“Or you either, I guess.”
“I guess,” I say.
Dad sits back and watches me cast. I’m stiff but I’m getting my line out there anyway. He doesn’t correct me. I feel good. I touch the water with my fingers and think of wolves: wild wolves, bad wolves, great wolves, dead wolves, fierce wolves.
“How did you do it?” he says. His voice is taut but not unhappy.
“Do what?”
“How did you make it back to shore? You were so blue when we found you, I thought you were dead.”
I don’t make a joke to change the subject. I don’t say anything. I just cast while I think about what I will tell him, and how much of it I need to save for myself. I know he’s been saving this question, carrying it around like his last sandwich. When I don’t answer he pulls the brim of his hat down and goes back to casting.
Suddenly my line disappears and my reel explodes with the gorgeous sound of spinning gears. I nearly lose my grip, but I manage to recover and keep my tip up. This is a monster.
My dad shouts, “Whoa! Can you hold him?”
I shout back, “If the leader holds.”
“He must be as big as the boat. Give him the whole reel if you have to.”
I give this brute the reel but I have to fight to keep him from going under the boat. My dad says, “Don’t hurt yourself now. I can take him.”
“I’m fine,” I sing out. The music of the reel fills my ears. He dives and then I reel and then he dives and then I reel. My hands ache. Suddenly the line stops and holds. There is no movement, just pressure. My dad says, “Are you sure that’s not a log? No use hurting yourself over a log.”
“Dad,” I say with a fat greedy smile, “I’m not letting go.”
He spits over the side of the boat. “They’re your hands.”
After one hundred and eight minutes the biggest fish I may ever hook in my life, a fish so big Dad says it would have set a record for Wade, runs hard under the boat and snaps off. I don’t curse, but my dad does, mostly at me for holding on so long.
I toss some bread in the water and sit down in the boat. The breeze cools my sweating head. I drink some water and watch a grebe land a few feet from the boat to eat the bread. The air smells like mud and fish. The pines murmur with wind.
I say, “I imagined you chewing me out.”
Dad nods.
“When I kept going I felt brave or something and I just kept going. Then, at the end, I heard Virgil’s voice. It helped me find the shore.”
Dad says, “You were ashore when we got there. You couldn’t have heard him.”
“I know.” I have said more than I planned, and less, but it’s not bad. I don’t mind if my dad knows how I feel.
He rows. We watch the water together.
Finally he says, “Sorry you lost that big one.”
“That’s fine,” I say. I smile at my father. “It’s just good to get out.”
About the Author
kristen chandler
has spent summers in Yellowstone at her family’s cabin since she was a young girl. She is a fisherwoman, a marathoner, a writing instructor, and the mother of four children. She and her family live outside Salt Lake City, Utah. This is her first novel.
1
Gets you moving, one way or another
2
Best served with a cold beer and no talking