"Hey, there sure were a lot of fish today!" Li Qingxia watched Li Long make two trips to retrieve all ten nets, his smiling wrinkles deep enough to trap a mosquito. "Must be sixty or seventy kilos!"
"That isn't all that much, is it?" Li Long dragged the inner tube out of Haizi, then shouldered two sacks, tucked the tube under his arm, and still had another sack to carry. As he walked, he said:
"Wouldn't ten nets catch about this much? How much did you and Daqiang catch before?"
"How could we catch this much? Occasionally we'd get forty or fifty kilos, but usually just twenty or thirty. There are a lot fewer fish in Haizi now. It won't produce as many as last year."
Li Qingxia always felt that the fish had an affinity with Li Long. Whenever Li Long set the nets, there were more fish.
Li Long, however, thought it was because he paddled his inner tube farther out. There were places Tao Daqiang might not dare venture into.
Deeper water meant more fish-the spots along the shore of Haizi had too many people setting nets. The fish had either been scared away or caught.
By the time they dragged the sacks of nets back to Li Jianguo's Big Courtyard, only a streak of red had appeared in the east. Everyone at home was already up. Seeing them return, they all pitched in. Plastic sheeting had already been laid out, and they picked fish out of the nets, found sacks, sorted the catch, and made breakfast.
Knowing Li Long and the others were going to Stone City today, Li Juan and Li Qiang had their schoolbags ready early, planning to ride the tractor to school.
A chance to hitch a tractor ride didn't come often, and