The Morning We Saved Eleven Hundred Fish

The First Trip

We carried the coolers out to the end of her dock one at a time.

Then Eli and I tipped each one over the side slow, letting the fish slide out with the water, so they would not hit the surface all at once.

Mrs. Pruett stood beside us with her coffee and watched every cooler go in. “Well, would you look at that,” she said, more than once. “Would you look at that.”

Wade read off his count for the first trip. One hundred and eighty-four.

I did the arithmetic in my head and did not like it. If the pond held what I thought it held, we had five or six more trips to go, and the water was dropping faster every hour.

“Go,” Mrs. Pruett said. She could see it on my face. “Go on. I’ll be right here.”

We went.

The Middle of the Morning

The mud pulled my boot off twice. The first time, I stepped right out of it and stood there on one foot in my sock, in the middle of a mud flat, holding a net full of bluegill over my head.

Wade laughed so hard he nearly dropped the bucket.

The second time, one leg sank to the knee and I sat down hard in the mud, with the net still held up in the air.

Eli came out and got me by the back of my jacket and pulled.

It took him three tries, and on the third one he fell over backwards too, and then we were both sitting in the mud, and he laughed so hard he could not stand up for a full minute.

I think the boys needed that. I think I did too. It is hard to stay angry with mud in your ears.

What Was Left

By half past ten, there was one pool left in the middle, maybe forty feet across. The fish in it were in trouble. You could see it.

The bluegill were swimming slow, with their mouths at the top, and some of the bass had rolled over on their sides. A few smaller ones were already dead, floating white in the brown water.

I waded right into the middle of it. The water came up over the top of my boots and filled them, cold and heavy, and I kept going.

I dragged that net through the thickest part of the school and came up with so many fish I had to hold it with both hands.

Eli waded in after me with the bucket and stood right beside me, and we filled it and filled it. Wade ran the bucket back and forth to the coolers.

He did not walk once. That fourteen-year-old ran across that mud for an hour, falling down and getting up again, like it was the last quarter of a ball game.

We were not perfect. We did not save every fish.

Some were too far gone when we got to them, and some of the little ones slipped through the net and stayed out on the mud where we never found them. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But we got most of them. We got far more of them than I thought we would at seven o’clock.