I was rather
concerned to see that apparently the tide was just about as high along
this shore as it ever got. Sam shook his head. The tides were strange
around the Keys. It will be high on the Gulf side and low on the
Atlantic side, and sometimes it will run one way through the channels
for thirty-six hours. But we forgot this as soon as we reached the
bonefish shoals.

Sam took an oar and slowly poled inshore, while I stood up on a seat to
watch for fish. The water was from six to eighteen inches deep and very
clear and still. The bottom appeared to be a soft mud, gray, almost
white in color, with patches of dark grass here and there. It was really
marl, which is dead and decayed coral.

Scarcely had we gotten over the edge of this shoal when we began to see
things--big blue crabs, the kind that can pinch and that play havoc with
the fishermen's nets, and impudent little gray crabs, and needle-fish,
and small chocolate-colored sharks--nurse sharks, Sam called them--and
barracuda from one foot to five feet in length, and whip-rays and
sting-rays. It was exceedingly interesting and surprising to see all
these in such shallow water. And they were all tame.

Here and there we saw little boils of the water, and then a muddy patch
where some fish had stirred the marl. Sam and I concluded these were
made by bonefish. Still, we could not be sure. I can see a fish a long
way in the water and I surely was alert. But some time elapsed and we
had poled to within a few rods of the mangroves before I really caught
sight of our coveted quarry. Then I saw five bonefish, two of them
large, between the boat and the mangroves. They were motionless. Somehow
the sight of them was thrilling. They looked wary, cunning, game, and
reminded me of gray wolves I had seen on the desert. Suddenly they
vanished. It was incredible the way they disappeared. When we got up to
the place where they had been there were the little swirls in the roiled
water.

Then Sam sighted two more bonefish that flashed away too swiftly for me
to see. We stuck an oar down in the mud and anchored the boat. It seemed
absolutely silly to fish in water a foot deep. But I meant to try it.
Putting a crab on my hook, I cast off ten or a dozen yards, and composed
myself to rest and watch.

Certainly I expected no results. But it was attractive there. The wide
flat stretched away, bordered by the rich, dark mangroves. Cranes and
pelicans were fishing off the shoals, and o