The Longest Silence Read online

  Some moments later, perhaps seventy feet astern of me, a large blacktip shark swam up onto the bank and began traveling with grave sweeps of its tail through the fish, not as yet making a move for them. Mullet and smaller fish nevertheless showered out in front of the shark as it coursed past. Behind the shark I could see another fish faintly flashing. I supposed it was a jack crevalle, a pelagic fish, strong for its size, that often follows sharks. I decided to cast anyway at a distance that was all I could manage. I got off one of my better shots, which nevertheless fell slightly behind target. I was surprised to see the fish drop back to the fly, turn and elevate high in the water, then take. A permit.

  I set the hook sharply and the fish started down the flat. Remembering my last episode, I kept the loose, racing line well away from the reel handle for the instant the fish took to consume it. Then the fish was on the reel. When I lowered the rod tip and cinched the hook, the fish began to accelerate, staying on top of the flat, where I could witness its wildly extending wake. Everything was holding together: the hookup was good, the knots were good. At 150 yards the fish stopped, and I got back line. I kept at it until the fish was within 80 yards of the boat. Then it suddenly made a wild, undirected run, not permitlike at all, and I could see the shark chasing it. The blacktip struck and missed three or four times, making explosions in the water that sickened me. I released the drag, untied the boat, and started the engine. Woody started poling toward me at the sound of my engine, his mystified client dragging a line astern.

  There was hardly enough water to move in. The prop was half buried, and even at full throttle I couldn’t get up on plane. As the explosions continued, I could only guess whether or not I was still connected to the permit. I ran toward it trailing a vast loop of line, saw the shark and immediately ran over him. I threw the engine into neutral and waited to see what had happened and tried to regain line. I was again tight to the permit. Then the shark reappeared. He hit the permit once, killed it, and ate it, worrying it like a dog and bloodying the water. Then, an instant later, I had the shark on my line and running. I fought him with irrational care: I now planned to gaff the blacktip and retrieve my permit piece by piece. When the inevitable cutoff came I dropped the rod in the boat and, empty-handed, wondered what I had done to deserve this.

  I heard Woody’s skiff and looked up. He swung about and coasted alongside. I told him it was a permit, just as he had guessed from my starting up on the flat. Woody began to say something when, at that not unceremonial moment, his client broke in to remark that hooking them was the main thing. We stared at him until he added, “Or is it?”

  Often afterward, we went over the affair and talked about what might have been done differently, as we had with the first permit. One friend clips a carbine on clips under the gunwale to resolve any shark problems. But I felt that with a gun in the skiff during the excitement of a running fish, I would either plug myself or deep-six the boat. Also, I like sharks. Woody knew better than to assure me there would be other chances. Knowing that there might very well not be was one of our conversational assumptions.

  One morning we went looking for tarpon. Woody had had a bad night of it. He’d awakened in the darkness of his room about three in the morning and watched the shadowy figure of a huge land crab walk across his chest. Endlessly it crept to the wall and then up the plaster. Carefully silhouetting the monster, Woody blasted it with a karate chop and now, at breakfast, he was nursing a bruise on the side of his hand. At 6:00 a.m., we were having grits and eggs at the Chat and Chew restaurant. A trucker who claimed to have driven from Loxahatchee in three hours flat was yelling for “oss tie.” And when the girl asked if he really wanted iced tea this early in the morning he replied, “Dash rat. Oss tie.” I couldn’t wake up in the heat. Listless, half dreaming, I imagined the land crab performing some morbid cadenza on my pile of grits.

