Aquifer: A Novel (22 page)

Clayton’s group had made camp and as dusk settled, everyone was eating a T-Bone steak dinner, complete with foil roasted potatoes, sauteed onions and mushrooms, and of course, corn-on-the-cob. A Dutch oven simmered on the coals emitting a wonderful aroma from a slow-baking peach cobbler.

“Clayton, I’ve got to hand it to you. This is the best tasting largemouth bass I’ve ever eaten,” lauded Welton as he took another large mouth full of steak. Everyone laughed.

“One thing I’ve learned about Dr. Clayton’s cooking,” Larry chimed in. “Give him a can of mushroom soup for gravy and he can make anything taste good.” Again everyone laughed.

“But I sure don’t understand why we didn’t catch anything,” protested Clayton. “These are supposed to be world-renowned bass waters.”

“Dr. Clayton’s right about the bass fishing,” said Tina, coming to his defense. “My Uncle, Johnny Mack, is a fishing guide on the river and he said that during the past few weeks the fishing has gotten progressively worse. It’s kind of weird. Nobody knows where all the fish have gone.”

An hour later darkness had settled over the campsite. Dinner was over and the foursome sat around the campfire talking and roasting marshmallows on sticks. Frogs and cicada locusts sang in the background and fireflies blinked intermittently around the camp.

“So Clayton, how’s the research project coming along?” asked Welton.

“Much better than I had hoped. I expected to see a lot of signs of Chytrid infestation killing the frogs but so far I have found very little, certainly within the tolerances the frogs can safely handle,” Clayton replied.

“Just exactly what is
. . . Chytrid infestation
?” asked Welton, eager to learn why his friend was spending his entire summer in the Ozarks.

“Puh-leeeaze!” Larry protested as he pulled a toasted marshmallow off his stick and made a s’more which he handed to Tina. “Don’t ask that question or we’ll be here all night.”

Ignoring Larry’s plea, Clayton began his explanation. “It’s a deadly fungus that infects amphibians and kills whole species almost overnight. It’s as deadly to them as Ebola is to humans.”

“That doesn’t sound good, but why did you expect to find it here?” asked Welton.

“Well, actually it’s everywhere. Normally the frog’s immune system handles it just fine.” Clayton spoke as he reached into his shirt pocket to retrieve his pipe. He began filling it as he resumed his explanation. “But the logging industry produces large amounts of tannic acid which leaches from the sawdust and chip piles into the streams and rivers. It stresses the frogs and makes them more susceptible to Chytrid. Sort of like tetanus. It’s all around us but we never worry about it unless we get a deep cut or a puncture wound, then we get a tetanus shot.”

At that point Larry interrupted the doctors with a mild rebuking tone, “Look, I know I haven’t done any camping since I was a kid, but aren’t we supposed to tell ghost stories or something when we’re sitting around a campfire instead of all this shop talk?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Welton chuckling. “Clayton, you probably know some good yarns, why don’t you tell us one?”

“Oh, I’ve heard several really good ones in my time, but why tell a story when the truth is so much more interesting.”

Clayton was horrible at storytelling; but he was even worse when narrating accounts of actual events. He had a delivery style reminiscent of an accounting professor lecturing on the relative merits of straight-line versus double-declining balance depreciation schedules with respect to the IRS tax code.

“What do you mean that the truth is even more interesting?” asked Welton.

Clayton held his pipe by the bowl and used the stem to point toward the mountain ridge on the other side of the river. “Well, it was just a half-mile over that mountain that the meteorite hit.”

“A meteorite hit near here and you didn’t tell me about it?” Welton stated in disbelief.

Clayton began to explain the events of the past several weeks. As he did so Larry turned to Tina and disappointedly stated, “Well, so much for ghost stories.”

Several minutes later Larry nudged Tina and pointed across the river. About one hundred yards downstream, on the far side of the river, near the base of the bluff, was a johnboat - a long, narrow, flat-bottomed, squared-off, snub-nosed fishing boat, roughly twice the length and half the width of a traditional bass boat. The johnboat remained stationary in the channel even though its motor was not running. The brilliant light of a full moon revealed two men sitting in the boat who appeared to be working on something by the light of lanterns which hung from poles attached at each end of the boat.

