earned him credibility with the guests. What followed, as bonefish became an industry, far eclipsed credibility:
“There were some great guides at Deep Water Cay,” Valdene told me, “but for decades, David Pinder was famous.”
From the lips of the man poling the Sea-Squid through a stiff northeaster, a sound squeaks forth—something he almost says but doesn’t. His bantering clients hush and turn to their guide, who weighs what he may have seen against hours of piscine vacancy, against the assurance of a timely arrival at the dock, against his better interests.
At the bow on the casting platform stands his client, British guest of his employer and potential investor at the lodge, gazing like someone who might suddenly fall prey to a narcoleptic episode.
Planting the edge of the push-pole starboard, inclining against the skiff’s momentum, the man says he might, he’s not sure, have seen a wake in the cove. Explaining that the fish’s tail will look like a mangrove leaf, he urges the Brit not to blink. The man has yet to see an actual fish but the tide is slipping out and revealing the bottom’s subtle sags and crab domes, several half-dollar-size indentations in the muck made by a feeding fish’s attempts to dislodge prey. A trail of these half-dollars leads to the inlet.
The lodge owner perks up from his seat on the dunnage box and whispers the Brit to attention. Be ready. I can tell by his tone.
The man points his push-pole over the Brit’s left shoulder. Tailing fish, he says. You see the leaf pointing sideways? A tail.
The Brit says he sees the fish, but his voice belies his uncertainty.
Coming straight over the skiff’s transom, the wind wants to sail the boat with the man’s billowed shirt for a jib away from the cay, but he pins the pole port, deep in the soft seafloor. That he holds his ground for thirty, forty seconds, without so much as bumping the pole on the skiff’s fiberglass sidewall, is a feat the lodge owner will later gush over.
From somewhere inside the oily green leaves a catbird mews. On his fourth try, the Brit lands the fly in the wheelhouse.
Whatever you do, the lodge owner intones, don’t move the rod tip on the take again or you’ll pull the fly out of the fish’s mouth. You can’t let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.
Though neither of his guests perceives any indication as to why, the man, from his slightly higher vantage, commands the Brit to set the hook.
Somehow the Brit manages to heed the voice in each ear, keeping his right wrist rigid while pulling tight a yard of line with his left. As the rod flinches and bucks with animal energy as the fish leaves the mangroves in its wake, the lodge owner curses at his guest to clear the line: Watch your shoelaces, goddammit! That’s why we go barefoot.
With the loose line spooled to the reel, the Brit puts the buzzing Hardy to his ear and declares the fish tallied.
Not on the board quite yet, the lodge owner chides. Still have to land it.
Crown law, Drake, Crown law. A solid hookup goes down in the book.
Running, the fish scribes a wide parabola on the flat, fifty yards west by southwest, then sixty yards south by southeast, stopping to breach not far from where it first felt the hook. The Brit’s line, beset with slack, lolls in the wind.
Gather the line, the man says, poling the boat away from the fish to tighten the surplus lest the fish spit the hook.
The Brit switches the rod to his left hand, so that he can reel with his dominant right, and cranks with abandon like a man vigorously scrambling an egg in a bowl, regaining connection with the fish momentarily before stopping to take a breath. During this inaction, the fish feels the line pressure falter and uses its brief loose leash to weave back into the mangroves. He heaves to pull the fish back. The rod blank creaks. Then he groans and deflates, piling atop his knees on the casting platform.
Give some slack, the man says, and he might come out yet.
Like stitches bursting at a seam, small bright flicks of water appear at the surface as the fish braids its way through the submerged roots. The Brit watches, stands, and with a grunt of resolution bows the rod again and yanks. The clear leader snaps with an audible crack, and he stumbles backward off the casting deck; simultaneously the rod recoils, straightens briefly overhead, clocks forward with uncontrolled fulcrum momentum and slams, just as he regains balance, onto the bow.
The shattered fiberglass hangs together at the ferrule by a few fibers, a broken antenna.
No one says a thing. A catbird lifts from the mangroves, rows a few strokes upwind, then turns tail. Someone curses, someone laughs. Then the lodge owner lifts the cooler lid with his toe and hands a beer to the Brit, who cracks it and takes a quick triple swallow, insisting, as he wipes foam from his lips, that he’ll pay to have to have the rod replaced. The lodge owner will hear none of it. The beer, though, he jokes, will cost three hundred American.
The men laugh—the incident has not vitiated the afternoon but emblazoned it in memory. They reenact the moment with comic gestures. Perhaps the potential investment, all but embalmed at lunchtime after nearly three days of angling futility, now possesses at least a pulse.
Staring from his perch atop the boat’s motor at the mangrove warrens into which the bonefish disappeared, the man reckons that the fish might yet be lingering: the snapped line looped around a mangrove shoot, attempting to worry the hook out of its mouth. True, the other guides are home with their second glass of Green Seed in hand, but on a slim day like this, it is worth a look.
The man begs pardon and, jumping down into the water from the transom, asks his employer to hold this stake. Quick glance before we go, he says.
Not on my account, the Brit insists. I had my fair shot.
But the man is already over the transom, making for the cay. He takes several fleet steps on the firm bottom before a layer of muck elasticizes his strides, then he dives in and front-crawls the last ten yards to shore. As he surfaces, two previously unseen brown pelicans lift ponderously out of the mangroves and bank away on the wind.
Not far into the maze of gray roots, the man sees his favored pink fly betraying the fish’s camouflage. Strung taut between the hook and the shoot around which it was wound, a yard of fifteen-pound-test monofilament tippet shines. Most fish would have fled at his footfalls, but this gorged seven-pounder merely wallows on its back as the man nears, eyeing his approach submissively through its nictitating membrane. With his right hand the man clasps the fish behind the gills; his left hand snaps the shoot off at its base.
THE ROTUND THING LIES GASPING ON THE FLOOR OF THE BOAT, still attached to the mangrove, and the lodge owner asks to have a look inside the distended belly.
A swift flick with the fillet knife from the anus to the gills: the man is quick to dispatch since the act insures the fish will feed his family later tonight. He peels out the cauly strings of the intestines, the red inner workings, and proffers the stretched bag of the stomach, which he slits open with the tip of the blade: out spills a partially digested shrimp, a small blue crab missing one of its claws, a schoolmaster, and a beet-red urchin—all of which he tosses without further regard over his shoulder and into the water.
This curious handful of food: the man’s memory of it, the details precise, unflinching, will persist against the wash of time.
From behind them, with the noise of heavy rain, a barracuda surfaces and with three open-mawed swipes clears the water of the chum. Then before the water settles, before the men can so much as remark, the barracuda rockets toward the boat on the edge of its tail, chased by a shark that, with a thump off the hull, wheels and catches the ’cuda: the hunter turned hunted vanishing in the ten-foot lemon’s bloody stranglehold.
The man chokes the engine twice and lets it idle for a moment, then revs the throttle and runs the skiff onto a plane.