Fishing Kid's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Fishing Kid wanted the lake monster no man had ever landed. For three weeks he had cast his line into water he could not read. His raincoat dripped. His hip waders leaked at the left knee. Every morning he pushed his old boat out from the dock and dropped his hook where he guessed the monster might rise. Every night he came back with nothing. The problem was simple and cruel. He had never once seen the monster surface. Old fishermen swore it lived here, but none showed him where. So he cast blind. He wasted whole days on flat, empty water, watching his line go slack. Today he tried a new plan. Instead of dropping his hook, he cut the engine and drifted. He sat still in the wooden hull and watched. He would not cast until he saw a sign. The sun climbed. His stomach growled. Bugs landed on his neck. Still he waited. By afternoon his eyes burned from staring. He almost gave up. Then, far off, he saw it. Fish were leaping. Dozens of them broke the surface at once, silver bodies arcing through spray. They ran in a bright, jumping line across the water, all fleeing the same spot. Something below was chasing them. Something big. He knew then. The monster did not surface where the water lay calm. It surfaced where the small fish panicked. That leaping river of fish was the sign he had missed for three weeks. His heart pounded. He gripped the oars and rowed toward the churning water. The boat cut fast across the lake. He forgot his hunger and his soaked knee. He watched the fish scatter and marked the exact place they fled. He reached the spot. The leaping had stopped. The water rolled and settled. Whatever chased the fish had gone back down. He had found where the monster hunted, but he had arrived too late to catch it. Still, he no longer cast blind. He tied his boat to a stump near the shallows and studied the water for a long time. He learned the shape of the place. A drowned tree. A dark drop where the bottom fell away. He carved a notch in his boat's rail to mark the line of sight. When he rowed home that evening, he was not empty-handed in the way that mattered. He knew where to wait. Tomorrow he would come before dawn and set his hook over that dark drop, ready before the fish began to leap. But as he tied up at the dock, he saw the problem in his plan. The monster surfaced only for a moment, and only when it chose. To catch it, he would have to be there at the exact instant it rose. He had found the door. Now he had to be standing at it when it opened.