The ancient Sturgeon is being restored to Georgia waters. My own family lore is peppered with stories of these ancient fish. My father and grandfather were seasoned fisherman who, often alone, ventured into water where they encountered alligators, moccasins and monster fish. When I was a boy, my father decided it was time I accompanied him on his adventures. One took us to the black waters of the St. Mary’s River. Photo Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

We slept in the clothes we wore, camped in our old car alongside the river road. In the dim light of a sun that had not quite risen, and a slow, steady rain, we managed to build  a fire, and  fried bacon on a campfire and browned buttered white bread in an iron skillet to break the morning chill.  Dawn’s first true light revealed we were under a Live Oak canopy of lowering branches covered in resurrection ferns, the trailing limbs draped in Spanish moss -the tableau was a scene from Dante’s inferno in my boy’s mind.

We gathered our bait and tackle and launched my grandfather’s old cypress bateau, heavy with chipped layers of green paint, and half filled with water as the rain came on. The rain became a deluge and the convulsed river swelled to the top of its banks as we untangled our rods and reels and stowed them on the boat. Dad was not to be dissuaded from challenging the waters. It was to be the last trip for the two of us while I was still a boy.

My father was determined to fish this place and pushed us off as he stepped precariously into the flat bottom of the boat. There was no motor and I struggled to keep the boat headed into the current with only a paddle.

Dad twisted and turned to angle his cast toward the bank. The lure, a pork rind hanging from a silver spoon, sank like a rock and disappeared, lost in the current.  It was immediately hung up on a thing unseen and unyielding. There was no retrieving it. Still, there was a twinge of movement telegraphed through the line and dad said “There’s something on the hook.”

As Dad tugged and tried to figure out what was going on under the water, the current became  too much for me. I must have let out a shout.  The rod and reel clattered onto the bottom of the boat as Dad grabbed a paddle and joined my struggle  to get back to where we had begun. Somewhere out there, something was still on the line.

A deer stood watching us with indifference as the boat ground onto the sandy bank. As we struggled to get out of the boat, Dad grabbed his rod and tossed it up on the bank.

Ignoring the rain and dark skies and forsaking the boat, we ignored the discarded rod and reel, glad to be safe on land, we prepared to fish from the bank with cane poles, stout nylon lines, minnow baits, heavy sinkers, and cork floats.  Our focus turned to the river and we tossed out our lines.

Nearby, Dad’s old Shakespeare reel began to studder in the sand as it slid along the bank.  Beneath the primeval waters whatever had seized his silver spoon, was moving slowly and relentlessly against the current at a depth that seemed to be on the very bottom of the dark waters.

Struggling to maneuver against its pull, Dad lost his balance and fell into the St. Mary’s River. It was as if his weight had doubled, or tripled, he later told me, as if he were too weighted down to resist the current. He grabbed the pole I was holding as the current swept him by and I managed to pull hard enough so that he arched back to the thin sandy beach and righted himself on the very spot he had dropped his rod and reel near the old bateau. Instinctively, Dad stepped on the rod to stop its slide back into the water, picked it up and began to reel. There was no fight, only leaden resistance on the part of the fish, as if he had hooked a discarded tire.

Dad hauled his catch onto the narrow sandbar and we stood starring down at something we had never seen except in old Field and Stream magazines, or imagined from the telling of my grandfather’s fish stories: a sturgeon.

Grandad had said they were once common and returned from the sea each year to lay their eggs on the sandy bottoms, above the falls on the Savannah, Altamaha, and Ogeechee Rivers. His own father shot and  killed a seven-footer that had traveled up an underground current of the Savannah and appeared in a sinkhole that appeared to everyone’s surprise in the middle of town. My mother’s grandfather -a cotton mill worker and harness maker -had earned much need cash by fishing for them on the river near Augusta, harvesting  their roe eggs that he sold to local hotels and restaurants as caviar.

With near reverence, Dad held the great fish for a moment in his hands, then tenderly removed the hook and let the great fish slide back into the river.

An understanding passed between us as I looked into Dad’s eyes. The sturgeon was a visitor from a lost world. We would be content with only telling the story of out encounter.