proposal to create a state park not far from Port Orford when his phone rang. He shoved the proposal aside with relief; the prose was at best uninspired.

  “This is Bill Williamson,” he said.

  “Hello, Governor,” his administrative assistant said. No, Phyllis wasn’t nearly so decorative as Barbara, but she was damn good at what she did. In Bill’s mind, that counted for more. She went on, “I have Charles Kuralt on the line.”

  “You do? Well, for heaven’s sake put him through!” Bill said. The bald, folksy newsman was one of CBS’s heavy hitters—a heavier hitter than Bill had expected to deal with.

  “Governor Williamson?” Those deep tones were as familiar as an old friend’s, all right, from the evening news and from his Sunday morning show.

  “That’s me.” Bill’s voice was deeper still, but not so mellow.

  “I talked with your charming publicist—” Kuralt began.

  “I’ll tell her you said so,” Bill broke in. “It’ll make her day.”

  “I told her myself,” Kuralt said. “But I wanted to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. You’re the governor of Jefferson. You don’t do puff pieces—I hope not, anyway. Are you telling me on your word of honor that a computer programmer out there really and truly pulled a speartooth out of the Rogue River?”

  “On my word of honor,” Bill said solemnly. “I saw the photos. I saw the fish. Hell, Mr. Kuralt, I ate the fish.”

  “I couldn’t be much more astonished if you told me you’d had dragon steaks,” the newsman said. “But okay, I believe you. Because I believe you, I’ll fly out there for your press conference Monday. And I’d like to ask you for an interview afterwards, if I may, with an eye toward running it on the news next Sunday morning.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” Bill said. Or whatever is one step up from wonderful, he thought giddily.

  “Okay. I’ll see you Monday, then. ’Bye.” Kuralt hung up.

  Bill picked up a pencil and punched the numbers for Barbara’s extension with the eraser end. When she answered, he blurted, “Charles Kuralt!”

  “I know! Isn’t that fabulous?” she said, and then, a beat later, “He’s such a nice man.”

  “He sounds like one, anyhow,” Bill said. “We’ll get to meet him Monday and find out for real.”

  “I know,” Barbara said. “I can hardly wait.”

  * * *

  A hallway led to the press room in the Capitol. Bill stood there with Barbara, Greg, Eric, Merv, and Steve Halvorsen, who looked professorial in a tweed jacket and cords. They waited for the clock on the far wall to say it was nine. Kelly Ann sat in the press room with Vicki Bishop, Donna McDougald, and Ellen Halvorsen. Bill hadn’t met any of the last three or Steve till a few minutes earlier.

  Most of the people in the room, though, were newspapermen and TV reporters. The television lights made Bill want to blink. Somebody plainly from out of state said, “How come this damn room’s so huge? The Jolly Green Giant could do a news conference in here.”

  “Jerk,” Greg Donovan said, sotto voce. Bill nodded.

  “It’s time,” Barbara said. She walked to the podium and took her place behind the lectern. On the podium were chairs and easels with blowups of two of Eric’s photos: the one of Greg by the speartooth and the closeup of the fish’s head. The head itself sat in a big jug of formalin on a table by the closeup. No trick photography here. They had the goods.

  “Welcome to Jefferson,” Barbara told the crowd. “I’m Barbara Rasmussen, the state public information officer. Governor Williamson will give a brief statement, and then we’ll let you talk with Mr. Donovan, Mr. Bishop, and Professors McDougald and Halvorsen. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Governor Bill Williamson.”

  When Bill came out, the guy who’d wondered why the press room was so big went “Ohhh.” Hadn’t he ever seen, or even heard of, a sasquatch before? If he came from somewhere like New York or Massachusetts, you never could tell.

  Bill tilted the extra-long microphone stalk up so it reached his mouth. “Thanks very much, Barbara,” he said. “Like you, I want to welcome everyone here to Jefferson. The speartooth is a fabulous fish that’s been the stuff of legend in these parts for as long as anyone can remember. Now, thanks to a fisherman’s lucky catch, we find that the legend turns out to be true after all.” He waved to the head in the jug. “Effective immediately, Jefferson has declared the speartooth to be a rare and endangered species. Any others that may be caught must be released at once. We have also asked the EPA to issue the same order for national parks, national forests, and Indian reservations in Jefferson, and they have agreed to do that. We must protect the speartooth if we possibly can.”

  He introduced Greg, Eric, Merv, and Steve, then sat down in the chair made for someone of his bulk while they told their stories in turn. He quickly decided Halvorsen was someone from whom he would have wanted to take a class in his own college days. The anthropology prof talked about other surprise discoveries. He mentioned the coelacanth. He talked about the platypus, which people in Europe had thought to be a jackalope-type creature when the first skins came back from Australia. And he talked about the okapi, a large, not particularly rare or inconspicuous mammal Europeans had somehow missed till the end of the nineteenth century.

