Acts of Nature

that going in.
    For the first couple of days we were satisfied to fish lazily on the southern area of the river that is wide and flat and bordered by sedge grasses and tupelos, red maple and bald cypress. Sherry had fished here before with me and it’s an easy enough activity that fits most people’s sense of normality in the wild.
    “You know, Max. This thing about incentive, motivation, greed,” she started on the second morning when we were sitting in my canoe on a wide and open stretch of river near a green edge where the color of the water goes suddenly dark and the bigger fish lurk. “Does a fish have that? Maybe we just have to figure out how to jack that up somehow. Make ’em more greedy.”
    Her line had been dormant for about an hour, lying like a single silvery string on calm water.
    “They aren’t much different than people, love,” I said, encouraging this little banter thing we’d become comfortable with over the years. “They’ll always want more. Dangle stuff in front of them and wait till they want it bad enough, they’ll take it.”
    She might have been pondering the thought, or figuring out a way to tell me I was full of shit, when a big tarpon hit her line and bent the pole like a whip.
    “Wooooo haaaaa!” she cried out and the instant enthusiasm and joy on her face caught me so off guard that I was slow to react to the sudden shift in the boat’s balance and nearly let us roll over. The tarpon immediately turned from the edge where it’d taken her bait and shot toward deep water. Sherry spun with it, her arms high, waist revolving, butt properly planted. I jammed my reel under my own seat and grabbed the gunwales with both hands, steadying the canoe. I’d learned from a dozen dunkings that fishing from a canoe is a different sport, a challenge of balance and concentration between shifting weight and anticipation of a strong animal’s moves.
    Sherry’s reel was grinding with the sound of an electric can opener but the tarpon’s strength still turned her end of the boat and started it moving. I countered the shift with my weight. Sherry let the big guy run, let it wear itself out a bit. She was working it like a pro. The line was tight as a guitar string, sizzling with water spray, but suddenly went slack. Sherry nearly fell back off her seat, her face shocked. Furrows started in her forehead, and bordering on disappointment, she started to look back at me. All I could do was point out where the fish was doubling back and yell out a warning.
    “Reel!” I shouted and she turned back and started cranking just as the silver-sided tarpon broke surface, flashed in the sun as it violently twisted its body in an attempt to throw the pain of the hook, and then crashed back into the river.
    “Holy, holy!” Sherry yelped with delight. She got a dozen spins on the reel to take up slack when again the line zipped taut and the fight was on.
    Three times over the next ten minutes I had to reach out and grab a handful of her waistband to keep Sherry from standing and going overboard as she battled the fish, her determination sometimes overtaking pragmatism.
    Twice I said: “Don’t let her get to the mangrove roots in the bank. She’ll try to swim into them and cut the line.”
    The second time I said it Sherry took her focus off the fish, shot me a “shut up” look, and slapped my hand away after an offer to take over.
    She finally reeled the exhausted fish to the side of the canoe and I reached over with a net and scooped it aboard. She let me hook my fingers into the gill slits and hold it up like a trophy. The tarpon seemed to be smiling and she mocked it with her own.
    “Tough little bastard,” she said.
    “She’s not so little,” I said, removing the hook from the tarpon’s mouth and then easing it back into the water. “And she’s gorgeous.”
    When I looked back up Sherry was watching me.
    “She, huh?”
    Those first days while the iced beer was still cold, we sipped and ate onion and tomato sandwiches and napped in the quiet roll of the boat or stretched out on the small dock landing at the foot of my stilted shack. Sherry listened to the sounds of the animals that always surrounded us. I was surprised when she started asking me to name them that I could only guess a few. Splash of a red-bellied turtle. Kee uk of an osprey. Grunt of a mating gator. During the day we sat in the speckled light that passed through the tree canopy as though it were green cheesecloth. At