ABSENT WITHOUT LEave.(Fiction)

In stocking waders and cleated boots, I am standing in a clump of bushes that spend most of the year far out of water. Not to mention the trees. The water comes up to my waist. If I were to step a wee bit farther out, cops would pick up the body in Trenton. The river here is only one or two hundred feet wide, and the number of cubic feet per second going by is six times normal. If you like, you could call it a flood, but the Delaware has cut such a deep gorge into the Pocono-Catskill plateau that the water is not pooling out all over the countryside but is concentrated in a silt-laden flume of what appears to be hurtling cement. All the sane people have long since quit and gone home. Stick around. There's a challenge present. The fish are in the river, where else? They're just as unhappy as you are. Out from the water's edge, they can't go much farther than you can.

Toss into the river a twig or a leaf or anything else that floats. Watch it go. If there is some kind of eddy, it will find it. Cast a bright dart into the big current so that it swings into the seam of the eddy. Do not be discouraged by the fact that deer have been known to sleep where you are fishing. This situation is extremely marginal, and you will not have a banner day, but one fish caught under these conditions is worth sixteen in a low river with big schools. A guy in Hankins told me that high turbid water, within reason, "can even be good for shad"--from the angler's point of view. They hit the darts more readily, he claimed, than they do in low, clear water. A local newspaper described fishermen using weighted flies for shad near the edge of the swollen river. There are things to be said for catching fish in a forest. The dart swings out of the brown-and-white turbulence into the haven shallows. Suddenly the line sticks fast to a five-pound-two-ounce roe.

An entry from my fishing diaries:

May 22: Was out on a rock in the afternoon, the river down and clear. The event of the day was a weird, deceptive snag. It felt like river-bottom monofilament--the lost fishing line, mine and others', that all of us so often get hung up on. It's like a bungee with your hook in it. Snags of one kind and another are routine in shad fishing because you generally fish along the bottom. I tugged at this one, and dragged it a little, hoping not to snap my rod. The burden at the far end kept coming--a slow, elastic dead weight. Then the line came up like a blade through the water and the surface of the river burst open. A roe shad the size of a blimp jumped and soared two feet in the air. Simultaneously, the dart came free. That huge roe shad had been sulking on the hook the way salmon do. Indisputably, she was the biggest shad anywhere in the river. I am off the mark, of course, in comparing her to a blimp. She was more like the Hindenburg. Beware. Nine snags will be snags, but the tenth will have a caudal fin.

An AWOL is a shad absent without leave. AWOLs in shad fishing are numerous and inevitable and deserve to be in the statistics. They are shad that hook up and later get away--the ten-second shad, the ten-minute shad. Solidly, the fish hits the lure; and completely it gets away. How it gets away is the nature of the AWOL. Many are the result of very light hookings, and most hookings are very light--nicks in the front of the mouth.

After a time, the hook pulls loose, and that is routine shad fishing. That is what it's like. Fish on the line are by no means halfway home. Most of all, the shad you hook but don't land are a part of your season--the hooking being in some ways more significant than the netting. In one ten-year span, I hooked up with a little over a thousand shad, and lost two hundred and ninety-eight. Roughly one in three. Most that get away are no-fault AWOLs. For example, the planer AWOL. Far out on the line, the shad comes to the river surface lying on one side. This is no spent shad. It skitters like a surfboard on the top of the river. There is nothing you can do except watch in wonder. The planing sometimes sets the fish free, even more than tail-walking and aerial somersaults. Selected examples:

May 7: Around 4:30, I hooked a shad that was on for three or four minutes before it shed the hook, jumping, and the dart flew back past my ear., May 13: Four AWOLs--one near the boat after twelve minutes. No mistakes., May 25: Spectacularly, a buck shad does three consecutive somersaults, high above the water, remaining on the line. Now comes somersault 4. He ejects the dart in midair. Draped over the tip of the jaw, the hook may have penetrated--as the hook often does--the thin soft tissue that the anatomist Willy Bemis calls "the membrane of the maxillary recess." After the hook has gradually widened the hole it makes in the membrane, the hook falls out., June 10: She leaped, leaped again, tail-walked all over the river. The line was high and taut and the dart securely tied when, after five or ten minutes, she was gone. She expanded the penetration. She got herself away.