  “This is what makes science fun,” he said with a little-kid grin. “We find new stuff, and so we have to try to work out what the dickens it all means.”

  Then it was question time. The first one was for Greg: “Mr. Donovan, what did you think when you got a good look at the speartooth?”

  “I thought, Holy, uh, moly, that’s the biggest, uh, darn fish I ever saw,” Greg answered. He drew some laughs for his edited-for-television thought process. He went on, “The next thing I thought was, Gosh, I hope it doesn’t break my legs or squash me, because it was flopping around on the bank right next to me. You don’t want to get clobbered by a fish that’s as long as you are tall, believe me you don’t.”

  Someone asked Merv McDougald, “What did you think when you heard a speartooth had been caught, Professor?”

  “That somebody was playing a practical joke on me,” the ichthyologist said. Bill nodded to himself; he’d thought the same thing. Merv continued, “Being wrong never made me so happy before.” He got a laugh, too.

  He also got a follow-up question: “What is this speartooth doing in modern Jefferson, anyway?”

  “Well, you have to understand that its near relatives lived here for millions of years. Probably the closest relation we have fossils of is Oncorhynchus rastrosus.” Merv thoughtfully spelled the scientific name for the reporters. He added, “The people who know about it often call it the tiger-toothed trout.” That won him some more chuckles.

  “Is the speartooth a surviving, um, tiger-toothed trout?” The reporter who asked that had the sense not to try to say Oncorhynchus rastrosus.

  “I thought so when I first saw it, but I don’t now,” Merv answered. “Enough details are different to convince me it’s a new, related species. When I publish, I’m going to propose the name Oncorhynchus jeffersonensis.” He spelled jeffersonensis, too.

  “In the legends, the speartooth can do things like fly and breathe fire,” a newspaperman said to Steve Halvorsen. “This is a great big fish, but it’s just a fish. Are we sure it’s what caused the legends?”

  “Are we sure? No. Is it very, very likely? Oh, yeah,” the anthropologist answered. “Look at the siege of Troy, three thousand years ago. There was one; archaeology makes that clear. Was it full of magic and Greek gods, the way Homer tells the story in the Iliad? Probably it wasn’t. Legends are stories that grow in the telling. That’s what makes them legends.”

  Charles Kuralt raised his hand. When he was recognized, he said, “Mr. Bishop, when you saw Mr. Donovan there on the riverbank with that enormous speartooth, did you ask him if he had a fishing license?”

  “No, sir.” Eric shook his head. “I didn’t need to, on account of I sold him the license myself.”

  “That will do it,” Kuralt agreed. “What were you thinking when you saw that fish and realized what it was?”

  “It blew my mind. I don’t know how else to put it,” the game warden said. “It’s blown everybody’s mind who’s had anything to do with it. You don’t think something that’s always been just fancy talk will turn out to be for real. But there it was.” He pointed to the preserved head. “There it is.”

  TV cameras swung from the lectern to the big jug. There it was, all right. You could see it with your own eyes. If that didn’t make it real and not legendary, Bill didn’t know what would.

  A few more questions came. The conference wound down. Finally, Barbara stepped up to the mike and said, “Thanks very much, folks. We appreciate your coming, believe me.” Newspaper reporters hurried out of the press room to file their stories. Most of the blowdried, hairsprayed TV guys went outside to film their reports against the imposing backdrop of the Capitol. One enterprising fellow stayed behind so he could be shown in front of the state seal.

  “I think that went well,” Bill said to Barbara.

  “Me, too.” She nodded. “We made as much of a splash as a speartooth can—and that’s one big fish.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, Charles Kuralt interviewed Bill in the covered patio behind the governor’s mansion. The weather stayed decent. It was in the upper sixties. Flowers bloomed in the garden the patio looked out on. Birds hopped and pecked and chirped.

  Bill had offered his office as an interview site. Kuralt took one look at it and shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’d feel like Gulliver in the land of the Brobdingnagians.”

  “Sasquatches aren’t as big as all that,” Bill said, but he didn’t argue very hard. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t felt like Gulliver in Lilliput more than a few times himself.

  The CBS crew aimed one camera at Bill, one at Kuralt, and one from the side at both of them. They set up lights on metal poles. Several lamps hung from the planks of the patio roof, but the crew sneered at those. A white-crowned sparrow perched on one and watched the setup proceedings as if it knew what was going on.

  A makeup girl powdered Kuralt’s bald dome so it wouldn’t shine too much under the fierce lights. “Joys of television,” the reporter said ruefully. “You ready, Governor?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” Bill answered.

