“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.”
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
Kristen Chandler Page 24
