Copyright 1968 by Carl L. Biemiller
Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, NY
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 68-25597

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CHAPTER ONE

Kent Palmer was fourteen that summer. He was three inches more than five feet tall, shinbone lean, and all gristle from a springtime of baseball with the high school freshmen team, and his twice-weekly games in the Pony League now that school was out.

On the last day of June he looked only half as high. He couldn't have cared less. He was busy. He was fishing. He was standing waist-deep in whipped-cream surf. The pewter sea before him was newly polished by a young sun only a half-hour into another day. His skin glistened from the tiny showers of east-wind spume. It was the color of an old penny. Wave spray hung a misty crown around his wet, black hair.

He flipped the bail on his spinning reel and snapped his surf rod through a careless arc, which shot a hundred feet of nearly invisible monofilament line out past the humpbacked breakers. He was fishing hopefully for anything, and hoping particularly for the striped bass or bluefish, which share the summer surfs of the New Jersey coast.

The sea plastered a ragged pair of knee-length, dungaree shorts to his sparse hips. He dug his barefoot heels into the constantly melting sand to hold his balance.

Kent couldn't remember a summer when he hadn't been fishing some part of most days, and some winters, too, when Dad had taken him out of school for southern trips to Florida and beyond.

Since his mother died just before his tenth birthday, there had been many of those trips. It was a good thing that he was a student type and not some natural born bust out. He liked to study. He liked to learn. He found that by just a lick more trying, he could not only keep up with his classmates but fairly well ahead of them, even if he did spend maybe a month on the road with Dad.

He could not remember just how young he had been when he had been given his first rod and reel. Of course, if he really wanted to know, all he had to do was walk down the beach and ask.

His father was only a few hundred feet away, probably holding down some four-ton chunk of Pennsylvania granite imported by the State and buttressed into a ragged sea wall to keep Sandy Hook from washing into the ocean. The sun would be warming the rock by now and doubtless his father's muscular flanks.

People who knew Kent seldom saw him smile. They didn't know that he saved his smiling for inside pleasures. He grinned inside now. He knew his father was fishing, but he also knew that Dad was also winging down some personal daydream, maybe reconstructing Sandy Hook as it was, or revising the Atlantic Ocean completely.

He lifted his rod tip and reeled in to take the sag out of the line placed there by a small eddy trying to be a whirlpool. He kept on reeling. He decided to go down and check in with Dad anyhow. Come to think of it, Dad had the fish tags.

He stuck the butt end of the rod into a holder spiked into the beach, left the line and lure dangling, and loped through the sand.

Father was on his rock. He was a compact man, sun-stained, limp and relaxed as a pair of sweat socks after the big game. There was a rime of dried salt on his shoulders, and a powder of white brine in the laugh lines of his face.

John Palmer wore a pair of sunglasses about to lose a perch on his snub nose. A pair of soggy, sandy shorts fought to stay upright upon his hips.

As always, Kent thought, Dad looked like a man about to discover something. He could feel his inside grin. He remembered what one of Dad's law partners had told him.

"Your father, young man, knows every minute of the day that he is about to meet a man from Mars who will turn out to be his cousin. He expects it. He expects everything. And, it won't make any difference if that cousin has nine heads and a purple hide, if it's alive, it's a relative simply because your father believes that everything alive is related to everything that lives. That's one of the things that makes him a good lawyer."

"Hey," said Kent.

"I saw you come out of the surf," said his father. "The salt in your blood and the lime in your bones proves that the sea is not only where you come from, but that it is every man's real home."

"So," said Kent, "the big thing is I'm out of fish tags."

"You never were in. I've had them here all the time. They didn't seem important."

"I know. I know," said Kent. "No fish to tag."

"As members of the American Littoral Society, which fosters the study and conservation of aquatic life, we are failures this morning so far."

"I am also hungry."

"The Audubon Society which bands birds to study their habits would scorn your hunger. The Littoral Society will give you a sandwich and hope that you take fish," said his father.

"What I came up to ask was, I think, is how old was I when I got my first rod and reel?"

John Palmer rolled off his rock and rummaged within a beat-up canvas rucksack. He produced a sandwich. The glint of the sun off the wax-paper wrapper beamed a message to two herring gulls loafing up a slant of wind; and wise to the ways of people, who used State beach parks, they braked to a sloppy landing on the nearby strand.

"Hogs with feathers," said John Palmer, giving his son a sandwich. "You were exactly four years old. You were first a trout fisherman. We were at Canadensis in the Pocono Mountains. I had a bootful of stream and a bad temper. You were sitting on the bank. I gave you my rod to hold, and the dumbest brook trout in the whole wide world grabbed the wet fly I was using and took it about two feet from the stream bank. I was still climbing to dry land. Being four years old and wiser than you will ever be again, you held the rod and did nothing. I took a seven-inch brook trout. Your mother laughed for three days. I gave you the rod and reel.

"Now, why did you want to know?"

"I forget," said Kent.

"No, you didn't forget. You had a sudden notion out there in the surf that you had been there a long time, like most of your life…. Well, you have, and if not right smack dab on this beach, somewhere else along this coast on a beach, in a boat, on a jetty, in some bay, river or pond. Maybe that's my fault. Do you realize that we spend more time together than most fathers and sons? Why do you think that is?"

Kent gulped down the last bite of sandwich. He felt his big inside smile, but he kept his face Indian grim.

