The Morning We Saved Eleven Hundred Fish

Three Coolers

You cannot move a fish in a bucket of air. You need water, and you need a lot of it, and you need it to stay cool and full of oxygen long enough to make the trip.

I had one big blue cooler of my own, the hundred-and-twenty-quart kind we take camping.

I called the neighbors up the road and the young couple who bought the home place, and inside ten minutes I had two more coolers sitting on my tailgate. Neither family asked what for until I was already backing out.

I keep a couple of battery aerators in the shop from when the boys and I used to buy live bait for crappie season.

They are the little kind that clip on the side of a bucket and blow bubbles through a hose. I dug them out of a drawer and found fresh batteries in the junk drawer by the back door.

I backed my gray pickup down the slope of the yard as close to the bank as I dared without sinking the back wheels.

The ground there was still hard, but ten feet past it the new mud was as soft as pudding.

We set the three coolers in the bed and filled each one half full with pond water, using a five-gallon bucket on a rope.

Half full is all a cooler that size can take without slopping out on the turns. Then I clipped an aerator onto two of them and turned them on.

Then I got my long-handled landing net out of the shed. It is an old one with a wooden handle almost six feet long, the kind you use off a dock for big fish.

Dad bought it for me the first spring the pond was stocked. It still had his initials scratched into the handle with a pocketknife.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go get them.”

Into the Mud

I walked out onto the gray mud flat, and after the first ten feet I sank to the shin with every step.

The fish had pulled back into the last of the deep water, and there were so many of them in there that the surface moved.

Bluegill flashed in the sunlight like new dimes. Every now and then a bass came up and gulped at the top, its big white mouth open, and went back down.

Then I reached out with the long net and dragged it through the edge of the pool, and when I lifted it up, it was so full of fish it bent the handle.

Bluegill, a dozen at least, flapping and shining, and two small bass on top.

I turned and walked them back across the mud as fast as I could, which was not fast at all.

Eli met me at the edge with the big blue cooler, and I tipped the net in. The fish hit that water and shot to the bottom like they had been waiting for it all morning.

We worked out a system after the first few trips. I netted from the pool. Wade carried the bucket out to me for the stragglers.

Eli took each full net from me at the edge of the hard ground and ran it up to the truck.

When a cooler was full enough to need moving, the boys carried it between them up the mud bank to the truck.

Those coolers weighed more than a hundred pounds half full of water. They carried them anyway, slipping and laughing and grumbling under their breath when they thought I could not hear.

I could hear. I did not say a thing about it.

Wade’s Notepad

Wade had a little feed store notepad in the front pocket of his hoodie, the kind with the spiral on top they give away at the counter.

He had a pencil stub too. I did not know he had them until I saw him writing after the second net.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Counting,” he said. “Somebody ought to know how many.”

When the three coolers were full, we drove them down to Mrs. Pruett’s.

I drove that gray pickup at about fifteen miles an hour the whole two miles, both hands on the wheel, taking every turn like there was a carton of eggs on the seat. Eli rode in the bed to keep an eye on the aerators.

Mrs. Pruett had the gate open and was waiting on her dock in a barn coat and a pair of men’s work gloves. She had a thermos of coffee on the bench and three foam cups lined up beside it.

“Back her right down to the water,” she said, and waved me in.