TROLLS by  Alan Czenkusch

(Long Island, the Bahamas) Dave and I drove down to a place called Galloway from our rented house on Lochabar Beach, chasing tarpon rumors. Or “rumours,” coming as they did from Bahamians, but anyway we’d heard some talk about some tarpon maybe being “down at Galloway.” We wanted to find out if there was anything to it. Galloway used to be part of a salt operation that pulled out in the ‘70s. There are odd-looking lagoons there; the waterways make no sense at all until you realize that the original point was to move sea water around to evaporate and make salt. There are channels dug out of solid limestone that connect natural lagoons, remnants of dikes and berms and ponds, and here and there big iron things that have rusted unidentifiable. Mom has played tropical-rate catchup here, though, and now there are plenty of mangroves big enough to make dandy black shadowy edges. She got some help, too—when the salt company left, the more civic-minded and serious islanders started modifying the salt works with dynamite. They later learned that you could restore tidal flow to a huge area just by digging through the offending berm with a shovel. “Just a little, little ditch but next storm come, drive a boat through,” our man Philip had told us yesterday, as he drove his boat through a channel he seemed pretty proud of. There are thousands of acres of healthy bonefish flats now that used to be sterile salt pans. Nice work, gentle Bahamians, and the bonefish thank you too.

The water was really warm, seemed like it had to be 90, and we slogged quite a way south. Dave decided to hang at one lagoon; I pressed on. These lagoons are flats, and then again they’re not. It’s been 30 years, but it’s still not quite back to a natural state. I went about a mile and a half and saw nothing but small mojarras, and not many of them. Could there be a hidden facet of Bahamian humor going on here? Nobody guaranteed tarpon here—and boy, this water sure is warm. No fresh bonefish holes here, either, no tails, no muds, no pushes, bonefish absent.

“Hell with this.” I turned around and headed back to see what Dave was up to. Some distance past where I should have turned off, I began to wonder if I should have turned off back there somewhere. “Maybe I’m just hot and tired, but it sure seems like I’ve walked a lot farther than before.” Sloshing along, not really trying to be quiet any more, I was fixating on the water that was in the cooler in the car. Now the lagoon necked down into more of a channel, and I never been here before. Shit. How can you get lost on a long, skinny island?

But lookie there up ahead—a slash, and bait fish squirt up out of the water! Were it not for being in the Bahamas, I would think “snook,” but there isn’t enough fresh water for there to be any snook, so what is it? Not nearly so hot or tired now, and here’s the plan: “get as close as I can to the left bank—it’s upwind—cast to where they jumped,” and I pick out the lump on the bank I need to be next to when I do. As I stealthed up the curved channel, there came into view the little bridge our bud Vincent called “a waste of good plywood” when he showed us how to get down here. Sure enough, I have walked way too far, but I’m not lost any more and besides, there’s action.

I get to my spot, look for a while, and cast, but nothing. Five or six casts, still nothing, don’t see a thing, but I do spot deeper water under the bridge. It’s time to back away some and plunge up through the mangroves. Boy, there are some biters in here out of the wind, a major contrast between being out in the sea breeze and in the Humid Bush, and I put on more deet. Crabs pinball through the black mangrove pneumatophores, which resemble May-in-Colorado, burned-irrigation ditch scouring rushes. Bum’s breath mangrove stink and deet—perfume of the tropics. Loud squishing from my flats boots; this is the first time I’ve been on dry ground in three hours. I break out onto the two-track and around the bend to the bridge.

I was standing on the little bridge, about two feet above the water, at the down-tide edge. It was not really much more than a culvert made of timbers; somebody had laid a couple of sheets of plywood on the wheel tracks. I stood there, looking. It occurred to me that looking, tropical-angling-wise, is a pretty complex process.

I finally looked straight down after a while and saw a big, black tail sticking out from under the bridge. I mean bigger than my hat. I could have spit and hit it. I racked my dumbfounded biologist brain, and couldn’t come up with anything but ‘poon. I was standing there on this dinky bridge, looking at the caudal fin and caudal peduncle of a damned tarpon, close enough to poke with the rod. There was about a foot of fish showing and so there had to be two or three feet of fish I couldn’t see, DIRECTLY UNDER MY FEET!

