Keith told me a story tonight I’ve heard 1000X & hope to hear 1000 more. Wade fishing off the Chandeleur Islands. He’d anchored his boat on a sandbar, hopped out chest-deep. Commenced casting. He’s a great outdoorsman all around but there’s no finer saltwater fisherman on earth.

Now my man does not exaggerate a story even when it would improve it no small measure. This 1 needs no improvement. It is perfect. Short. To the point &, when he tells it, he looks off into the distance & props both his hands, scarred from years of hooks & fins, low on his waist.

And he settles in. Don’t rush him. His face is weathered from so many years in the sun and, as he tells the story, the lines around his eyes widen just enough to let you catch thin strips of white hidden in the brown folds. He was casting a red shrimp-tail jig for trout and reds.

Keith started advancing to the deeper part of the sand bar, casting rhythmically when the sun reflected hot off something in his peripheral vision. Keith squinted & saw it was a large dorsal fin attached to a mako shark he estimated at a length somewhere between 10&12 feet long.

Said it swam with its bottom jaw about 14 inches across dropped wide open, the saltwater rippling rapidly in channels through rows of long jagged teeth reaching eerily in no uniform direction & big black eye locked right on him. The mako moved with a speed impossible to outpace.

As it made haste to him & Keith looked straight down its wide-open mouth, he (Keith) shot straight up in the air out of that chest deep water like a rocket propelled from the sea. Now’s my favorite part. He’s still staring off in space, reliving the whole saga. Pauses & squints.

Then right here every single time he says exactly the same thing. I wait for it because I know it’s coming.

“And I screamed like a girl.”

I clap every time. My man doesn’t say he screamed like a girl unless he screamed like a girl.

He so startled the shark, it began to turn.

Said it felt like it took 10 minutes for that shark to turn. Curved with the pace of a ship, he says, & every inch of that magnificent beast’s body paraded itself right in front of my husband.

The caudal fin was 5 feet tall.

It was the day one Keith Moore screamed like a girl.