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By pure chance I saw them before they saw me in that cold blue dawn. Two men in a canoe with a swivel harpoon mounted in the stern. A low growl told me they were using an outboard motor with the throttle barely open. Their speed was that of a slow walk.
I’d heard of these vessels but never seen one. It was a Crockett tribe specialty for taking Giant Pike and even coypu (a valuable winter meat if salted away). What on this drowning earth was a Crockett hunting canoe doing here above the flooded streets of Dracopolis? It could only mean that the Crocketts en masse had seen their opportunity during the riots and invaded the flooding Kwanon city.
They’d be looting and plundering anything they could carry away, picking over whatever remnants the rioters and then the flood had failed to de
