When the River Sang in Silver

Three cups of coffee couldn't warm my fingers as I launched the canoe into pre-dawn darkness. The Muskegon River breathed steam like a sleeping dragon, its currents whispering secrets beneath my fluorocarbon line. I'd swear on my grandfather's tackle box that the water temperature dropped twenty degrees since yesterday.

'Should've brought the neoprenes,' I muttered, watching my breath hang in the air. The first cast sent a spinnerbait skittering across current seams where steelhead should've been stacking up. By sunrise, my thermos sat empty and my net drier than a tax auditor's humor.

It happened when I stopped trying. Leaning back to watch a bald eagle hunt, my rod tip jerked sideways with violence that nearly sent my lucky Zippo flying. The reel's drag screamed like a banshee as forty yards of line disappeared upstream. 'Talk to me, sweetheart,' I crooned, palm pressed against the throbbing spool.

Twenty minutes later, I stood knee-deep in liquid mercury, a chrome-bright hen thrashing in the shallows. Her gill plates flared crimson as I removed the hook, scales glittering like shattered moonlight. The river's icy kiss still burns on my cheeks where she slapped her goodbye.