Everyday possible, Maro was getting up as early as he could and making his way out to the first hole near the Archway. The fishing had been excellent thus far, and he was pleased with the money he was making. He was hoping to save enough money to get Autumn a gift for the Arriving Night.
When he arrived though, there was already someone else there, but they didn’t have their line in the water. Not wanting to be rude by beginning to fish in someone else’s hole, he waved at the person. Maybe he would receive permission from them, maybe not. The person looked up from whatever they were looking at in their hands and motioned him over. Maro wandered across the Archway and upstream until he was standing next to the person.
The person looked up from the object in their hands, a right bird’s nest of a tangle of their line around their reel. “Hey, Maro.”
The person knew his name, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember theirs. He recognized the face, with its narrow sunken cheeks and knew he had met this person before. He’d have to get better at remembering people’s names. “Good morning,” he replied.
The person held up their reel and shrugged at the mess. “Not so good of a morning.” Pointing at a bucket, he added. “I’ve caught a few though, so at least the morning’s not a complete waste. You should get started on fishing before too many others show up.”
Maro left the other fisherman to his tangled line and filled his bucket with water. Taking his rod, he baited it and cast it out into the gentle almost motionless water. After several long minutes of waiting and no strikes, he reeled his line back in and cast it farther upstream, watching the glass bobber drift slowly downstream to prove that a current still did exist on this portion of the river. He was about to settle down to wait when a fish struck the line. Leaping up, he followed the fish upstream and down, slowly working the creature in toward the shore.
When it was close enough, he reeled in quickly and pulled the fish on to shore. It flopped about madly, trying to escape the hook holding it, and its mouth flashed open and closed for the want of water to breath. Maro knew that not being able to breathe was an agony he would want no creature or person to feel. Taking his bolas, he held it like a club and brought the heavy weights down on the fish’s head. The flopping stopped, and Maro put the fish in his bucket.
After his line was baited once more, the next few casts were uneventful, and the gentle cursing behind him didn’t help him concentrate on his fishing at all, not that fishing required much concentration at all. It was more a game of patience, though knowing the right bait or lure to use would help immensely. Maro wasn’t nearly that knowledgeable about fish and their tendencies yet, but he was convinced he would with time. There were already several different types of fishing he wanted to test himself out on, two of those being coastal fishing in a row boat and lure fishing back on land.
Finally, he got another strike, and the fish on the other end of the line battled furiously against him. This was the hardest he had ever felt a fish fight aside from the monster of a specimen he had lost in a hole much farther upstream. He played this fish with caution, never leaving too much slack in his line but allowing the fish to take the line out whenever it pulled too hard against him. Throughout the long battle, the fish never broke the surface of the water, just thrashed beneath it, and Maro waited in primal anticipation to see how big this fish would prove to be. Slowly, the fish’s fight left it, and as Maro drew it in to shore, he couldn’t help but laugh when he saw how small it was. It couldn’t have been more than eight inches; its spirit in the fight it had put up had made it seem like a fish three times its size. Bringing it up on to the shore, he killed it with a swift blow from his bolas and placed it in his bucket. |
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