AFTER THE BEARS Diana had no more interest in fishing, and Don decided he wanted to get the charcoal going for tonight, so I was on my own.
“How about if I go back out by myself?” I asked Don. “I wanted to try that rocky point next to that last little creek we saw.”
“For muskie?” He grabbed the bag of charcoal.
“Yes sir.”
He thought about it as he slit open the top of the bag with his pocketknife. “Might work, at that,” he said. “Think you can run the boat okay?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then you got a deal,” he said. “Just don’t put in anywhere along that south shore, and get back by dark.”
I anchored thirty yards off the point where the creek drained into the lake between the high dark firs and spruces. Across the creek mouth was a wide flat with a few big rocks and stickups in the water.
I tied on an eighteen-inch steel leader and a red and white muskie lure, and cast as hard as I could, watching the huge plug carry up and out a surprising distance before splashing down onto the water. I slowly retrieved it and cast again, then again and again, with no results. I kept casting, becoming so engrossed that several times I forgot to worry about L.A. and Gram back in Dallas. I even forgot to ask myself why I was still worried.
Then something stopped me. I looked around at the water and the trees on the shore and up at the sky, but nothing had changed. I thought about bears, and dug the blue stone out of my pocket. I sat looking at it for a minute, wondering if it had been born in the earth or had fallen from the sky, and then, taking a deep breath, I threw it as far as I could out toward the center of the lake. It plinked into the water, and in a couple of seconds the ripples disappeared.
I cast again, and was about to start the retrieve when I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Out to my right beyond the creek channel a table-sized region of the surface swirled into a fast-moving arrow of water driving across the open flat, straight for the lure, leaving a wake like a submarine. A dome of water boiled up under the lure, and an unbelievably huge fish reared its long-jawed head clear of the water, shook once with the lure in its mouth and then blasted a white wall of spray into the air as it slammed back down through the surface and disappeared.
The fish went for the center of the channel cut where the water was deepest, taking line from the drag without effort, the rod bent almost double as the line sliced through the water. I planted my feet on the gunnel and leaned back against the pull, feeling the boat come around to the end of the anchor line as it tried to follow the fish’s run.
But I knew better than to think I was going to turn this fish. Nothing was going to do that.
And then it stopped. I couldn’t feel anything now but the thing’s massive weight, so immovable that I wondered for a second if I had snagged a rock or stump. But then the fish gave three slow shakes of its mighty head and came directly at the boat, and before I could take back the slack line it drifted up alongside, a yard under the surface—tremendous jaws jagged with teeth and a soulless yellow eye the size of a clock face looking through my own eyes and brain and into the exact center of my soul, then the gray-green armored gills and the fish’s barred side passing like a slow train in the fog. The creature looked as long as the boat, and when it was gone the water suddenly seemed as empty as space.
In the next instant the fish hit the end of the slack, emptied the reel in one straight run out the channel, and the line snapped. The surface gradually settled back to stillness.
I sat and breathed for a while, waiting for my heart to stop banging in my throat, feeling the small rocking motion of the boat and hearing the light lapping of the water against its side. The sun was dropping lower in the sky, looking bigger and redder and softer. Finally I pulled up the anchor, stowed the rod inside the gunnel and started the motor.
As I brought the boat around I saw something floating on the water out near the spot where I’d thrown the stone. I eased the boat alongside it and leaned down to pick it up. It was the lure, or what was left of it, the steel leader and a short length of line hanging from the front eye hook. The plug was made of cedar, thick as a shovel handle, but the back half was gone, treble hooks and all, the wood marked by the fish’s teeth where they had sheared through it.
Looking at it, I could feel that something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t figure out what. I stared at the ruined plug a while longer, then dropped it into the tackle box and snapped the lid down. Bringing the boat’s bow around, I gradually opened the throttle and headed back toward the cabin.