MISQUAH — The walleye Vern Dahlquist landed Saturday on Big Pelican measured, by the cooler ticket his wife Eunice produced and laid flat on the table without a word, a respectable but entirely ordinary nineteen inches. By the time the story reached the Daybreak’s corner table on Tuesday morning, the fish was “pushing twenty-five” and had fought, Vern reported to a fresh and politely doubtful audience, “like something prehistoric, like something that shouldn’t still be in the lake.”

This is the standing arrangement in the Dahlquist marriage, and has been for the forty-some years the paper has had occasion to document it: Vern tells the fish, Eunice tells the truth, and the Pilot-Independent, wisely, prints both and takes no side it can avoid taking. The walleye gains roughly an inch a day in the retelling, a growth rate Eunice has tracked on the back of more than one receipt and describes, with the weariness of a long and happy marriage, as “the only thing on that lake growing faster than the milfoil, and the milfoil at least has the decency not to brag.”

“It was a nice fish,” Eunice allowed, for the record, because she is fair. “It was a nice nineteen-inch fish, and it ate fine, and if he’d just say nineteen I’d let him have nineteen and throw in a compliment besides. But he can’t. He has never once said nineteen. By Friday it’ll be a different fish entirely, a fish that doesn’t exist, and I’ll still have the ticket, and we’ll both know, and he’ll tell it anyway.” A man at the next stool, who has heard the Dahlquists conduct this exact transaction for two decades and regards it as a feature of the room, confirmed only that the fish was “getting bigger by the cup of coffee.” Vern, asked for comment, was already at the far end of the counter, telling someone newer, where the fish had reached twenty-six.