“Yeah,” Little Jim piped up and said, “but fish maybe don’t have school in August,” which reminded me that right after August came September, and generally in the first week of September, the Sugar Creek School started and—
I let out a fierce long sigh when I thought of that, not because I didn’t need an education but I hated to have to sit down to get one, which is what you have to do in school most of the time—and the boat seat was getting harder and harder every minute.
The yellowish rubber fish I’d just blown up looked cute though, and was as fat as a butterball. For a jiffy I let it float on the water clear out to the end of the fishing line I had it tied on. “Here, Poetry,” I said to the fish, “get out there and float. You’re so fat you can’t sink,” which made the real Poetry in the boat with us pretend to be peeved, and he said to me, “Oh, you go jump in the lake!”
And then—all of an excited sudden—Poetry got a big strike. He waited until he was sure it was time to set the hook, which he did at exactly the right time and in a jiffy he landed a very excited walleye; only it wasn’t much bigger than a big yellow perch—hardly big enough to keep.
“O.K., Bill—hand me the stringer,” he ordered me, panting with happiness. Talk about a proud grin on a boy’s face—Poetry really had one.
“What stringer?” I said, and looked all around on the bottom of the boat for one. And—would you believe it?—not a one of us had brought along a fish stringer! The other boat was too far away for them to throw one into our boat, so Poetry just sat there with his fish in his fat hand, wondering what to do with it.
“It’s too little to keep,” Little Jim said. “Let him go back to his mama.”
“I wish I knew where his mama is hiding,” Dragonfly said, “I’d like to catch her.”
“Let him go and he’ll find his mama,” Snow-in-the-face said, and had the cutest grin on his smallish face, and that tickled me all over ’cause I could see he was as mischievous as any white-faced boy.
“It’s probably a little lost child-fish,” Little Jim said. “We aren’t going to catch any more anyway. Let’s let him go home to his parents.”