Swamp Things, Pt. 3

That evening began well. In the first few holes above where the branches rejoined, fishing with nightcrawlers, I'd taken several browns of ten to thirteen inches. The pleasures of the evening didn't come entirely from the end of my line. The warm, humid air, infused with the scent of drying loam and honeysuckle, contrasted pleasantly with the cool flow along my legs. For me to this day, when the fishing is very good or promises to be, all the sensations of the river world become more vivid.

Eagerly, even greedily expecting more fish, I approached the deepest spot in the Swamp, a narrow channel about four feet deep in its center. I'm not sure if I had caught anything there before, but it seemed like exactly the sort of spot that would harbor a big trout. I flipped a nightcrawler to the head of the run with my Zebco spincaster and let it drift back to me, ticking the bottom every foot or so. Then the line stopped. I pulled back and felt only dead weight. Thinking I may have hooked a sunken log, I dropped the rod tip to let tension off the line, but before the line hit the water, that weight lurched toward the right bank, then slammed back to the left. After a few more of these ricochets, the fish turned toward me and charged downstream. I reeled frantically to take up the slack line, but once I had, the monster on the other end thrashed twice, then snapped my line.

To appreciate the feeling of losing an unexpectedly large fish, imagine that at the moment that fish broke free, all the oxygen in the atmosphere was sucked away, leaving you stunned and gasping, your balance wavering, your mind beginning to freeze. Unlike in the case of instantaneous oxygen depletion, your equilibrium returns, slowly, after the loss of a fish, yet a shadow will remain over the rest of the day.

I was crushed after this Swamp Thing ditched me. It was by far the largest trout I'd ever hooked in the creek. A once in a lifetime fish, I feared, the like of which I might never fight again. As it turns out, my fears were unfounded, though sometimes I would question whether that was fortunate.