When You Were a Boy

by Edwin L. Sabin

You shook your head. You wanted to do it all yourself.

Little by little, in response to the relentless leverage that you exerted, your victim was being dragged to the surface. Higher and higher was elevated your pole, and the wet line followed. The cork appeared and left the water. Victory was almost yours, but you would not relax.

“It’s nothin’ but a snag!” denounced Snoopie.

You would not believe. It was—if it was not the big bass, it was something else wonderful.

A second—and up through the heaving area upon which were fixed your eyes broke a black stem. Swifter it exposed itself, and suddenly you had hoisted into the sunlight an ugly old branch, soaked and dripping, wrenched by your might from the peaceful bed where it long had lain.

Amid irritating jeers you swung it to shore.

“Well, I had something all right—and it was a bass, too; and he snagged my hook on me. He took the bobber under in less’n no time, I tell you!” you argued defensively.

That was a favorite trick of the “big bass” and other prodigies of these waters—to be almost caught and to escape by cleverly snagging the hook.

“YOU LUXURIOUSLY DINED”