Before we left that summer, we went back to the scene of the creature encounter. Sure enough, a black swath of burnt grass stretched from the edge of the rocky beach to the middle of the abandoned cottage's backyard, where it abruptly ceased. Marc considered it a coincidence, having nothing to do with the monster that had emerged from the lake and, he believed, accidentally sliced his arm with clawed flipper while struggling with the hooked fish. Little Champ, Marc figured, had simply gone back under. But Carla was willing to take seriously what I had suggested facetiously: the little dragon had strafed the lawn with a blast of fiery breath. In the seventies' summers Marc and I often took weekend fishing trips to Lake Champlain, hoping to catch a glimpse of Champ. We could only fish from shore, for Marc never learned to swim much and still was scared of boats, but it didn’t matter because he always found the best spots and never went away without a stringer-full of fish. On all these trips, there was no sign of the creature. But then during the summer of 1982, we met this guy who was obsessed with Champ. This was just after Sandra Mansi’s famous photograph was made public (it looks like a plesiosaur, with its head turned back), and interest in the monster was at an all-time high. It was right around then that Port Henry declared their waters a safe haven for Champ, and the state legislatures of New York and Vermont passed resolutions to protect the creature. The guy was a member of the Lake Champlain Phenomena Investigation group, and he became quite interested in Marc’s story of Baby Champ’s little visit to Lake George ten years before. He showed us a documented report of some railroad workers who found weird footprints in the mud. They described the prints as long and flipper-like, running between the railroad tracks and Route 22 not far from Cold Spring. It seemed to them like something had crawled out of Lake Champlain and headed west. By the time they got a biologist over there the rain had ruined the prints, making them indistinguishable from a bear’s. But what got me was that this incident occurred in August, 1972—the same month Marc’s arm was slashed by that thrashing tail. It was corroboration enough for my brother. He changed his major to paleontology, and in graduate school specialized in aquatic fossils. Of course, he never told his professors or colleagues of his secret obsession, his guilty pleasure. He would sneak off to give lectures at cryptozoology conferences . . .       . . . and throughout his life while maintaining the skeptical persona of the scientist, he never gave up hope for another encounter with Little Champ. He became so obsessed with the damn thing he even overcame his fear of boats, though not without the help of a very expensive therapist. Even after boating all over the lake, he never saw the creature again. By the time she got out of college, Carla also consulted a therapist. Never convinced that what she saw was a natural not a supernatural beast, she became a fantasy writer, and one of her short stories, while she sold it as fiction, was clearly her own bizarre interpretation of the thing that had attacked Marc’s bass that August afternoon. . . .