I had a small, tan and white craft-fur Clouser on, hooked on the fourth guide and the leader looped around the reel from the trip through the mangrove bush. What we call a bonefish Clouser, tied on a #6 hook, with a fluorescent chartreuse nose. Telling myself “this is really stupid,” I unhooked that fly and dropped it, no cast at all, right off behind that fish tail about a foot. I was rattled; it’s all I could think of at the time.

Speaking of time, an altered-time condition now applies. Very, very quickly, all in the same motion, the fish swapped ends, ate the fly, jumped up into the air, hovered while making horizontal eye contact with the gaping fool on the bridge, jumped back down into the water, and took off smartly down the channel. Now, my composure was not all it could have been. But I did bow to the king, and I didn’t have to clear line since it was instantly on the reel which was a happy accident.

I flushed birds from the trees, yelling. I can not recall the words I yelled, but there are peripheral, squawking herons and egrets while this Tropical Adventure unfolds.

The first jump and the first run, of course, were the most grandiose. The tarpon would run straight down the channel and I could mostly pump him straight back—both ways avoided the mangroves that lined the channel on both sides. The jumps and runs grew shorter, to the point that I began to think of maybe getting my fly back. I became conscious that diminishing was what was going on. I was still connected to a strong, energetic fish, and it wasn’t over yet,  but it was all diminishing. Then he rolled over, and that silver side lit up. At the time, numbers like 40 or 50 flashed by, but a boga-grip or a cooler head would have put it at 25 pounds. I reached down and it wasn’t nearly as tough to get the fly out of the bone of his jaw as it should have been. It didn’t just fall out; I had to pull on it some, but not real hard either. A tug and a pop, and we weren’t connected any more. I let him go, took my arm from under him, and watched him rotate back upright. A pause—that blue and chrome hombre against the shadows of the bridge in that clear, warm Bahamian water—and then his fins seemed to renew, and that fish rolled majestically off down the channel.

It goes on. When I quit shaking and began breathing normally, I looked around and realized that the dark shapes upstream under the mangroves were smaller tarpon. They didn’t seem happy, either, not what you would call relaxed fish. Like their big brother had been making one hell of a lot of racket, and this just couldn’t mean anything good . . . I stood still and watched them, and then was surprised by how it didn’t take very long for them to settle down, and one by one they darted back under the bridge.

This is too much. Back through the mangroves, bothering the crabs again, and about fifty feet below the bridge I waded out bottom-of-the-wade-belt deep and dusted off the old snook under the bush sidearm cast. I shot right under the bridge where the first one’s head had been. BAM! Wow—looking up at jumping tarpon is amazing! They took little round hunks of water with them up into the air that the sun lit up. Two more, these twelve or fifteen pounds, ‘poon BABIES!

With the third one caught, I saw the rest finally decide to leave the shelter of the bridge and they raised the finest push I’ve ever seen, charging away upstream. Think of parimutuel pig racing. Do you have that mental image? Now, picture it in a creek.

Well. One fine gift from the gods of the tropics. Back through the mangroves and mosquitoes once more, and down the road to somehow break the news to Dave, and try to be considerate and diplomatic about it. Sure. That creep always catches more fish. It must have been that the sun was getting lower, and I was back out in the breeze, but I wasn’t hot or tired any more. What I was, was looking forward to telling Dave that while he was fiddling around back there, I had found the tarpon, by God, and not only caught one but three, and when it’s trout guides versus fish biologists you had better not put your dough on fly pimps. Initiative and Perseverance are rewarded, I told myself.

I got to the car and shed my wade belt and rod, and darned if Dave wasn’t coming out of the water where all this had started four hours ago. I took a deep breath, sort of like when you are two beats from singing the first words of an important song, and he grinned a nasty possum grin at me and said “I caught three tarpon. Right here, three tarpon.” And held up a big, fat tarpon scale.