The Bass Wore Scales by Mark Schweizer Page A

plastic frog jump to look like something a fish would actually like to eat—but for me, fishing was mostly about dropping a worm in the lake and enjoying the morning. If some fish was stupid enough to eat it and get caught, that was his own dumb fault. I couldn’t be blamed.
    We’d sat there in silence for about thirty minutes, relaxing and switching worms when they either stopped wiggling, managed to escape, or were nibbled off our hooks by some smart fish. Then Moosey got a bite. And what a bite it was.
    There was a big splash and a yell, and Moosey’s pole bent almost double, the spinner having been locked to prevent a snarl. I was expecting that we might catch a brim or a blue-gill or, at the very most, a small bass, and locking the reel wouldn’t have posed any problem. But what Moosey had was a monster.
    “ WhatdoIdoWhatdoIdo?” hollered Moosey, standing in the boat and hanging on to the fishing rod for dear life. I put my own rod down and stood behind him, putting my hands over his, helping him to hang on. The rod was bending at about a ninety- degree angle. I unlocked the spinner and the line sailed off the reel as the fish made a dash toward the middle of the lake.
    “ Wow!” I said. “Did you see him?”
    “ Just for a second,” said Moosey excitedly. “When he came up for the worm.”
    “ What did he look like?”
    “ He was darkish green and white! With some spikey fins on his back!”
    “ Not black? Like a catfish?”
    “ He ain’t no catfish,” Moosey declared. “I’ll bet he’s a big ol’ bass.”
    I had to agree. I’d caught catfish in this little lake before, and I’d never seen a catfish take off like this fellow.
    “ Okay,” I said. “Let’s see if we can land him.”
    We began the traditional fisherman’s dance, first pulling back on the pole, drawing the fish back toward the boat, then reeling in the excess line. We’d done this three times and were feeling pretty good about ourselves when the line went slack.
    “ He’s heading back. Reel him in! Quick now!” I said.
    Moosey reeled frantically and the spinner whirred, but just as almost all the line had been recovered, the fish changed direction again, bent the pole at another right angle and with a sickening ‘pop,’ the fishing line snapped.
    “ Aw, man!” said Moosey, disappointment clouding his face. “The line busted.”
    “ Wow,” I said. “That was a big one.”
    “ He was as big as my arm,” said Moosey, holding up his arm to show me.
    “ I don’t know if he was that big,” I said. “But I’ll tell you what. We’re going to get him before the summer’s out.”
    “ All right!” yelped Moosey. “Wait till I tell the guys.”
    “ Nope,” I said. “You can’t tell anyone.”
    “ Why not?”
    “ Because that’s your fish, Moosey. If you tell anyone, pretty soon everybody will be down here trying to catch him. And we don’t want that.”
    Moosey nodded thoughtfully. “I won’t tell.”
    “ That’s good. ‘Cause we’re going to catch that rascal,” I said with a smile. I was smiling because that fish snapped my twenty-five-pound-test fishing line like it was a piece of thread. If it was a bass, and I was pretty sure it was, he was one for the record books.

    * * *

    “ How was the fishing?” asked Pete when I walked into the Slab.
    “ Well, we didn’t catch anything,” I said, truthfully.
    “ Get any bites?”
    “ Umm. Nope. Not a one.”
    “ You’re lying,” said Pete with a grin. “You saw him, didn’t you?”
    “ What are you talking about?”
    Pete lowered his voice and leaned in close. “You saw Old Spiney. I can always tell.” He grinned again, studying my face. “Yep. You saw him all right.”
    “ Come sit down with me, Pete,” I said gesturing to a booth, “and tell me all you know.”
    “ I know two things,” said Pete as he slid across the red Naugahyde bench. “That fish ain’t never been caught, and he ain’t likely to be.”
    “ He’s a