Tarpon Shepherd, Andrew Steketee

Captain says the poons are laid up near the Shark River, eating Cockroaches and Jungle Bunnies if you’re man enough to make a ninety-foot cast without dirtying your laundry. The twenty-mile run involves repeated wrong turns, appearances of his free-ranging testicles and a patchwork of memories around tarpon wads flooding past Homosassa and Elliott Key. Shit, there were so many fish, it would’ve been impossible for one of them not to have eaten your fly. At our intended locale some new young asshole guide runs wide open through the fishing, precipitating thick strings of profanity, followed by awkward silence. We bow our heads until captain doubles his faded yellow skiff through a river of mangroves, herons and raining bait, clutching a chrome wheel and throttle with scalded, skinless hands. When he cuts the engine alongside a second tarpon flat, fish are a goddamn certainty. Above the deck on a poling platform, he angles a long black crook between sea and God, then slowly herds the ancient iron schools like a bowlegged shepherd from Hangnail, Oklahoma. In the distance, we watch an eighty-pound free-jumper throw its machinery across the horizon, until it’s time to work. Tarpon at eleven o’clock, coming to ten. Make the cast! Strip, give it some life, not mechanical, yeah, like that. Okay, that’s good. Let’s see if we can’t jump one of these six-footers. Chrissake! Check your goddamn line! Make sure it’s clear! He’s on it, he’s on it. Eat the fly tarpon …