Through its translucent depths he saw an abundance of catfish, large-mouthed bass, white crappies, known locally as sac-a-lait, and sunfish. Even an occasional grindle… those tough ol’ bottom-feeders whose air bladders enabled them to live in mud and who were often plowed up in fields, alive, weeks after floodwater had receded.
“Wish we had some time to fish,” Tee-John called back to him, as if reading his mind. His brother sat in the front of the pirogue, Sylvie in the middle, wearing an old Ragin’ Cajun baseball cap she’d found in the cabin, and he brought up the rear. As she viewed all the sights, her ponytail flipped right and left through the back hole in the cap like a, well, pony’s tail.
“Yep,” Luc answered. “Remember the time we spent a week at the cabin and caught our limits every time we threw out a line?”
Tee-John laughed in remembrance. “We were so sick of eating fish, I about puked. And Tante Lulu said she was startin’ to grow whiskers from all the catfish we brought her.”
“Do you fish, Sylv?” Luc asked then.
She shook her head. “I never learned. No one ever took me when I was a kid. Can you imagine my mother in her Carrier diamonds and designer clothes down on the bayou… fishing? I… don’t… think… so. I suspect I might like it, though.”
“I could teach you,” Tee-John offered, much to both Sylvie and Luc’s surprise. “Course you’d have to bait your own hook. Ah cain’t stand sissy girls.” He gave an exaggerated Southern drawl to that last statement.
Everyone went quiet again, and Luc sighed with the sheer pleasure of being in the place he loved most. How he cherished the majesty of this land of his birth… a virtual Garden of Eden! In fact, there was a saying that God must be a Cajun to have created such a paradise. He agreed.
The bayou, like God, was as old as time, but there was always something new to see or hear or smell. Every time a fierce hurricane or tornado broke over the Gulf, the land and water were prone to change places. With each storm, new bayous were birthed and old ones swallowed up, as if they’d never existed. In many places, the swamp wilderness had never been civilized. It was one reason his mother’s family’s cabin had remained fairly unknown to his father. As far as Valcour LeDeux knew, the property no longer existed.
Mostly, it was a silent journey as each of them contemplated his or her own thoughts. The only sounds, aside from the rhythmic dip of paddles in water, were the occasional glide of a gator into the stream for an early morning dip, or a heron swooping down for a tasty breakfast of crawfish.
Maneuvering the pirogue required expert concentration as they wended their way between the bald cypress trees that rose smooth-trunked from the streams like royal queens. Strewn about the grand trees with their feathery green foliage were their ladies in waiting—the many knobby “knees” or root protrusions resembling gnarled stumps that pushed themselves above the water for air.
Mixed amongst the cypress trees were also the half-submerged loblollies… not as massive in girth as the cypress but giant in height, sometimes as tall as eighty feet. The loblolly was a sort of weed in the pine species… an indomitable colonizer that grew wherever its seeds landed, its male pine cones rich in life-giving pollen. Sort of like Cajun men, Luc thought with an inward smile.
The ducks followed them, at first, but then soon gave up their raucous pursuit. They’d come across a particularly succulent patch of what appeared to be green slime, but was actually duckweed—masses of tiny four-petaled flowers floating on the surface of the water. A treat more tempting than Sylvie, he assumed. To a duck, anyhow.
When they turned around one bend, they ran into a huge sheet of water hyacinths covering the entire stream for about thirty feet. With grumbles at the delay, they were forced to bank the pirogue and carry it a short distance beyond the floral mat.
“Damn, I hate this stuff,” Luc remarked.
Sylvie nodded her agreement. “How anything so beautiful can be so deadly is beyond me.”