  We laid out the rods in the skiff. The wind was coming out of the east—that is, over one’s casting hand from the point we planned to fish—and blowing fairly stiff. But the light was good, and that was more important. We headed out of Big Pine into the calm water along Ramrod Key. We ran in behind Pye Key, through the hole behind Little Money and out to Southeast Point. The sun was already huge, out of hand, like Shakespeare’s “glistering Phaethon.” I had whitened my nose and mouth with zinc oxide ointment, and felt, handling the mysterious rods and flies, like a shaman. As Woody jockeyed the skiff with the pole, I put my leader together. I had retained enough of my trout-fishing sensibilities to continue to be intrigued by tarpon leaders with their array of arcane knots. The butt of the leader is nail-knotted to the line, blood-knotted to monofilament of lighter test; the shock tippet that protects the leader from the rough jaws of tarpon is tied to the leader with a combination Albright Special and Bimini Bend; the shock tippet is attached to the fly either by a perfection loop, a clinch or a Homer Rhodes Loop; and to choose one is to make a moral choice. You are made to understand that it would not be impossible to fight about it or, at the very least, quibble darkly.

  We set up on a tarpon pass point. We had sand spots around us that would help us pick out the dark shapes of traveling tarpon. And we expected tarpon on the falling water, from left to right. Up on the bow with fifty feet of line coiled on the deck, I was barefoot, so I could feel if I stepped on a loop. I made a couple of practice casts—harsh, indecorous, tarpon-style—and scanned for fish.

  The first were, from my point of view, spotted from too great a distance. That is, a long period of time would pass before they actually broke the circle of my casting range, during which I could go, secretly but quite completely, to pieces. The sensation for me, in the face of these advancing forms, was as of a gradual ossification of the joints. Moviegoers will recall the early appearances of Frankenstein’s monster, his ambulatory motions accompanied by great rigidity of the limbs, almost as though he could stand a good oiling. I was hard put to see how I could manage anything beyond a perfunctory flapping of the rod. I had once laughed at Woody’s stories of customers who sat down and held their feet slightly aloft, treading the air or wobbling their hands from the wrists. I giggled at the story of a Boston chiropractor who fell over on his back and barked like a seal.

  “Let them come in now,” Woody said.

  “I want to nail one, Woody.”

  “You will. Let them come.”

  The fish, six of them, were surging toward us in a wedge. They ran from 80 to 110 pounds, slow, dark torpedoes. “All right, the lead fish, get on him,” Woody said. I managed the throw, the fly falling in front of the fish. I let them overtake it before starting my retrieve. The big lead fish pulled up behind the fly, trailed, and then made the shoveling, open-jawed uplift of a strike that is not soon forgotten. When he turned down I set the hook and he started his run. The critical issue of getting rid of that loose line piled around one’s feet now ensued. You imagine that if you are standing on a coil, you will go to the moon when that coil must follow its predecessors out of the rod. This trial went off without a hitch, and it was only my certainty that someone had done it before that kept me from deciding that we’d made a huge mistake.

  The sudden pressure of the line and the direction of its resistance apparently confused the tarpon, so it raced in close-coupled arcs around the boat. Then, once it had seen the boat, felt the line and isolated a single point of resistance, it cleared out at a perfectly insane rate of acceleration that made water run three feet up my line as it sliced through the ocean. The jumps—wild, greyhounding, end-over-end, rattling—were all crazily blurred as they happened, while I pictured my reel exploding like a racing clutch and filling me with shrapnel. This fish, the first of six that day, broke off. So did the others, destroying various aspects of my tackle.

  As the sun moved through the day the blind side continually changed, forcing us to adjust position until, by afternoon, we were watching to the north. Somehow, looking uplight, Woody saw four permit coming right toward us, head-on. I cast my tarpon fly at them, o
ut of my accustomed long-shot routine, and was surprised when one fish moved forward from the pack and followed up the fly rather aggressively. About then they all sensed the skiff and swerved to cross the bow around thirty feet out. They were down close to the bottom now, slightly spooked. I picked up, changed direction, and cast a fairly long interception. When the fly lit, well out ahead, two permit elevated from the group, sprinted forward, and the inside fish took the fly in plain view.

  The positive certainty of the take, in the face of an ungodly number of refusals and countless unrewarded hours, induced immediate pessimism. I waited for everything to go haywire.

