winglike from its flanks, the fish is built for departure. Tail tip to sloped nose, its belly is nearly level, recalling, in profile, Pterrichthyodes, “the first fish,” which swam early seas 350 million years ago.
Weighing only a third of a pound in salt water, a fusiform bonefish of six pounds shuns its element. Fleeing boat or boat’s shadow, a lemon shark or a conspiring pair of barracuda, the bonefish can reach speeds of up to twenty-five miles per hour swimming in water that is 760 times denser than air—I would have to sprint at an equivalent speed through waist-deep Jell-O to experience similar resistance.
When not fleeing danger, the bonefish avoids it by means of intricate disguise, its shadow nearly always more visible than its body. Over white sand, the fish appears the color of watered-down skim milk; over turtle grass, on a knee-deep subaqueous prairie, the fish jewels up, turning the color of some yet-to-be-discovered gem; traversing coral heads or mangrove roots, the fish goes sepia, the density of the pigment cells beneath its fingernail-shaped scales varying from moment to moment to match its environment.
Because of its considerable speed, the bonefish is rarely pursued in blue water by its predators. On the flats, however, the more herdable bone becomes a mark for teams of blacktip sharks, bonnetheads, and lemons. Ospreys traffic the air above shallow saltwater acreages, but rarely seek out adult bonefish when easier game abounds. The archipelago’s first people netted bonefish, making the quarry keener to shore-walking humans’ thudding vibrations—vibrations sensed in the fish’s lateral line, a thin, tail-to-cheek organ that detects movements in the water. Centuries later the disturbing plop of a bell sinker followed shortly by the slightly quieter but equally alarming smack of a shrimp-threaded bait hook were added to this list of affronting sounds, the many suggestions of imminent death.
If desperate for safety, the fish seeks out like company: more eyes to watch for danger, more sensory organs alert. Despite its tendency to school, Linnaeus named the bonefish after a solitary mammal, and a conspicuous one at that: the white fox. The eighteenth-century naturalist, of course, had never seen an actual bonefish, and must have focused on sketches of the fish’s canine nose. In Central America the bonefish is called ratón for the way it scurries briskly from the minutest piscatory failings. Among anglers, gray ghost is the preferred and perhaps most telling moniker; it is rarely visible to the average human eye, and a sighted fish is usually a fish in flight.
OUT IN THE BLUE WATER, FAR OFFSHORE AND FAR BENEATH the swelling surface of the sea, a large school of bonefish has gathered in the September dusk to spawn. A thousand or more staging fish, uniform in length as bars of silver. Through a paling shaft of light, the shimmering tornado made of scales and fins and eyes moves hypnotically, slowly circling an invisible axis. As the full moon lifts, the fish one by one abandon their rotation, rising toward the roof of their world to breach and gulp air, which helps males and females expel, respectively, sperm and roe that drop together from the cusp of an underwater terrace—hundreds of millions of eggs falling through spreading clouds of milt.
For several weeks the fertilized eggs rest on the ocean floor’s good darkness, in one of the few places we know blessedly little about. Then from the eggs heads and ink-splotch eyes protrude as the fish begin their forty-day larval stage, expanding in this form until they are two inches long and metamorphosis begins. Before they continue to grow, they must shrink—maturing implausibly in reverse, contracting through the leptocephalid stage over a ten-day period. Nourished on plankton, they soon look quite like miniature, one-inch bonefish, creatures protected by the same number of scales from birth to death.
BONEFISH SURVIVING THREE DOZEN MOONS WITHIN THE relative protection of mangrove swamps will mature sexually and grow into one of the world’s most coveted game fish—such as the flat-foraging specimen I cast toward now, which, curse instinct, disengages from its school and mistakes this traveling angler’s artificial fly for a live, fleeing shrimp. When the false prey is attacked, a steel hook dressed with feathers bites into the fish’s bony palate.
Quickened along with the fish, I brace against its first blistering run, wet line peeling off the reel and spraying onto my face and polarized lenses. Very soon the fish is farther out than I can see, struggling against the rod’s full bend to reach the edge of the flat where the seafloor falls abruptly into the fathom-deep green. Like exaggeratedly slow seconds ticking off on a watch, line clicks off the reel one gear rotation at a time. As the distance increases, so does the tension on the line, on the knot joining monofilament leader to fly. For a hundred yards—from fish to fist gripping rod cork, from shoulder to heel seated in the sand—there is connection, like a long tendon, stressed to its tearing point.
This tug, as anglers visiting the islands say, “is the drug,” a quick hit of adrenaline initiated by a hooked and fleeing bonefish, and one the Bahamian tourism industry counts as an invaluable commodity, having recently gauged the industry surrounding the scarcely edible fish at roughly $150 million annually.
I lean the rod low and the fish finally cedes, and, reel turn by reel turn, comes to hand. I hold it upside down with shaking wrists to disorient it, and dislodge the artificial fly from its jaw. Hook free, the fish is righted, vulpine snout to the sand, and rocked briefly like a small child in a bath, one hand behind the head and one hand at the tail, to circulate salt water through its gills. Revived in its element, it tightens, kicks, and heads for refuge, meeting a curtain of sand near the edge of the flat stirred up by two feeding spotted rays, and parting the murk opposite the tidal bore.
A rising orange sun laces its hazy light across the basin and my shadow clocks westward, a visible indication of a presence already sensed by the fish’s schoolmates. Previously unnoticed, a short backhand cast away, the substantial congregation of fish arcs across the wales of sand, fleeing its birthright flat for a deeper corridor of water, reminding the angler that the ocean is an aggregate of all perceptions, not just his human ones.
The boy walks barefoot atop fine-grained sand that was once stone—thousands and thousands of years ago, millions of years ago, kalpas ago. Twelve years old. His toes dodge the snarled studs of remnant basalt uplift as he scours the ground for snails and shells, curves to eat. His brothers and sisters forage downshore from him, communal, businesslike. Breakfast was guona berries, cocoplum, wild derrie plucked from the bushes near his family’s one-room house. The lucky ones find conchs, smash the horned pink shells with rocks and try not to slice their fingers on the shards as they peel the seething single-eyed creature from its hold.
Something scurrying or glistening with life: now and then he spots a live thing and crouches to pluck it from the sand. If it doesn’t have claws or fins, he rinses it in a wave and pops it in his mouth; otherwise it’s shoved into the darkness of the small burlap sack he’ll bring for dinner. The water glides toward shore, then away, the tide falling from the mangrove shadows and lightly sketched tracks of hermit crabs, the glistening bag of a jellyfish brought in after two days of north wind, and, suddenly—this stops him in his tracks—the bleached skull of a long-dead hawksbill turtle, weathered to its orifices and distinctly human.
Despite his brothers’ chiding, he carries it all afternoon: light to hold, but with a strange density to it. They merely want to touch it, perhaps toss it back and forth, but he fends them off, kicking sand at them like a lobster. He even refuses to relinquish it to his sisters while he dives a blue hole for lobsters; air bubbles peel off from the skull as he descends. Later, while warming himself by a fire built of coconut husks, he sprawls on his back and holds the skull to his eyes, peering through the sockets. Through these strange lenses, the evening sky is indigo. Later the horizon will bleed its strange ink upward and the heavens will darken thoroughly, Jupiter will appear precisely where he’s staring, and the sky will fill with the constellations by which he’s learned to navigate. And that are up there even now, he comprehends, whether visible or not.
Roosting doves rustle in the shoreline
