Thar Be Gold in Them Thar Eels

By Bob Fields

This classic Bob Fields tale captures the endearing relationship between three young boys in northern Maine dubbed the Elm Street Gang. The boys embark on an adventure in central Maine to earn money harvesting the annual run of Elvers a/k/a Glass Eels in the Penobscot River. This is the story of three young men, friends since childhood, who face an ever-increasing series of threats while on what should have been a carefree end of winter fishing trip. The reader will savor every line of this YA adventure on the Maine coast..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bob Fields
• Release date: Mar 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005985714

Bob Fields

Bob Fields possesses an exceptional talent for translating his broadly based life experiences to the written page. A veteran of two wars (three if you count Wall Street), his hardscrabble early life taught him real life lessons; the application of which propelled his success in a military career and numerous business ventures.After his retirement from business in 1999, he began a career as a Free Lance Writer. His work has been published in regional magazines and company oriented newsletters related to the environment. He has published two print books describing life as a boy in the 1940s, and a highly acclaimed novel; “Rendezvous with Destiny” a well-paced story about discrimination, love, murder, revenge, redemption, and the ultimate understanding between people with disparate backgrounds in small town America.Bob is currently working on several short stories soon to be published as an anthology about Maine as it once was.Like me on Face Book

Book preview

Thar be gold in them thar eels

By

Bob Fields

Copyright © 2021 Bob Fields

All rights reserved.

Distributed by BobFieldsBooks.com

The following account is a work of fiction. It is based on events experienced by the author when he and two friends enjoyed life in a small Maine town as members of the Elm Street Gang.

Contents

Thar be gold in them thar eels

Thar be gold in them thar eels

Dave struggled to keep the tiny clear salamander look-a-like from twisting around his thumb. He looked up at his buddy Dick Huggard and said, Never saw a salamander so clear you can see its insides.

Dick grinned, grabbed the wiggling baby by the tail, and waved it back and forth like he was drying it in the wind. It’s not a Salamander numbnuts, "it’s a Glass Eel, an Elver.

Glass my ass, said Bob. glass breaks, that baby is bending. Look at him. He’s trying to wrap around your finger. It’s a baby snake. We see baby snakes all the time at Cooks Brook.

Not transparent ones, said Dave.

Dave Putnam, Dick Huggard, and Bob Fields, three fishing buddies from Houlton, Maine, were standing in knee-deep water a long, long way from their favorite fishing hole; an un-named creek winding its way through the Wytipitlcok woods to feed East Grande Lake.

Known by their peers as the Elm Street Gang, they counted their friendship back to elementary school. Bob, a lukewarm Catholic at Saint Mary’s, Dave and Dick reluctant congregants at the Baptist Church on Military Street. Bob, described by his basketball coach as skinny as a starving stray, figured the lack of padding made him a better rebounder on the court because of his sharp elbows. Dick was shorter, broader, and more aggressive than his buddies. Good guy to have handy in a street fight which often occurred on the playgrounds until the boys were 14. Like young bulls marking territory. Dave was the outlier in the gang. Shorter than Bob and taller than Dick, His specialty was anything on the water. He could swim three laps across Nickerson Lake doing the backstroke and follow that with three more doing the Australian crawl after exciting the crowd with a swan dive off the Pavilion roof.

The three loved high school sports, but the tie that bound them was fishing. Most kids kept their lunch and a few prized possessions in the locker at school. These boys kept fishing rods and tackle. Every day after school, unless they were needed at home for chores, they met at monument park and hitched rides to Cooks brook on the Foxcroft Road.

********

They were in Bucksport, Maine. Standing in the Frankfort Flats section of the Penobscot River Estuary.

Fred Hanlon and his friend, Tyke Suiter, invited the boys to come with them to witness the annual migration of Elver eels from the Sargasso Sea to the rivers of Maine. Fred said they could earn big money by netting and selling the two-inch-long baby eels known as Glass Eels or Elvers. A pound of Elvers in Portland could fetch five hundred dollars. When sold through a broker to the Asian market in New York City, they could fetch a thousand dollars or more.

Each Spring, the baby eels gathered in the Estuary that dumped water from Northern Maine and New Brunswick and even parts of Quebec into the Atlantic. Once acclimated to the transition from saltwater to fresh, the baby Eels began the long