  I hooked the fish quickly. It was only slightly startled and returned to the pack, which by this time had veered away from the shallow flat edge and swung back toward deep water. The critical time of loose line passed slowly. Woody unstaked the skiff and was poised to see which way the fish would take us. When the permit was tight to the reel I cinched him once and he began running. The deep water kept the fish from making the long, sustained sprints permit make on the flats. This fight was a series of assured jabs at various clean angles from the skiff. We followed, alternately gaining and losing line. Then, in some way, at the end of this blurred episode, the permit was flashing beside the boat, looking nearly circular, and the only visual contradiction to his perfect poise was the intersecting line of leader seemingly inscribed from the tip of my arcing rod to the precise corner of his jaw.

  Then we discovered that there was no net in the boat. The fish would have to be tailed. I forgave Woody in advance for the permit’s escape. Woody was kneeling in the skiff, my line disappearing over his shoulder, the permit no longer in my sight, Woody leaning deep from the gunwale. Then, unbelievably, his arm was up, the black symmetry of tail above his fist, the permit perpendicular to the earth, then horizontal on the floorboards, where a pile of loose line was strewn in curves that wandered around the bottom of the boat toward the gray-and-orange fly secured in the permit’s mouth. I sat down numb and soaring.

  I don’t know what this sort of occurrence indicates beyond the necessary, ecstatic resignation to the moment. With the beginning over and, possibly, nothing learned, I was persuaded that once was not enough. And indeed it wasn’t. Thirty years have passed and none of the magic of permit fishing, not a trace of it, has gone.

  Close to the Bone

  ONE IS TEMPTED to think of bonefish as among the wildest of creatures, if a sensory apparatus calculated to separate them continually from man’s presence qualifies them as “wild.” Yet, when the serious angler insinuates himself into the luminous, subaqueous universe of the bonefish and catches one without benefit of accident, he has, in effect, visited another world, one whose precise cycles and conditions appear so serene that the addled twentieth-century angler begins to be consoled for all he has done to afford the trip in the first place. In his imagination he is emphatic about emptiness, space, and silence. He is searching less for recreation than for a kind of stillness.

  Only the utterly initiated consider the bonefish handsome. Those new to or stupid about the sport think the fish is silly-looking, but those who know him well grant the bonefish a radiant, nearly celestial beauty. To me, he seems so perfectly made for both his terrain and my needs as a fisherman that he has the specificity of design seen in experimental aircraft. The nose, it is true, has a curious slant, and there is an undershot mouth that we, with our anthropocentrism, associate with lack of character, yet after a while you see that the entire head is rather hydrodynamic and handsomely vulpine.

  The body is sturdy, often a radiant gray-green above and pure silver on the sides. The tail, like the fins, is frequently a gunmetal gray and is oversized and powerful, as exaggeratedly proportioned to its size as are the fish’s speed and power.

  A bonefish doesn’t jump. From the fish’s point of view, the jump is a wasteful and often ruinous enterprise. Tarpon customarily wreck themselves jumping, which is the only thing that enables us to take the large ones on light tackle at all. So people who like to be photographed with all the spectacle associated with themselves, their fishing paraphernalia and their aerobatic catch ought to forget bonefish and concentrate on tarpon. Hang a tarpon up at the dock and it will suck gawkers off the highway like a vacuum cleaner. A dead bonefish at dockside barely draws flies.

  It took me a month to catch my first bonefish, and I regret to say that I killed it and put it in the freezer. I had no boat and haunted the roadside flats, especially at Ohio-Missouri Key, finally catching one at Big Torch after pushing my way through the mangroves and stumbling onto a mud flat where some gullible fish were feeding. For a long time, at the drop of a hat, I would take it out, rigid as a fungo bat, to show to my friends. One said it was small. Another noted that the freezer had given it sunken eyes and a morbid demeanor. I asked how you could speak of demeanor in something which had departed this world. It was the last bonefish I kept.

