I held on, in spite of the line’s hurting my hand a little, and then, out there about ten feet, something with a big long ugly snout and with fierce eyes shot up through the waves and almost two feet in the air, and dive-splashed back in again.
There was a fierce, mad boiling of the surface like a bomb had exploded down there in the water somewhere. I was trembling inside like any fisherman trembles when a fierce fast-fighting fish gets away after it’s been hooked—only this one hadn’t been hooked with a real hook. He had probably come swimming along down there under the water, looking for an early supper, like a robin hops around in our lawn at Sugar Creek looking for night crawlers, and, seeing Wally swimming lazily around, had decided to eat him, which is what some big fish do to little other fish when they’re hungry.
He had probably slowly nosed his fierce ugly long snout up to Wally, and then all of a sudden made a savage rush at him with his mouth open, and had swallowed him whole, and started to swim away with him. That had scared all the other fish, which was why we’d all stopped getting bites at the same time.
Anyway, right after that fierce old fighting fish lunged up out of the water and down in again, he made a dive straight for our boat, shot under it, and pulled so hard that I had to hold on for dear life. If I’d had a long line on a fishing rod with a reel on it, I could have let the reel spin, and like fishermen do when they have a wild walleye or an enormous northern pike on their lines, I could have “played” him until he was tired out, then hauled him in, but with my line only a dozen or more feet long, I was pretty sure I didn’t have a chance in the world to land him,—and the next thing I knew I found out I was right. In a second it seemed, after he dived under our boat, I felt my line go sickeningly slack, and I knew I’d lost him. I couldn’t tell though whether he’d broken my line, or whether he’d swallowed backwards and Wally was free again.
While the gang was groaning with disappointment, ’cause they’d seen what had happened, and while I was pulling in the lifeless line to see what was on the other end, I had a sickish feeling in the pit of my stomach like a fisherman gets when he loses a big fish.
In another jiffy I was holding up the end of the line for us to look at. Dragonfly, seeing it, said, “Poetry’s slip-knot slipped.”
We would have been a terribly sad gang if we hadn’t already caught a lot of middle-sized walleyes.
Circus called to us from the other boat and said, “We could have put a lot of kidnapper’s ransom money in a fish that big, if we’d caught him.”
“There wouldn’t have been much room left with Wally already inside of him,” Poetry said.
For some reason I was looking at Little Jim when Poetry said that and I noticed a sad expression come on his smallish mouse-like face, and I thought it looked like he had a couple of tears in his eyes.