In the Dark of the Moon by Suzanne Hudson

Author:Suzanne Hudson [Hudson, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59692-957-9
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2005-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

NIGHT FISHING

The big man, Ned Sutton, pushed at brambles bathed in humidity, sometimes knocking at webs of weeds and tangled briars with an intricately carved cypress staff, making his way to where the banks of the Flint River dipped into the woods. He ducked under a low limb, a shelter for a bowl-shaped dirt wallow, probably made by a nesting doe. He slid his hand over the top of the staff, which knobbed its perfect fit into his palm. His fingers could read the letters raised there, around the top of the staff, where Giovanni had carved “92nd.” He ran his grip down the side of the walking stick, feeling the starred-and-striped grooves of a small American flag under which the words “Liberatore” and “Redentare” were nestled.

Ned used the stick to stir back some briars and brush. A good bit of the trail had gone under fresh growth in the space of only a couple of weeks, the warm rain of dog days soaking life into the dankness of rotting twigs. But he knew the way, even without a light, the moon’s dark glowing the forest in a subtle illumination his eyes settled into with the ease of a nocturnal forager.

He carried two cane poles and, in a haversack slung over his shoulder, a tin of sardines, a couple of slabs of hoecake wrapped in crinkled foil, a Nehi, a bottle opener, a small paper sack holding sparse tackle—bobbers, weights, hooks, and line—a stringer, and a mason jar, lid punched with holes, full of black dirt and snail-gray earthworms, all knotted and slickly wrapping and sliding curled into, across, and around one another.

The night was electric with the crisp singing of crickets, chirping tree frogs, the deep bass of bullfrogs in the distance. An owl called into the din of sound, a lonely, purring, four-noted noise blending with the buzz of vibrating life. He pulled at vines winding over fallen oak limbs as his fine, heavy work boots, handed down from his boss, snapped sticks into the soil.

He had gone about a quarter of a mile when he began to hear the faint wash of the river’s currents spilling around rooted tree trunks, a liquid whisper filtering through foliage. The trail would soon widen to finally fall open onto the high bank above his favorite fishing spot, the one he frequented regularly of a summer evening, the one where a pristine sandbar settled a ways back from the mouth of Scratchy Branch, where the catfish nestled in deep pools and silvery bream swam in water that window-glassed the rippling sand of the bottom, their fins stroking at gentle currents in the shallows.

It was the best spot on a river he had fished for twenty-six years, since he was three years old, trailing behind his uncle on long hikes through the woods in search of that magical place where the fish never failed to bite. He had discovered it not long after he was married, and told no one, could not tell his uncle, who had died when Ned was only a boy.

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