Suddenly, he felt a slight bump -- as if something had hit the boat from the below. "Shark" was the first thing that came to his mind, for in his youth, Samuel had watched too many movies with a plot including a man-eating white shark. But he shrugged it off, for there had never been any sharks in these waters. For a long time, he had been afraid of rowing too far from the shore in the fear of a shark attack, but later, he had learned that the water was too darn cold for them. Nay, it couldn't have been a shark. Or could it?

Suddenly, there was another bump.

Samuel sat up with a languor that belied his present anxiety. Though his calm reverie had been upset by this interruption, he didn't want to similarly upset his boat. While one hand held the craft steady, the other shifted his hat back onto the top of his head. His mouth curled wryly, as he felt quite silly worrying about a shark out in the middle of a lake. Then, suddenly, he laughed at himself, thinking of how silly a "lakeshark" would be, and then mentally extending that premise to include "Lakesharks on a Plane". As he lazily grabbed the oars to put them into the water, his gaze was fixed on the sparkling surface, trying to see why lie beneath. He squinted through the oblique sunlight, saying to no one in particular, "I want these sharks out my motherfucking lake!"

With the whole lake-o-sharks reverie behind him, he started to row for the docks, each stroke feeling like a harder pull than the last, each stroke separately considered, measured. He resigned himself to the task, and tried to make a mental exercise of it, to keep the strain from dominating his thoughts.

Thhhhhhhhiiip!

It was a soft sound, something like a mosquito buzzing past his ear.

Then again, Thhhhhhhhiiip! No, not a mosquito.What it sounded like, more than anything else, was a fucking BULLET whizzing past his ear!

He dropped the oars and flattened himself across the benches, lifting his head just enough to scan the lakeshore for the source of the bullets, or whatever was making that sound.

There was no one around the docks, but he could make out two figures on the opposite side of the lake.

He looked over to the left, and suddenly, there was another bump, and another. And then, with his head down, he saw that there was some kind of ball rolling between his tackle box and the aft bench mount, making the bumping noise when it struck the wooden bench like a sounding board.

He remembered the fishing knife in the tackle box, and reached for it. The ball rolled toward him. It was a billiard ball, specifically the 2 ball.

"What the hell?" he wondered, aloud this time, as another bullet ripped the air somewhere near the boat -- he didn't know how near -- and forced him to think once again about how to survive this absurd ordeal.