CADDO GAP -- When your daughter asks if she can skip school so you can take her fishing for her birthday, there's really only one answer.
Hannah, my youngest, is obsessed with fishing. To hear her tell it, weather is not a deterrent, but she's actually quite averse to discomfort. Sitting in a hot boat under a blazing sun for hours on a day when fish won't bite can kill a young angler's ardor, so I put her off for most of the summer.
Instead, she and her older sister Claire spent the summer fishing for bream in the creek behind our house with worms they dug from our garden. They returned from one of these forays last Sunday with a couple of bluegill in a small bucket full of water. They wanted to eat them immediately, so I filleted them, and Miss Laura pan fried them in a skillet with olive oil for lunch.
They proclaimed them the best fish they'd ever eaten.
Hannah turned 10 on Thursday. As she prepared for school, she asked if I would take her fishing instead.
As the father of seven children, I'm wise to all the ploys that youngsters conceive to skip school for a lark. Their subterfuge often starts in the second week, after they've reunited with all their friends and they're ready to resume a life of leisure.
Hannah's request was sincere. Besides, one's 10th birthday only comes along once, and we have learned the hard way that your child's next birthday is not guaranteed, so the answer was an unequivocal yes.
To justify the absence, this would have to be more than a mere fishing trip. It would be an interactive field trip that would encompass ichthyology, herpetology, biology, hydrology and geology.
Originally we intended to do a short float on the Buffalo River, but that was too far away. The Caddo River is much closer. I called Lucky's Canoe Rental in Glenwood.
"There's still a lot of water, but it's cleared up a lot, and the fishing ought to be really good," Lucky said.
About an hour later we arrived with a tube of crickets, two bream rigs and one smallmouth rig.
The river was swift, but not too fast and not too full. The ride would be bumpy in places, but most of the rocks were far enough underwater to be benign.
After rubbing on sunscreen, we stopped at a backflow pool directly across the river. A shallow gravel bar separated it from the main channel, and the water was cobalt. I beached on the gravel, put a cricket on Hannah's hook and told her to flip her bait to the deepest water close to the bank.
The bobber plunged almost as quickly as Hannah closed the bail on her spinning rod, and she reeled in a magnum-size longear sunfish.
"This looks different than the ones we catch in the creek," Hannah said.
"Same family of fish, but a different species," I said. Besides its more brilliant color scheme, it also has a long, thin black tab on the gill plate.
"The bluegills you catch in the creek have a shorter, wider tab."
Our next stop was at the mouth of the South Fork of the Caddo. That's a great spot for catching big smallmouth bass and spotted bass in the winter, but I've never caught much there in warm weather. The South Fork is usually a trickle in summer, but it was full and fast Thursday.
"All these little creeks drain water from this entire valley," I said. "From here, it all goes into DeGray Lake, and then it continues on down past Arkadelphia, where it empties into the Ouachita River. Then, the Ouachita carries it all the way through Louisiana to the Atchafalaya River, which goes into the Gulf of Mexico."
Hannah was unimpressed, so I said, "Think about that for a minute. If we had enough food, and a tent and stuff, we could paddle from here all the way to the ocean!"
The glint in her eyes revealed that her imagination was in gear.
"These Ouachita Mountains are really cool," I continued. "This is the only mountain range in North America that runs east to west."
Geologists theorize that the Ouachitas were once connected to the southern Appalachians, I explained. All land rests on what they call tectonic plates, and geologists believe that two of these big plates collided to shift these mountains to the west.
"These mountains look real similar to the ones in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina," I said. "They're not as high, but there are bird and plant species here that don't live anywhere else except the southern Appalachians."
Our day started sunny and bright, but thick clouds boiled up to the north and south. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and then it started raining.
Hannah grew unhappy and demanded to know how far we were from our takeout.
"A long way," I said. "You might as well fish. It'll take your mind off the rain and wind."
She initially did not like that answer, but the logic was unassailable. She barbed a cricket and tossed out her rig. She was soon enjoying herself again.
"Fish usually bite right before and right after a storm," I said. "I bet we catch a bunch."
Hannah slayed the longears with her cricket rig. I caught a few smallmouths with a Zoom Tiny Lizard, but not nearly as many or as big as I expected. I switched to a Booyah Pond Magic buzzbait to provoke more bites. One fish saved me from disappointment.
I threw to the end of a submerged log, and a big smallmouth leaped out of the water, jumped on the buzzbait and took it underwater. I gave a two-count and set the hook on a big fish that went skyward like a Polaris missile leaving a submarine.
After an intense fight of hard tugs and long runs, I brought a 17-inch smallmouth bass to hand.
The fight took us to shore, where we came to rest beneath an overhanging tree. With my left hand holding the fish underwater, I opened my camera case with my right hand. I extracted the camera and noticed it didn't contain a data card, so I fumbled to insert the card.
Maybe an instinctive distrust of overhanging branches caused me to look up, but what I saw next dumped a gallon of adrenaline into my bloodstream. Seven inches above my shoulder was a fat, ugly cottonmouth wrapped around a branch.
I can assure you that a 200-horsepower outboard in full throttle wouldn't have moved that canoe faster than my paddle did.
"We just about had a water moccasin in the boat," I said, panting.
"That was a cottonmouth, Dad," Hannah said primly. "It flicked its tongue at me."
"A water moccasin is a cottonmouth," I said. "That fish knew darn well that snake was there. It tried to kill us!"
Hannah thought that was funny.
Hannah's school is great, but there's no doubt her birthday on the Caddo was more memorable than it would have been behind a desk.
Even if the herpetology exhibit was a bit too interactive.
Sports on 08/28/2016