“I’ve been watching those guys in that boat for a while now, but I can’t tell what they’re doing,” said Larry.

“They’re running a trot-line,” Tina explained.

“What the heck is a trot-line?” asked Larry.

“It’s a long line, sometimes a couple of hundred feet or more in length. They tie one end to a stout tree limb and then pay it out as they float downstream, tying baited hooks to it every three or four feet. Then they check it every couple of hours or so to see if they’ve caught anything,” she explained.

=/\=

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
IX

Gimp Foot

The two fishermen in the johnboat anxiously checked the hooks on their trot-line for the second time that night. They starting at the upstream end where their line was tied to the trunk of a fallen tree which extended several feet into the water. An empty plastic milk jug was tied to the line near the tree trunk. The fishermen’s names and fishing license numbers were written on a tag which danged from the jug’s handle. The jug also served as a floatation marker. This was especially important when checking the line at night. The white plastic jug reflected the beam of a flashlight or lantern so that the line could be easily found in the dark.

Slowly the men worked their way downstream in the river’s twenty-foot deep channel, inching their way toward the large submerged rock anchored to the other end three hundred feet away. The baldheaded fisherman, Jed, sat at the back of the boat. His job was to hang onto the trot-line tightly to prevent the river’s current from carrying the boat downstream and to keep the boat aligned with the channel. He would pay out the line, hand-over-hand, until coming to a treble hook that was suspended from the trot-line by an eighteen-inch leader-line. If the hook needed re-baiting, he would clamp onto the trot-line with an old pair of Vise-Grip type pliers that was chained to the boat’s sidewall gunnels. This secured the boat firmly to the trot-line so that it remained stationary in the river’s channel, freeing up Jed’s hands to re-bait the hook.

Jed’s companion, Mack, stood at the other end of the boat. His job was to raise the trot-line out of the water. This process allowed the trot-line to cross the boat diagonally from the left of the bow to the right of the stern. In this manner, the boat remained stable and properly aligned with the channel’s flow even in the swiftest of currents.

Trot-line fishing seemed to come naturally to Ozark men. On a good night they would usually catch at least twenty fish, mainly channel cats, carps and buffaloes, but there was usually a bass or two and sometimes even a drum or perch.

The men used a combination of worms, minnows, crawdads, stink bate, Wheaties balls and cottonseed cakes secured to # 1 Eagle Claw treble hooks. The first forty or fifty hooks still contained bait, so Jed passed them by, continuing hand-over-hand in his inspection of the line.

“I’ve never seen the fishin’ so bad,” Jed complained. “We ain’t caught nothin’ in a week, not even a turtle or an eel.”

When he had checked all but the last sixty feet of the line he came to a hook that had two of the prongs bent out almost straight.

“Was this one snagged on the bottom or somethin’?” he asked.

“Naw,” Mack replied. “We ain’t been snagged on nothin’.”

Jed clamped onto the trot-line with the pliers to free up his hands. Then unsnapped the heavy-duty swivel-clip, removed the damaged hook from the leader-line, and replaced it with a new hook which he baited with a large crawdad. Then he un-clamped the pliers and proceeded to the next hook.

“Hey, this one’s bent too! Ya sure we weren’t snagged?”

“I already told ya. There’s nothin’ in the bottom of this channel ta get snagged on.”

“Well, somethin’ sure bent these hooks. Raise the line high.”

Both men raised their end of the line high so that the hooks between them could be seen dangling in the air. The next hook had one of the prongs broken off while the next two hooks were missing entirely, their leaders had been broken.

“This is really weird,” said Jed.

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it much, we’re about to the end. The anchor rock’s almost directly below us. Wait!” shouted Mack. “I think we might have somethin’. The line’s movin’.”

