When the River Whispered at Dawn

Mosquitoes still drowsy in the predawn chill, I waded into the Chattahoochee's tea-colored water. My spinnerbait clinked against the whiskey flask in my vest pocket - a habit formed after that infamous 2018 tournament where liquid courage out-fished my actual lures. The river breathed fog that clung to my beard like ghosts of last night's campfire stories.

Three casts. Three snags. 'Should've used the cursed blue lure,' I muttered, remembering old Jim's tale about the jighead that never lost fish...or fishermen. As sunlight fractured through cypress knees, something silver flashed beneath a submerged log. Not the cautious glint of bass, but the frantic shimmer of shad balling up.

My next cast landed with the grace of a drunken heron. The spinnerbait hadn't sunk six inches before the rod doubled. The drag screamed like a bobcat caught in a fiddle string. Twenty yards downstream, smallmouth bronzed the sunrise as it tail-walked across liquid fire. When I finally lipped it, the fish's gills pulsed against my thumb in time with the river's heartbeat.

Back at the truck, wiping fish slime on my lucky bandana, I noticed the spinnerbait's skirt unraveling. The river gives, and the river takes away. Always.