BOB KORNEGAY: Raise a glass to a life well-spent

The big fish floated belly-up on the water’s surface. Not long dead, she retained the undulating flexibility of a creature born to swim. She seemed to swim, in fact, weirdly upside down, tail fin gently waving, propelled by ripple and current. The pectorals, oar-like, still limber at the joints, moved naturally, unimpeded by the rigor of functional shutdown.

Her olive-green iridescence had yet to fade into dead-fish pallor. Even the eye was still clear.

Only the inverted attitude revealed the fish’s actual condition. That, and the immobile, locked-down gill plate, which no longer opened and closed to force oxygen into the bright red capillary network that once fueled the heart and powered the blocky-but-graceful body.

Nearly a dozen years prior, in a backwater cove, this life-just-ended began. It was a precarious beginning, jump-started when a mother largemouth (“mother” only in the strictest biological sense) spewed a teeming clutch of miniscule ova onto the clean sand of a fanned-out, lake-bottom nest crater. Sprayed haphazardly with milt supplied by a comparatively tiny father, the eggs, most of them, began burgeoning with embryonic animation.

“Daddy” bass stayed “home,” his single-parent role in this ages-old process dictated by an ingrained nurturing urge he could not fathom. Automatically if not affectionately, he removed the lifeless, infertile spawn and fanned small-but-vital currents of oxygen-rich water over and through the living egg mass. Now and then, he chased away egg-consuming salamanders, sunfishes, and other predators intent upon indiscriminate feasting and the subsequent reduction of the nest to complete barrenness.

The wee eggs quickly hatched into a wriggling “cloud” of fry that rapidly absorbed each nutrient-filled yolk sac and swam freely, all together in synchronized unison. Protected by blind fortune and the sheer size of the sibling horde, the she-bass, that would more than a decade hence float lifeless on the surface of the lake, survived.

But only by the tiniest margin. Dozens of times she narrowly avoided being swallowed by myriad enemies. While brothers and sisters passed through various aquatic digestive tracts or succumbed to microscopic parasites, she somehow avoided becoming a blip footnote on an obscure page of natural history. Instead, she grew. And grew large.

As a yearling in a school of two or three dozen, she was already a third larger than her peers. By her second season, others of her year-class prudently avoided her. By age three, no “lizard,” bluegill, or cannibalistic kin threatened her. A lone, solitary prowler, now she was the threat. By the time five years passed, she swam where she pleased, with almost-swaggering impunity.

She was not totally devoid of foes, however. Otters, alligators, and soaring ospreys were never distant. Neither was Man, with his rocket-sled bass boats, roaring outboards, and those oh-so-tantalizing plastic-and-metal thingamajigs that look and sound so much like something good to eat.

Miraculously, though, these, too, were evaded. No tooth or talon scars ever marred the unbroken overlay of her scales. Her fins remained perpetually intact and symmetrical. No hook-hole ever appeared in her wide, intimidating jaw. The odds of such a life history? Staggering.

She gained her 12th pound sometime during her 11th year; good food, good genes, and a long life all contributing.

Then she died. Naturally and without fanfare.

The angler discovered her soon afterward, shortly before the scavengers of Nature’s “cleanup crew.” He steered his boat alongside and plucked her from the water, marveling at her great size and beauty. A wry smile skewed his lips as the thought occurred that he had never caught a largemouth bass remotely approaching these proportions in over a half-century of fishing. The smile vanished and his brow wrinkled when he found no obvious outward or inward cause of her demise.

“Just up and died, I reckon,” the pragmatic fisherman mused.

The grand “trophy-that-never-was” now lies buried, slowly decomposing and nourishing the soil in the man’s garden.

“Too bad,” sigh fellow fishermen when he tells the tale.

But, is it?

Think about it. This fish, whose lifeless remains ended up in a curious angler’s respectful hands is the progenitor of hundreds of her kind, each one bearing her obviously superior genetic imprint. How many are out there to potentially provide a bass fisherman or two that once-in-a-lifetime angling thrill?

Seems to me we’d be foolish to mourn such a passing. Why not instead raise a glass to a life well spent?

Email outdoors columnist Bob Kornegay at [email protected].