"Holy shit! It's a kid!"
Charlie was dully aware of voices, of being so cold that his body was shaking violently from the chill. Hands pulled at him, lifting him out of the cold water. "He's alive! Give me your coat! Get some blankets, anything warm!" He opened his eyes and got a bleary view of sky, of faces peering down at him. He was so weak that every breath was an effort. The spawning instinct was gone, leaving him feeling confused and unable to focus. There was a dim sound of a motor starting up, and then movement. A boat of some kind. Had he been caught? Fishmen bringing home the catch of the day. He tried to stir, but consciousness faded out again.
When he woke again, he was in a hospital room. The terrible fatigue was still there, but he was breathing easily. It was so strange to feel lungs in his chest, air passing through his mouth and nose. It was too hard to lift his head, but he managed to raise one arm so he could stare at a hand. He was terribly thin, emaciated looking like images of starving children. But he was alive, and human again!
"Charlie!" There was a gasp from the side and he turned his head to see his mother rising up from a chair where she had obviously been sleeping. "Oh, thank God! Charlie!" She reached out to him, then stopped and very gently stroked his cheeks. Her eyes were red and swollen. "Oh, Charlie! What happened? You were only missing for a few days, and they found you more than two hundred miles away from the camp, floating naked in a lake! You lost so much weight!" She could see the confusion in his eyes and stopped. "I'm sorry, honey. It's just that, no can explain what could have happened. And Brad is still missing, along with some other boys. It's been a nightmare!"
It took a while to finally get the whole story, or as much as the adults knew. Charlie, Brad, and nine other boys from the camping trip had vanished, and so far Charlie was the only one to turn up. He'd been found by some sport fishermen in freshwater lake up in the mountains, floating in a mass of dead salmon. There were some scratches on his back, but nothing that would explain how he could have lost half his body weight in just a few days. Looking in a mirror revealed the sunken cheeks and eyes of a starvation victim, even much of his muscle tissue gone.
Bu he was getting stronger. Even after just one day, Charlie had obviously regained a lot of strength, and his body regenerated at a rate that confounded the medical staff. They kept asking him what had happened, but Charlie wisely decided to stick to saying he had no idea. Better to blame loss of memory than try to convince the doctors and his parents that he'd been transformed into a fish and nearly killed himself swimming two hundred miles upriver to spawn. It was harder not to say anything to Brad's parents, as their son had banished with the others. It would be little comfort for them to know he was now a wild animal, even if Charlie could convince them.
He went home at the end of the week, already looking mostly normal, if very thin. And he had no doubt that his strength would come back fully. He would work out, build up strength and body mass. For in the back of his mind, he could feel the salmon's brain lurking. It would stay idle, silent, until the spawning instincts resurfaced and forced Charlie to return to the river. And then he would join his brothers and sisters in the rush back to the lake that was now Charlie's spawning grounds.