The hook goes all the way through the side of the great bass’s mouth. Jason has set the hook perfectly, and now Elihu dances on the end of the line like a roped tiger.
The fish’s inky, green scales glisten over its body, and its girth is so enormous! Why! Elihu is as big around as a five-gallon pickle jar. Now Jason can see the great bass’s eye staring at him, as if saying, Ah! It’s you.
Jason works the reel, but Elihu takes the line and runs under water with it. Shhhhhh, the reel sings as the line goes out. “Look!” Jason points with his chin toward Old Snout, for he can’t ease his grip on the rod for an instant.
“Hold on!” Grampy Luke raises the oar, ready to swat Old Snout. “Just watch your line, Jason. Watch your line.”
Old Snout’s eyes are yellow fire as he enters a circle of water lilies and aims straight toward them. He opens his mouth. The alligator’s teeth are like razors.
Whoosh! Elihu again explodes from the water.
The bass is like a black diamond rocketed from the center of the earth. Jason freezes in wonder as the great fish dances across the water. Now Jason can clearly see the markings that Elihu is famous for: the scales darkly tinted from the tannic acid leeched from the cypress trees near the bank. And the white stripe on Elihu’s belly is as wide as a hat band, wider than most.
That stripe helped Elihu grow to its great size, since bigger fish are always looking for smaller ones to gobble up. So when Elihu was a baby, that wide stripe appeared like sunlight coming from above, and Elihu escaped.
Elihu’s one eye is a famous sign too, for long ago, the other was lost when caught on a trot line set out to catch whatever swam by. Now Elihu’s good eye is fixed on Jason, locked in battle with him.
Old Snout swims through the last of the lilies into open water as if he’s caught a bullet train straight for them. Jason’s throat tightens. His heart beats like a mad clock. “Start the motor, Grampy Luke! Back us up!”
The jon boat motor chugs. It runs along for a good minute, then dies like a swallowed cough. “Dadblasted yellow stumpsucker!” Grampy Luke shouts and bends over the motor. Recently, Grampy Luke made a rule: whenever he and Jason are in the boat, out on the lake, they can say as many bad-sounding words as they can think up. But the words now cannot come fast enough.
“Gullywompus festatatious!” Grampy Luke again fake-cusses as the motor sputters but doesn’t catch.
Like a sheath sharpening a knife, Old Snout closes his mouth over his razor-teeth and keeps coming. Elihu beats the surface with its great tail. Hold on, hold on, hold on! Jason must never let go! Not ever let go! Elihu. Elihu. He has caught Elihu.
Now Old Snout is so close that Jason can smell the ugly gator’s musty hide. Then, Bang! Old Snout hits the boat.
“Hold tight!” Grampy Luke yells and grabs the sides of the jon boat as it rocks and fills with water, almost like a big spoon dipped into the lake.
Suddenly, Old Snout rises out of the water. The gator opens its huge mouth and bites the line. Snap! Old Snout’s smelly breath floats over Jason’s face like an opened sewer. It is a smell worse than rotted-meat stink, and the line on Jason’s rod goes slack.
Elihu swims free. The great fish slaps the water in a loud Ha! and dives.
“Never mind,” Grampy Luke says. “We’ll try another day.” He reaches for his tackle box and takes a screwdriver out to work on the motor.
Old Snout goes back to his cover of weeds, and Elihu hides happily once again on the bottom of the lake.
TWO
THE LEGEND OF ELIHU
The daydream stopped.
Jason opened his eyes. He was lying in a bed in a cabin at the Orange Lake Fish Camp. Just as if he’d been watching a movie on the inside of his eyelids, he’d been going over all he’d heard that afternoon in the Tackle Shop. He’d been going over it so much that he began imagining it happening to him.
And soon it might.
He first heard about Elihu when he and Grampy Luke stopped in at the Tackle Shop to buy minnows for catching crappie. Fishermen were always in the shop, standing around, buying bait, drinking coffee and talking.
“You ever heard of Elihu?” A man with a dark bushy beard leaned into Jason’s face.
Jason shook his head, no.
“Look, then.” Bill, who owned the Tackle Shop, pointed to three photographs tacked behind glass. The photos were of famous fishermen holding up big bass. “Old Elihu’s bigger’n even that.”
There were no pictures, yet, of Elihu, because whenever Elihu had been hooked, Old Snout had set the giant bass free. Only stories and the names of fishermen were linked with the famous fish. Sometimes those who touched Elihu brought back one of the bass’s inky scales–darker than most–to back-up their tale.
In that one instant when Jason heard about Elihu, it was as if a match were put to dry brush: the way the dream to catch the great fish blazed up in his mind. Right away he knew he would one day catch Elihu. Elihu and Jason. Jason and Elihu. The story of Jason and Elihu would travel for miles and miles around the lake and beyond. Their names would be linked forever.
The desire to catch Elihu quickly became a dream-fever. It was like a fever in the way that it burned through him with an unquenchable longing to catch the great bass. Elihu would make Jason the most famous eleven-year-old boy in Florida, maybe even in the whole United States. Jason’s photograph would be in the Tackle Shop, then. Nothing else you ever heard about him would matter–nothing, nothing at all. Jason would be known only as the boy who caught Elihu.
Then the men in the Tackle Shop started telling about another great fish, and when Jason turned to hear what they were saying, this time he heard about a bass somewhere else.
He leaned in toward the cash register to watch Bill behind the counter point to a newspaper article. Bill read parts and told parts, so Jason soon knew of the June morning in Georgia in l932 when a nineteen-year-old boy named George Perry caught the biggest bass on record.
That boy had cast a Fintail Shiner next to a cypress log. It was raining, and it didn’t seem there would be much chance of catching anything. Then bam! The great bass had hit George Perry’s line. As he started to reel it in, he realized he’d hooked something like a monster. “What a nice chunk of meat to take home to the family,” he was thinking. For it was during the Great Depression; a lot of people were out of work. Many worried about starving, and George Perry’s family was poor.
The bass on George Perry’s line fought harder than a Spanish bull. It bulled around until it was totally exhausted, and only then could Perry haul it into his boat. He looked wide-eyed at the monstrosity he’d caught. Right away, he drove it to a general store, where the owner weighed and measured it and wrote down the record. George Perry’s bass weighed twenty-two pounds and four-ounces. It was a record that was yet to be broken. It was the most famous bass of all time.
“And Elihu’s even bigger,” Wally called, sitting by the shrimp-bait live-well. Wally was known as a bassmaster fisherman who fished many tournaments. His coffee cup steamed up over his face. His eyes glinted with a playful look.
Jason shivered.
“No picture was taken of George Perry’s bass, either,” Bill said, touching Jason’s shoulder and laughing. “Because that young George Perry took it home and ate it. But the record stands for sure. Now come look at this.”
Bill’s red whisker stubble reminded Jason of a dusting of orange clay. Bill pointed to another piece of newspaper under glass near where the fish knives were kept. This was the picture of a bass so big