down
with another.

Just when my brother reached me I got a nibble. I called to him and then
stood up, ready to strike. I caught a glimpse of the fish. He looked big
and dark. He had his nose down, fooling with my bait. When I struck him
he felt heavy. I put on the click of the reel, and when the bonefish
started off he pulled the rod down hard, taking the line fast. He made
one swirl on the surface and then started up-shore. He seemed
exceedingly swift. I ran along the beach until presently the line
slackened and I felt that the hook had torn out. This was
disappointment. I could not figure that I had done anything wrong, but I
decided in the future to use a smaller and sharper hook. We went on down
the beach, seeing several bonefish on the way, and finally we ran into
a big school of them. They were right alongshore, but when they saw us
we could not induce them to bite.

* * * * *

Every day we learn something. It is necessary to keep out of sight of
these fish. After they bite, everything depends upon the skilful hooking
of the fish. Probably it will require a good deal of skill to land them
after you have hooked them, but we have had little experience at that so
far. When these fish are along the shore they certainly are feeding, and
presumably they are feeding on crabs of some sort. Bonefish appear to be
game worthy of any fisherman's best efforts.

It was a still, hot day, without any clouds. We went up the beach to a
point opposite an old construction camp. To-day when we expected the
tide to be doing one thing it was doing another. Ebb and flow and
flood-tide have become as difficult as Sanskrit synonyms for me. My
brother took an easy and comfortable chair and sat up the beach, and I,
like an ambitious fisherman, laboriously and adventurously waded out one
hundred and fifty feet to an old platform that had been erected there. I
climbed upon this, and found it a very precarious place to sit. Come to
think about it, there is something very remarkable about the places a
fisherman will pick out to sit down on. This place was a two-by-four
plank full of nails, and I cheerfully availed myself of it and, casting
my bait out as far as I could, I calmly sat down to wait for a bonefish.
It has become a settled conviction in my mind that you have to wait for
bonefish. But all at once I got a hard bite. It quite excited me. I
jerked and pulled the bait away from the fish and he followed