To his credit, he did. He showed her how to tie a steel leader, how to do a figure eight at the end of every cast, how to keep her rod tip down. He bought her a heavy rod for her birthday. I will not take that from him.
That Sunday in June was the fourteenth. My wife Margit had gone into town for the early service at our church, where she sings in the choir. I drove Ingrid out to the lake at six in the morning because she had been begging for a week.
Royce was already on the dock with his coffee. The water was flat. The loons were calling somewhere out past the point. Ingrid made maybe forty casts. I sat in an old lawn chair at the end of the dock and drank coffee from my thermos and watched her work. She never complained once.
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On the forty-first cast, or thereabouts, she was halfway through her figure eight when the water opened up next to the dock. I have seen a lot of things in my life. I have never seen anything like that.
The fish came up from under the dock boards like it had been waiting there all morning. It hit the bucktail so hard the rod bent double and Ingrid went down to one knee.
“Keep your tip down!” Royce shouted. “Let it run, Inga, let it run!”
She let it run. The drag screamed. The fish went straight out toward deep water and then turned and came back along the weed edge, and Ingrid followed it down the dock, one step at a time, with both hands on the cork.
I got up out of my chair. I did not touch her. I did not touch the rod. Royce did not either. We just stood behind her and watched.
It went on and on. Every time she got the fish close, it saw the dock and took off again. Her arms were shaking. Her face was red. Her braid had come half undone.
“You want me to take it?” Royce asked her once.
“No,” she said, through her teeth.
I looked at my watch when the fish first hit, out of some habit I picked up at the county shop. When Royce finally slid the big cradle net under it, it had been twenty minutes and some seconds.
Twenty minutes. A thirteen-year-old girl. I am a grown man and I do not know if I could have done it.
Royce kept a bump board on the dock, a long measuring board with a stop at one end. He knelt down with the fish still in the net in the water, and we got it laid on the board quick and careful.
Forty-four inches. Nose to the fork of the tail. I looked at the number twice. I wrapped a soft tape around its middle. Twenty inches of girth. Then we got it back in the water to breathe.
In Wisconsin the minimum on a lot of lakes is forty inches, and on plenty of the big northern ones it is fifty, so whether she could keep it depended on the water. Ingrid did not even think about it.