A Bomb In Sheep's Clothing

I concede that "mutton snapper" is hardly a prepossessing title. The sheep, from which the name derives, is not much of an animal. No civilized person will deal with him except in chops and stews. To bleat is not to sing out in a commanding baritone; to be sheepish is scarcely to possess a virtue for which civilization rolls out its more impressive Oriental carpets or, for that matter, even a few ordinary bath mats.

And it is true that the fish, as you may have suspected, is not at all handsome, with its large and vacant-looking head, crazy red eye and haphazard black spot just shy of its tail. Yet its brick orange flanks and red tail are rather tropical and fine, and for a number of reasons it deserves consideration as major light-tackle game. When you have been incessantly outwitted by the mutton snapper, you cease to emphasize his vaguely doltish exterior.

To begin with, mutton snapper share with the most pursued shallow-water game fish a combination of hair-trigger perceptions. They are wild and spooky, difficult to deceive and very powerful. Taken under optimum conditions, they are as enthralling as any species that haunts the flats.

Like most flats fish, the mutton snapper is primarily a creature of deep water, another individual thread in the ocean system that, following its own particular necessity, crisscrosses the lives and functions of the species that share its habitat. Which is to say that in looking for one fish you find another—and maybe in the end you find it all.

After a long winter's flats fishing, I had naturally acquired a ready facility for recognizing most anything that came along. A flat is a circumscribed habitat so far as larger fishes are concerned. The first mutton snappers I found were encountered while I was poling for permit on flood tides close to the Florida Keys. They were wild fish, hustling around in their curious way and pushing abrupt knuckles of wake in the thin water. Their red tails made them unmistakable.

They seemed so quick to flush and so conscious of the skiff that it was hard to see how they might be taken on a fly rod. Besides, they were hard to find, somewhat harder, for example, than permit, and they were every bit as alert and quick to flush.

Last May, Guy and I began to fish for them in earnest, spurred on from time to time by the sight of brilliant red forks in the air. The fish often seemed hurried, and when we would pole to the place where we had seen a tail, there would be nothing. Most of the first fish we found were in a grassy basin south of Key West, a shallow place usually good for a few shots at permit. The basin was little more than a declivity in the long-running ocean bank that reaches from just below Key West to the Boca Grande Channel—and across which lie the Marquesas.

Early one hot day Guy and I began to fish this basin. A long convection buildup of clouds lay along the spine of the Keys, like a mirror image of the islands themselves, all the way to Boca Grande, and then scattered in cottony' streamers to the west. So we fished in a shadow most of the day, straining to find fish in the turtle grass.

With the leisurely wan hope that comes of being on a flat at no particular tide, I was poling the skiff. We passed a small depression on the flat and suddenly spotted two mutton snappers floating close to the bottom with the antsy, fidgeting look they so often seem to have. Guy made an excellent cast and a fish responded immediately. My hopes sank as it overtook and began to follow the fly with the kind of examining pursuit we had come to associate with one of the permit's more refined refusals. But with considerable �lan, Guy stopped the fly and let it sink to the bottom. The snapper paused behind the fly at a slight forward tilt and then, in what is to the flats fisherman a thrilling gesture, he tilted over onto his head and tailed, the great, actually wondrous, fork in the air, precisely marking the position of Guy's fly.

I looked toward the stern. Guy was poised, line still slack, rod tip down. He gave the fish three full seconds and I watched him lift the rod, feeling foredoomed that the line would glide back slack. But the rod bowed. Abruptly, the fish was surging away from us in a globe of wake that it pushed before itself; a thin sheet of water stood behind the leader as it sheared the surface.