  Hard as it may be to believe, the bonefish leads his life in his extensive multiocean range quite without reference to the angler. For example, off the coast of Hawaii he has taken himself to great depths, where he is of no earthly use to the light-tackle fisherman. His poor manners extend to the African coast, where he reveals himself occasionally to cut-bait anglers of the high surf who smother his fight with pyramid sinkers that a Wyoming wrangler might use to keep the horses handy.

  For these transgressions of fair play the human race can best revenge itself upon the bonefish in the shallows of Central America, Christmas Island, the Bahamas, and the Florida Keys. From a topographical perspective, this immensely distributed fish seems to be all over the place, but the angler will resort to low tricks and importuning the deity for just one. In the back of his mind, he recalls that marine biologists describe the bonefish as “widely distributed.” It doesn’t help.

  The marine shallows where the bonefish spends much of its existence, from the transparent larval stage to maturity, are accessible only to the fisherman or scientist who either wades or transports himself in a light skiff over the sand and turtlegrass. As much delicacy of approach is required of these observers as there is of the ornithologist. This essential condition of bonefishing makes it almost generically different from offshore angling.

  Unlike almost any other game fish, the bonefish are not sought where they live. They live in deep water and only do some of their feeding on the flats. A trout fisherman, for example, seeking a particular fish, would attempt to ascertain where that fish lived, in which pool or under which log. The bonefisherman never has any idea where any given fish lives; he attempts to find combinations of tide and place that are attractive to feeding bonefish. Occasionally, a single fish will appear with certain regularity, but this is exceptional.

  Flats used by feeding bonefish are flooded by tide. They are flooded at unequal rates, depending on the location of the individual flats relative to the direction of tidal bore and current, and the presence of keys and basins, which draw and deflect the moving water. One flat, for instance, might have rising water while another, located a mile away, may not get its first incoming water until an hour later. Even this is not constant, since wind can alter the precise times of rising and falling water.

  The beginning bonefisherman often feels humiliated to learn that flats he found empty could produce bonanzas for anglers with a better sense of timing. A tide book and a good memory are the first tools of the bonefisherman. With experience, a pattern begins to emerge—the shape of the life habits of a wild species.

  The novice starts with a simple combination—early incoming water in the morning or evening—and gradually, by observation, begins to include the mosaic of tidal information that finally becomes the fabric of his fishing knowledge. Tide in the Tropics, where only a foot of water moves on the average, seems rather ethereal to the new bonefisherman. To him it hardly seems reasonable that three- or four-tenths of a foot of tidal variation can mean the difference between a great and a worthless fishing tide.

  Tide ca
n work in another way: you are poling across a flat in less than a foot of water. A fish tails high on the flat. You begin your approach, closing in deliberately. There is the small sound of staghorn crunching against the skiff’s bottom, then the more solid sound of sand. You can’t go any farther. The bonefish is still tailing, still out of reach. You get out of the skiff and wade toward him to make your cast. His tail disappears as he tilts out of his feeding posture, follows your lure or bait, takes, is hooked and running. For ten minutes you live as never before. Then the bonefish, a fine eight-pounder, is released.

  When you return to the skiff, it’s high and dry; the tide has dropped out from under it. You’ve got a six-hour wait before you can budge the skiff, so you pace up and down the flat like an angry executive. If you’re a smoker, you smoke more than you have ever smoked before. Can’t someone get me out of this?

  Now, if you have gone aground in the morning on a summer’s day and have not brought water, you will be truly sorry. If you have gone aground in the afternoon and can’t find your way home in the dark, you’ll be sleeping in the skiff. Pick a breezy place where the mosquitoes have taxiing problems; a certain number will crash-land on your person anyway, but the breeze will discourage the rank and file. Curl up in your little flats boat, listen to the wave-slap, and, watching the deep tropical night, think upon the verities of your choice. Tantrums, it should be mentioned, only keep you from getting to sleep.