Release-a short story

Release


By Jeffrey Hostetler



The fall fishing on the Bighorn was ok-good anglers realized that grass breaking off the bottom was a nuisance, but they could carefully deliver their flies between the floating rafts of knotted river vines. That was where Tom’s friend Eric hooked, landed, measured, and his five fishing buddies photographed the 26 ½ in rainbow. It was recorded, and the images were posted on Facebook and emailed to angling friends nationwide.

The next summer Tom waded the lower Madison in June, post runoff, alone, below Black’s Ford. He stripped Clousers and Zonkers and sculpin patterns in the five to foot troughs that divided the easily wadable weed beds. That is where he hooked an anchor, a lunker, the fish that throttles the reel’s drag, and races the angler’s heart with fear that he will lose it and excitement that he will see such a specimen stung on the end of his line. After leaping over troughs and much of the time spent with the fish fighting him rather than the other way around, he was able to swing it into the reeds and muck and tiny white flowers that bordered the receding river. He couldn’t drag it upstream to the net, so he crouched and reached and slipped his net under its head and slowly lifted it.

The brown trout’s color had all but faded since the dusk faded minutes ago, and the river, the reeds, even those tiny white flowers were instantly blue. Neither the tail nor the hooked jaw and its rows of teeth fit in the net, but its mass did, and it was hefty, like a full milk jug. No longer was Tom’s heart racing. His eyes were wide, his ears massive and heard crickets and rushing water. Heat from his face made his head feel huge and not big enough for the blood rushing to it.

He set the net down and now Tom could see the trout’s full length in the oncoming darkness. Phrases like “as long as his leg” came to mind, and he reached down with his right hand to grasp the exhausted trout around its middle. It was a two hander, for sure, as his thumb wrapped around its spine, but he couldn’t get his fingers beyond its scaly side. He plucked the black McCune’s sculpin from its hard jaw, and he rolled it upright and slipped downstream of the fish and kneeled. With his left hand under the male’s abdomen, and his right around the base of its tail, he reintroduced flowing cold water into its gills, its system, its muscles.

He exhaled finally, and reached inside with his right hand and slipped the trout’s tail between his thighs to hold it in place. The camera wasn’t there. Neither was the cell phone. He looked upstream panicked. The vague silhouette of the parking lot’s outhouses looked a mile away, and across the river. There was no way to keep the trout alive and get it back up there to the car to photograph it. He wished a boat would come by, but at dark, that wasn’t possible. He thought about other verification. Clubbing it with a stick was surely possible. He looked to the bank on his right, and a bat-sized piece of driftwood was just out of reach. He reached into the river beside his right thigh, and picked up a wedged rock the size of a flat softball. He measured its size against the trout’s head, and it would be labor, force, brutality he needed to crush that trout’s cranium. He raised it, and practiced the blow. As he did, the long, relaxed body tensed for a minute, shocked by the cold night water.

But he doesn’t kill trout. Tom hadn’t killed a trout in decades. When he was a teen, he would kill 18 inchers or even a 22 incher, more to show off to friends than to eat. But now at 40, life meant more. No one would believe him though. Maybe he could clip its adipose and save it. It was bigger than Tom’s thumbprint.

He set the rock back down, and took that right hand and slid it alongside the trout’s nose, and rolled the fish on his forearm. Its tail extended beyond his own neck. It was easily 30 inches. It was the culmination of a lifetime’s work, and fate’s luck and what legends are made of. If he could prove it. And now he started to shake. Tom did. The fish started to crank its back half. It was reviving, and Tom’s adrenal glands were pumped clean, and his body was withdrawing, or shocked from the euphoria, and with his left hand opened wide, he cradled the fish’s front portion, as it started to swim in its human nest, and Tom admired the bottle cap sized spots on its flanks, its paddle sized tail as he let it swat between his thighs. He rose off his penitent knees, and shuffled into the current even more, and held this fish as it came alive, and he harnessed its power for merely another second, and in the blue-black flow the fish powered out of his grasp, and swatted the surface and was gone.

Tom’s tears mixed with the river water on his roasted cheeks and ran into the crow’s feet and down into his stubbled grey beard, dripped off his chin, and mixed with the river, and the darkness, and the night and Tom and fish and legend were one for a second.