The Johnboat Ramp at Lake Week

Out past the point, I heard the pontoon motor throttle back. Brad was bringing it around, close along the bar, maybe heading back to the cabins for lunch.

It came around slow, sixty yards off, and I saw the boys stand up in the front.

The fish ran. Walt held the rod up with his right arm, the butt jammed into his belly, and let the drag work.

He could not reel and hold at the same time with one good hand, so he did the smart thing. He pinned the rod against the armrest of the seat with his elbow, reeled a few turns, lifted, and did it again.

“Don’t horse him,” he said, to himself more than to me. “Don’t horse him, Walt.”

Emma was on her knees on the bench with both hands over her mouth. I had the net in the water. The pontoon had stopped now, idling forty yards away, and I could hear Owen yelling, “Grandpa’s got one! Grandpa’s got a big one!”

The fish came up once, close to the boat, and rolled, and I saw the white tip on the tail and the gold side and the size of it, and I said a word I do not use in front of my daughter.

“Dad,” Emma said.

“Sorry, baby.”

Walt brought it in close the second time, and I got the net under it, and I lifted, and it was heavy.

It was so heavy I had to use both hands on the handle, and it came over the side and into the boat flopping and slapping against the deck I had built at five in the morning.

It was a walleye. A big female, thick across the back, with glassy eyes and a gold belly.

I laid her on the bump board with her nose against the end. Twenty-seven inches. Not quite twenty-seven and a quarter.

The pontoon had drifted closer. Tyler and Owen were hanging over the front rail with their mouths open. Tara had her phone up.

Brad was standing at the wheel with one hand on it, and he was looking at his father, and I could not read his face at all.

“Grandpa!” Tyler yelled. “That’s the biggest one all week! That’s the biggest one anybody got!”

Walt was breathing hard and grinning like a kid. He reached down with his good hand and touched the side of that fish, gently, the way you would touch a newborn calf.

“Mike,” he said. “You get a picture. Emma, you take it with your dad’s phone. Then we’re putting her back.”

“Back?” Emma said. “Grandpa, she’s huge.”

“That’s why,” Walt said. “Big girls like this lay the eggs. She’s been out here longer than you’ve been alive. She ought to get to make some more walleye for somebody else’s grandkids.”

That was Walt’s rule, not the state’s. It is what Walt taught Kelly and Brad when they were kids, and what he taught me the first summer I came up here: the big females go back.

I held the fish up across Walt’s lap with both hands under her, and he put his hand on her back, and Emma took the picture.

In it, Walt is looking at the fish, not the camera, and he is smiling with the whole right side of his face.

Then I leaned over the side and held her in the water, facing into the little current, until her gills were working strong and she kicked out of my hands and was gone.