The Founding Fish Read Online Free

membrane that lies behind. The hook is like a coat hanger swinging from a bar. The longer the shad is on the line, the greater the opening the hook will make in that thin membrane. Suddenly, the fish is gone. A fisherman doing everything right loses many shad. It’s a basic component of shad fishing. Not all shad are hooked in just that way, but most seem to be, and when they are netted—or the tension on the line otherwise drops—there’s usually no need to detach the shad dart; it just falls out of the mouth. The lower extremities of the premaxillary bones widen out like strips of durable plastic. If the hook lodges there, your chances of netting the fish are considerably larger. Of course, while the fish is in the water you’ve got no idea where the hook is and your only rational strategy is finesse.
    More time went by. I’d had the fish on the line for an hour, and then an hour and a half. The guys in the boat next to us—now the only other boat—finally pulled anchor and left, mentioning
something about their wives. There were people on the bridge who had been watching earlier, and had gone off to dinner, and now had come back from dinner and were watching again. One of them shouted, “Are you still catching that same fish?” I nodded without looking up. In the darkness, I was staring instead at the black vertical rod against the disco lights of Club Zadar, which had grown ever brighter with the fall of night and were flashing colors on the river. While the fish moved and sounded, and came up a little, and then sounded again, it almost hypnotized me as I concentrated on the swaying rod against the whirling colors. Gingerly, I worked it to the left and the right, trying to move its head to one side and then to the other side, to confuse it, and try to get in charge of it psychologically. But I’ll tell you, I never got in charge of that fish psychologically. At nine-thirty, completing two hours on the other end of the line, it made the reel scream as it took off downriver like a tarpon.
    Tarpon? Well, hardly. But the Delaware is a river of prodigious fisheries, and for the past hour we had been doubting, speculating, wondering. What species could this fish be? It had been on the line more than five times as long any of us had ever required to bring in a shad. We now decided that it was not a shad. It felt like a shad in strong current, but the passage of so much time made us think elsewhere. The Delaware is the premier wild-rainbow-trout river in the eastern half of the United States. Ed Cervone and I had watched a shad fisherman catching a rainbow only ten miles north. The big native rainbows, though, were two hundred miles up the river. Besides, no rainbow could ever qualify to be this fish. Once, after I threw a shad dart into the current far upriver, the dart swung into a fish that felt like a shad with a bad cold. It moved around like a shad, but it just felt, by comparison, weak. It turned out to be a fat native wild rainbow, a beautiful fish, not much under two pounds.

    There were numerous alternative possibilities. Edmund mentioned the muskellunge. If an alligator had the swimming skills of a barracuda, that would be a muskellunge. Muskies are lone ambush hunters, as much as six feet long, and are not uncommon in the Delaware. With two hours behind us, Ed Cervone dismissed the notion. “They give up,” he said. “They roll over.”
    A walleye? Never. “A walleye would be fatigued in five minutes.”
    A striped bass? Never. “A striped bass would be fatigued in ten minutes. Stripers fight very, very strongly—savagely. However, after a certain point they fade. They exhaust themselves. They use up their oxygen. Once you control the first few rushes it’s awfully hard to revive them. They give up. They roll over.”
    A carp?
    Edmund: “Whatever it is, if we catch it we’re going to eat it.”
    Ed: “A carp wouldn’t