The men watched as the point where the trot-line entered the water started to move toward the shore, indicating that they had caught something and that it was swimming in that direction.

“Alright!” shouted Jed. “Let’s get it in here. Pull it up, Mack!”

Jed un-clamped the pliers from the trot-line so that he could pay the line out the back-end of the boat as Mack hauled in the line at the front.

Mack struggled with the line, pulling hard with his hands, but whatever was on the other end of the line pulled harder. Mack bent down, trying to hang on as the line was drawn deeper and deeper into the water. Suddenly, the line was yanked from his hands and slapped against the sidewalls of the small fishing boat. This caused Jed to lose his grip on the line too. Quickly the current whisked the boat broadside to the current with the trot-line draped across its middle. The line drew tight and started dragging the boat lower and lower into the water. The boat tipped slightly toward the downstream edge and water began to pour into it.

“Cut the line!” Mack yelled.

Without hesitating, Jed reached to his belt where he had a six-inch Schrade folding-knife. He unsnapped the sheath cover and removed the tool. Quickly he opened the blade, but before he could reach for the line to cut it, the line snapped. The johnboat, released from its scuttling tow, uprighted itself so violently that Mack was almost flung overboard. Released from their tether they slowly began drifting downstream.

“That was a 450 lb. test line! What the heck just happened?” asked Jed.

There was a moment of silence as the men contemplated the experience of a few moments earlier.

“Well,” Mack answered. “I ‘member once when I was just a youngen’, my Daddy told me ‘bout a time when a big old channel cat swum up here from the Mississippi River. Weighed over two hundred pounds. Maybe that’s what we hooked into - a big old Mississippi channel cat.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Jed replied, shaking his head in disbelief. “Grab that milk jug scoop and start bailing. I’ll paddle us to shore.”

With that, Jed began paddling the short distance to the shoreline. He glanced back upriver and saw the bonfire at Clayton’s camp nearly a quarter-mile away.

“I didn’t realize we’d drifted so far downstream.”

“Hey,” said Mack. “I got an idea. Let’s do some gillin’.”

“Sure beats this.”

As the bow of the johnboat nudged the river bank, the two men slipped over the side into chest deep water. They guided the boat to the bank and tied it to a tree root protruding from the shore line. The steep bank came right down to the water’s edge. The river’s swift current had undercut a section of the bank leaving an overhang that projected a foot and a half into the river. Attached to the overhang was a thick matting of grasses, reeds, and mosses that formed a floating shelf another two feet in width. The entire shelf and overhang was anchored to the shore and held in place by numerous tree roots and rocks. The spongy shelf was strong enough to support a man walking on it and provided ample cover for hundreds of fish that usually hid under it.

The fishermen began feeling their hands up and under the overhanging shelf, working their way upstream. They spoke in whispers as they worked.

“How come the fish don't swim away when we touch ‘em?” asked Jed.

“How should I know? All I know is that it works. Just don't make any sudden moves.”

The two men worked about twenty feet apart, taking their time to explore every nook and cranny under the overhang. Suddenly, Mack became excited. “Hey, I've got something here . . . it’s huge. Must be that catfish that almost swamped us ‘cause it’s got spines on it.”

“Well just be careful to not spook it. Work your hands up to its gills and flip it onto the bank.”

“I don't think I can do that. This thing feels like it's as big as I am . . . I . . .” He suddenly winced in pain. “It's got me.”

Mack muffled a scream as his face contorted with pain and fear. He frantically thrashed in the water trying to free himself from the grasp of something under the shore's overhang. As he thrashed his whole body was suddenly towed toward the middle of the river by something underwater. When he was fifteen feet from shore he was immediately pulled underwater and disappeared. Jed looked on in disbelief.

After what seemed an eternity, Mack suddenly reappeared, breaking the surface of the water, gasping for air and desperately wrestling and thrashing to free himself from some unseen captor. Wincing in pain he shouted, “Get out of the water Jed . . . Run! Run!” His last word was muffled with bubbles as he was again pulled underwater.