"You'd beat me?"

"Ahggh!" grunted his father. "Some real wise kid! First thing I know, you'll show up wearing jack-boots and your hair down around your shoulders. Grab a tag or two and go to work. The light's getting strong enough to move some fish around out there."

"Are you going to help?" asked Kent gravely.

"I give great moral aid to all of the aquatic sciences," said Dad.

"Back on the rock?"

"As a peerless observer."

Kent picked up two fish tags from a nest-full in a small box.

They were lengths of small, tough, vinyl tubing, quite literally tubes within tubes. The inner tubes were a bright yellow-orange in color with a printed message. It said "Reward Send Length and Tab to Sandy Hook Lab Highlands, N. J. U. S. A. H. C. D.,"and then a number.

He also picked up a small, skewer length of metal, which looked like a sharp and headless ten-penny nail. When he tagged a fish, he inserted the skewer into an open end of tubing, rammed it through the fish behind the dorsal or top fin just where the fish body began to taper into tail, and pulled the spaghetti-like tube through and knotted it firmly. The fish thus owned an identity, if not an address.

As always, when he looked at the tags, he felt a vast sense of wonder. He was part of a great mystery. He was, in fact, and very aware of the fact, a skinny, juvenile medicine man about to unlock another treasure of knowledge for the enrichment of man's life on earth. No one knew where or when those tags would appear again or what briny adventures they would share in the ocean depths.

Kent knew that when the tags did appear again, and were mailed to the Littoral Society, that the information they carried would add one more small bit of data about fish migrations and behavior patterns. They would add another tiny bit of certainty to man's understanding of the endless cycles of life in the sea. They would help man save and sustain that life so that long after he and Dad were gone, others might enjoy fishing.

And he knew that the scientists at the Sandy Hook Marine Laboratory, all specialists with funny, special names for their specialties, would list, chart, graph, record and study the tag information. They were part of the government's Department of the Interior, its sports fishing division. Their job was to find out everything possible to know about fish and sea life, stream life, river life, pond life and the teeming living things in the wet marshlands.

Their real job was conservation.

When Kent thought about conservation, he thought about his father.

"All you need to know about conservation," his dad once explained, "is that it is the important business of protecting people from their own ignorance. Man thinks that he is the only thing that matters on the earth. He isn't. He couldn't live one minute without trees, plants, grass, fresh air, clean water, and all of the other life forms on this planet, including the ones too small to see with a microscope and the ones too big to stuff in the trunk of a car. And every time he destroys one of them he commits his own suicide. Maybe that's a good thing but I prefer to leave some good days to the young to pay for all the great ones I have."

But to save life, you have to know about it. That's why the Littoral Society, from coast to coast, was so concerned about fish tagging. It was why more and more fishermen, fish watchers, snorkel and scuba divers, and shell collectors were finding their hobbies more fun when joined with a little science.

Kent scuffed through the sand to his rod, now vibrating in a heavier breeze backing out of the east to the southeast.

The Littoral Society was getting pretty hairy about a lot of things. It now had a porpoise, a porpoise with a purpose, for a Society mascot, sort of a seagoing, and much smarter, "Smoky the Bear" which protected the national parks from fire.

Dad called it Petunia Porpoise.

"It has a certain dignity," he explained, "and one befitting a matron. Obviously this porpoise is a female, a motherly type. Male porpoises are too busy working with the Navy or just plain playing around to do good works. Petunia, like Mary, is a grand old name."

Kent chuckled. Well, there was one reason, he thought, that he and his father spent a lot of time together. Dad was fun. And, come to think about it, they didn't spend all that time together, hardly any when Dad was busy on some big law case, not too much during the winters in the small town of Rumson, where they lived when Kent had basketball and studies, and not too much during baseball season. In fact, sometimes Dad said, "Get out and mess with your peer groups, riot in the streets, discover girls, dance some of those crazy dances."

The sea was turning color from a pewter to a smoky-green gray. Out in the shipping lanes offshore, two tankers were walking a tightrope of horizon. The surf was sulky and confused and the breakers were full of sand.

Kent changed lures. He had been using a metal lure called a Hopkins with an action, which made it resemble a small herring. He decided on a heavier lure, rounder and fatter, which looked like a baby mullet. From habit, and as long as he was rattling about in his tackle box, he took a pencil stub and a beat-up card and wrote down the number of the tag he intended to use if he caught a fish. He shoved the other tag out of sight where he couldn't grab it by mistake.

He checked his lure again. The new one had about seven inches of fine-wire leader and he wanted to make sure that it hadn't kinked, and wasn't worn enough to break, or frail enough for some striper or blue to bite through it.

He waded into the wash of an ebbing wave and made his cast.

The line sang sweetly seaward and plopped, making a momentary buttercup of foam. He dug in his heels against the undertow and relaxed as he started to reel in and retrieve lure and line, easy, but not urgent, just enough to give the lure action and a chance to work.

Kent didn't know it, but it was the last time he would be loose and jelly-jointed and that relaxed for months to come.

The water felt suddenly warmer around his knees as if something had turned on a hot-water faucet, and he felt, rather than sensed, a change in the wind. It leaned against his shoulder from the south.

He was five seconds away from the incredible, from the awesome, from a beauty he would remember all of his life.

The day was growing golden and the sea greening now from gray.

Dad was within earshot, relaxed on a rock.