“You don’t catch the fish. The fish allows itself to be caught.”

At least that’s what my dad always said. Every time we would go fishing, he would ramble on about how fish were humble creatures that knew whether or not you really needed them. If you did, they would gladly forfeit their lives to save yours. If you didn’t, they would remain hidden.

Dad had found a hook worthy of him about a year before the day I met her.

On that day, I was starving. I cast my line with every fly I had made and every technique I had mastered, but none of the silvery glints would grace my hook. The bastards must have thought I wasn’t hungry enough yet. Their humility, to me, seemed much more like a taunt.

In frustration I tossed my rod and reel onto the bank and stood in the water with my hands on my hips. The line floated through my reflection on the surface, and I realized that was where the whole of me still was.

All the years of my life I had spent becoming a man, but without Dad I was still a novice. I was floating on the surface of understanding what manhood meant, reflecting a wavering image of him but never casting my own.

“Help!”

I heard the call but saw no one.

“Help me! Please!”

A woman with a bruised cheek and bloody lip came running into the stream. She tripped on her torn dress, doubling over and into the icy water but regained her footing enough to stumble forward and throw herself at me acheter levitra en france viagra apoteket. Her chin pinned to my chest, she looked up at me with a drenched face and wetter eyes.

“Please… Please,” she whispered.
“You there! Be a good man and kindly retrieve that wench for me, would you?”

A man with a tightly-curled handlebar mustache and a white horse stood on the bank. He was wealthy. Apparently, too wealthy to get wet. Two other men rode alongside him.

Her eyes begged me not to comply with handlebar’s demands.

“And what has she done,” I asked.

He leaned forward and grinned.

“Uh… She ran away.”

His accomplices laughed.

Having heard enough, I slowly reached around for my revolver. His eyes narrowed, and he matched my move. My line thrashed with a fish on the end of it, and I knew that I too had found a worthy hook.

 

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