**Night Fishing**

On Friday evening some friends called me—said, let’s go fishing this weekend, carp have come out on the Volga. I got permission from my wife, and off we went.

We arrived at the spot; it was close to some summer cottages—only about a kilometer to the nearest house. We hauled firewood in advance and set up a canopy, since the weather was overcast and who knew whether it would rain or not. By the time we finished setting up camp and the tackle, evening had already fallen. We sat fishing, talking quietly. We caught one carp, maybe a kilo and a half, and pulled in a couple of perch on spinning rods. While this and that was going on, I caught some small fish by the shore and started cooking fish soup (what kind of fishing is it without that?). Around eight we took a break to eat, had about a hundred grams of vodka each with the soup—for appetite and warmth. I’ll say right away: after that, we didn’t drink anything else that evening except tea.

It started getting dark, clouds rolled in, and by ten it was pitch-black. When you couldn’t even bait a hook without a flashlight, we set about six bottom rods with corn and worms, put bells on them, and moved under the canopy. Around then the sky cleared on the horizon and the sunset became clearly visible. In several places on the Ivankovo Reservoir the Volga spreads out quite wide, and you can see the water surface far away. The boats that had come without staying overnight had already gone home.

That’s when an angry man from a neighboring camp ran up to us and started shouting that we’d torn his nets and taken his fish. We calmed him down as best we could, said we didn’t have a boat and the water was cold anyway. Then we showed him our catch (to be honest, not much: two carp, five crucian carp, and three perch), and he completely calmed down. Out of curiosity my friend and I went to look at his net. It was torn in several places and badly tangled. That usually happens if a pike or something bigger goes after the fish in the net—but there was no fish in it at all, as if everything had been carefully untangled and removed.

We said goodbye to the neighbors and went back to our camp. Until about one in the morning it was quiet and peaceful. Waves slapped the shore, pines rustled overhead, dogs barked from the dachas now and then. Around two in the morning, when we’d started to doze by the fire, a sound came from the water, as if someone had dragged an oar across the surface. We exchanged glances: it was dark, we couldn’t see anything beyond the rods, and there were no signal lights or flashlights visible.

About ten minutes later all our bottom rods started ringing at once. We rushed to them. Two were lying in the water with the line snapped; three were hopelessly tangled and snagged on something; but on the last one there was something—so big and strong that the braided line rang like a string and the reel spool spun so fast we could barely manage to wind it back at all. After another sharp jerk, the tension suddenly slackened. We thought the braid had broken or the snap had burst. We started pulling—and on the hook there was a piece of something incomprehensible and foul-smelling. In the beam of the flashlight, after pinching our noses, we took a closer look. It looked most like meat—rotten and slimy.

We started sweeping our flashlights over the water’s surface, but nothing floated up. Somehow we reeled in the rods and cast them out again. We went back to the fire and sat for about fifteen minutes, when suddenly something started slapping along the river again, and on top of that came a sound like a howl. Men from the neighboring camp ran over with flashlights (as we found out later, they thought we’d gone into the water). Together we started shining our lights and scanning the surface.

What we saw left us stunned: about a hundred meters out, something was floating down the river—a log, and on it sat something shaggy, with curved little horns, big intelligent shining eyes that looked at us without any fear—and most importantly, it had human hands, without fur, with flexible fingers gripping the log. We’ve lived here a long time and spent plenty of time outdoors, but everyone who saw it is still convinced that no such animal exists in our region—and it’s unlikely creatures like that live anywhere else either. After the beams of three flashlights crossed on it, it slipped under the water.

We showed the men what we’d pulled up on the last rod. An old man in their group joked nervously, “Looks like you hooked the water spirit.” We spent the rest of the night sitting together by our fire, waiting for dawn.