  “You’ll have done this kind of thing before. You know how it goes. Don’t worry about fluffing. We’ll film way more than we need, then edit it down to a couple of minutes of good stuff for Sunday morning. People won’t just want to know about the fish. They’ll want to know about you, and about your state here.”

  “I hope so,” Bill said.

  Kuralt glanced at his cameramen. One by one, they gave thumbs up. So did the sound guy. “Let’s do it, then,” Kuralt said. The little lights under the TV camera lenses went red. Just as quickly, the newsman went from ordinary fellow to personality. “This is Charles Kuralt,” he declared, as if anyone could be in any doubt. “This afternoon I’m in Yreka, the capital of Jefferson, talking with Governor Bill Williamson. Thanks for inviting me to your state, Governor.”

  “Thanks for coming,” Bill answered. “I was thrilled when I found out you would be.”

  The newsman cocked his head to one side to study the governor. Almost at the same moment, and almost with the same gesture, the sparrow cocked its head to study the newsman. “And this is a remarkable state you have here,” Kuralt said.

  “We do like to think so,” Bill said.

  “Remarkable,” Charles Kuralt repeated. He scribbled a note in a little book held together by a spiral wire at the top. Phyllis Ward used the same kind for jotting things down. Kuralt went on, “Sometimes it seems as though the rest of the USA hardly hears about Jefferson, and it should. It really should.”

  “We aren’t one of your big, crowded states,” Bill said. “The people we have, most of ’em hope to get left alone most of the time, and they pretty much leave the rest of the world alone, too.”

  “But that’s a shame,” Kuralt said. The white-crowned sparrow fluttered its wings, as if about to take off from the lamp. It sat tight, though. The CBS man went on, “Everyone I’ve met has been warm and friendly, ready to give me the shirt off his back.”

  “When you’re here, you’re our guest. We try to treat guests right,” Bill said. “We wish we had more of them. With our mountains and forests, there’s a lot to see in the state.” The Jefferson Tourist Board would be proud of him.

  “There’s a lot to see other ways, too,” Kuralt said. “Take you, for instance. As far as I know, no other state has had a sasquatch elected to anything above local office. You’re the second sasquatch governor of Jefferson. There have also been state legislators and Senators—”

  “I was a state Senator myself before I ran for governor,” Bill put in.

  “Yes, of course. And you had a sasquatch Congressman back in the 1950s,” the newsman continued. “So what is it about Jefferson that makes the state so different?”

  “Well, for one thing, this is where most of us have always lived, ever since the Ice Age,” Bill said. “And everybody in Jefferson, big and little, has a live-and-let-live attitude. It’s the flip side of wanting to be left alone, you might say. People here do leave other people alone. They don’t hassle them for being different. And, because of our accommodations laws, sasquatches just fit in better here. They literally fit better, here, too.”

  Kuralt took more notes. The sparrow flapped again, but didn’t fly off. “It all makes sense when you explain it, but Jefferson still seems … exotic to the rest of America,” Kuralt said. “A sasquatch governor! And now a speartooth pulled out of the river! Amazing!”

  “If Professor McDougald is right—and he knows his business—speartooths and their relatives have lived here for millions of years. They’ve lived here longer than sasquatches have.”

  “But they’re still here! And so are you.” Charles Kuralt waved his hands. “The Romans said, ‘Out of Africa, always something new.’ With us, it’s ‘Out of Jefferson…’ What should we expect next? A live dinosaur?”

  That wave was finally too much for the white-crown. It flew out toward the garden, right over Kuralt. And, as it flew, it left a souvenir behind. “Sorry about that,” Bill said.

  “It got my notebook, not my suit.” Kuralt tore out the soiled page and gingerly crumpled it. “Just another editorial.” He glanced after the sparrow. “Stupid little bird.”

  Governor Bill Williamson’s breath smoked as he opened the 1974 Eldorado’s right front door. It was a chilly February day in Yreka. It was supposed to get to fifty later on, but Bill had his doubts that it would. The clouds blowing in from the west looked as if they meant business.

  Barbara Rasmussen slid into the Mighty Mo. The governor’s publicist was in a skirt that showed a lot of leg; she had to be colder than he was. Sure enough, she said, “Brr! As soon as you start this beast, I’m gonna crank the heat all the way up.”

  “Whatever you want.” Bill didn’t like to argue unless there was a payoff at the end. He closed the door, watched Barbara lock it after she put on her seat belt, and went around to the driver’s side of the two-and-a-half-ton Detroit behemoth. He got into the left rear seat. The Eldorado had no left front seat. The steering column was extra long, which let a nine-foot-two sasquatch drive from in back.

  The governor of the state of Jefferson turned the key. The engine ran raggedly. He was glad it ran at all. Since the energy crisis, cars had shrunk while inflation soared. Even with special arrangements like this, he didn’t fit into more modern vehicles.

 

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