Chapter 96: True Love
“Don’t trust it.”
Tulland’s uncle had dragged him onto a boat before the sun was up that morning, forcing the thirteen year old him to help as they rowed through the icy cold-season surf to open water. They weren’t fishing, it turned out. Instead, they were watching a man in what Tulland was only now starting to realize was as close to a secret fisherman coming of age ceremony as there probably was.
The man in the boat they were observing was probably only a man to Tulland. Every other observer around them was older, more worn by age, and much more likely to consider the eighteen-year-old youth a mere boy. To Tulland, the man wasn’t only an adult, he was what all adults were supposed to look like. He stood wide-stanced on his own boat, bound in work-grown muscles and with a boot up against the ribs that lined the side of the boat as he tried desperately to wrangle a fish out of the water.
“He has a giant hook in it,” Tulland said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“Right. It was dead as soon as he got the hook in. That doesn’t mean it can’t live for minutes or hours. And it doesn’t mean that these things could change in an instant.”
Tulland looked at the boy as he steadily gained ground on the giant fish. Apparently, these huge aquatic masses of scales and teeth only swam by the island for a few short days a year, as predictable as clockwork going back generations. They weren’t good to eat, and their bones and scales were useless for crafting. To the extent they had a purpose, it was this. Allowing young men to prove they were as strong as anything the sea would ever bring near the island, and thus qualified to deal with any hardship they would face in the future.
“How?” Tulland asked. Even though he wasn’t a fisherman himself, he could see the conclusion of the fight.
“Like I said, don’t trust it. That boy understands fishing but he doesn’t know it.”
It was true that the boy knew fishing. There was caution in both the boy’s eyes and his movements. But when the fish would jerk, he’d give up ground to it, allowing it some rope to pull back or to the sides instead of keeping the animal directly in front of him. That was a small mistake. If he had just been able to pull it in steadily and directly, it would have taken a few minutes to get the fish into the boat. As it was, they were closing in on a half hour.