The second to last time I saw Warren Cabral, he was knee deep in the Caribbean, a ten year-old tow-headed urchin with oversized Bob Marley teeshirt, soggy nylon shorts, and the exaggerated stillness of a snake charmer. He had broken open a baby conch and, moving only his right arm, was handlining for fingerlings with bits of its flesh. As he caught these, he thumbnailed their heads against his forefinger, then underhanded the stilled bodies toward the reason for the whole production: Peli the pelican.

The bird watched from six feet away, pounced greedily upon each offering, eased back to watch again. When Warren walked along the shoreline to another likely fishing spot, the bird hesitated, then swam alongside like a dog at heel.

Watching from shore, I asked, just above a whisper, how he had decided to tame such a creature.

He whispered back: Peli came one evening to the dock where his father cleans the nightly catch. The bird was so aggressive the small nurse sharks that normally show up couldn’t win any of the scraps. Warren liked that.

Watching, it seemed to me there was more: these two, the blue-eyed boy and the pouch-faced bird, share an overriding commonality. They both live to fish.

Like the pelican, Warren comes by his fishing obsession naturally. He is growing up on a nine acre private island off mainland Belize. In his universe, land is the anomaly and limitless, fish-filled ocean the rule. His father is Belizean, the son and grandson of subsistence fishermen. His mother, child of French and American expatriates, was also raised here.

This is a boy who caught fish before he could walk. Caught his first bonefish, a creature Rocky Mountain flyfishermen cherish technicolor dreams of, by age 5. Has been spearfishing since kindergarten. When he was 8 he caught the fish of which he’s still most proud, an 80 pound grouper longer than he was tall. His father says the boy could easily feed the family, but Breeze Cabral does not mean to say the boy is special, only that all is as it should be: Breeze was younger than Warren when he began putting food on the family table.

The Cabrals support themselves not by subsistence fishing but by taking in guests, which is how I came to be here. Rocky Mountain flyfisherman that I am, I suppose I came, at least in part, for the bonefish.

Which, it turns out, are Warren’s favorite prey. He likes the zzzhhh sound his reel makes when the fish runs. He likes that they’re “spooky,” a word he says with an island accent that makes watery ripples out of those o’s.

What “spooky” means, I’ve read, is that casts must be accurate and clean, the fly landing gently, not too close but not too far from feeding fish. The fly must sink before the bonefish arrive, and the retrieve must not ask these wary bottom feeders to detour significantly.

“Spooky” also means that, once hooked, a bonefish can easily break off, either through sheer speed or by abrading the line as it dodges among coral heads.

Bonefishing with Warren can be a humbling experience, especially if you haven’t done much ocean fishing. First off, if you don’t know him yet, it’s easy to mistake his fish tales for unabashed fictions. But it’s a sunny morning on a tiny tropical island and he’s a nice kid, so you (or in actual fact, my friend and fishing buddy, Dean) grab your gear and meet Warren at the dock. He’s not allowed to go alone; you (Dean) figure you’re helping him out.

He’s also not allowed to take a motor rig, so one of the family’s sea kayaks, powered mostly by you once Warren gets talking, carries the two of you to a nearby island called Long Caye. The island’s southern tip is a sand flat 2 to 5 feet deep, surrounded by sea grass. Bonefish heaven.

Almost immediately on arriving, the boy points dramatically.

“There they are,” he says.

You see light dancing on water, and beneath that, several vague darknesses, any of which might be a cluster of fish.
“See them? They’re feeding.”

And while your eyes dart uncertainly from darkness to darkness, he adds, “And there’s a barracuda in the middle. They will be careful with him there.”

Which is when you decide you don’t believe him. Your decision is strengthened when Warren asks you to tie on his fly, a thing like an Egg-sucking Leach, fat-headed and streamy, that the boy calls a Mini Puff. What kind of fisherman can’t tie on his own fly?

Then Warren strides into the water, saying “Look, I’ll show you,” and hacks off a couple of rough-looking casts that land his fly this side of a shadow cluster you already scanned and dismissed. Strip, strip, strip. On the third cast, he hooks up.

You smile and shake your head -- you’re the one wearing polarized sunglasses -- and wade out to cheer the fight.

Catch. Release. And he’s casting again. You start casting too but of the corner of your eye, you also watch. The boy’s rod is a 9 foot, 8 weight St. Croix. Lacking wrist strength, he chokes up on the handle, wedging the butt in the crook of his elbow and casting with his whole arm. For long casts, he steps out on his left leg like a baseball pitcher. But his flies land lightly, and he patiently waits for them to sink. His strips are smooth and slow. His rod tip points, unwavering, at the quarry.

He catches two more and so, finally, do you, by aiming where Warren points and never by seeing the fish yourself. All are about 12 inches long, slim and moon-silver, as full of fight as a 20 inch native cutt. You and the boy howl in delight at each take and rod-bending run.
Then, announcing it’s time to rest the bonefish, Warren wades to shore and stalks the waterline. Stops, casts, and immediately catches a needlefish about ten inches long. It’s pencil-thin, like a finned snake.

He skewers the wriggling creature on a large fly he has again asked you to tie on and proceeds to locate, stalk and, in minutes, catch a 24 inch, snag-toothed barracuda.

The area is a marine reserve. Only catch-and-release fishing is allowed unless you are an island resident fishing for the table. Warren kills the ‘cuda.

Most of this time, you’ve been trying to catch one last bonefish, but like a batter who’s lost his lucky rabbit’s foot, without Warren you strike out. So you wade ashore to try for needlefish, but although you can tease them up, hooking them seems a different matter. Warren has no such difficulty: he catches another needlefish, then another barracuda, this one 14 or so inches long. He looks at it dismissively, releases it.

An hour later as you paddle back, you pass the sandy mound that comprises tiny Lomont Caye, named after Warren’s mother’s family because once they lived there.
“Look at that big barracuda,” Warren says.

You look down, see something below the boat. Four feet long, motionless, black against the bright-white sand. To your eye it could be as easily be a shark or a flyrod case. But if Warren says it’s a barracuda, it’s a barracuda.

“If I had my spinning rod, trust me, he’d have a toothache.”

You don’t question that, either.

But it’s not Warren’s fishing skill that finally and utterly charms. It’s the fact that this is, bottom line, a ten-year-old child. While I was visiting the island, he stole two strings from his 7 year-old sister’s toy guitar. They were steel and he envisioned them as fishing leaders that might keep barracuda from making off with his flies.

A while back he got himself in big trouble by spending an entire week marching from guest cabin to guest cabin at mealtimes, claiming, alongside his sister, that their mother didn’t feed them and could the guests spare some scraps?

And when Becky, his mom, fetches him home from some adventure or another, like as not he’ll unselfconsciously take her hand as they walk and begin chattering the day’s stories at her.

The last time I saw Warren Cabral, he looked almost as hang-faced as his friend the pelican. He was being yelled at by his mother for not attending to chores. Drinking water needed fetched from the cistern, wash water from the well. I sympathized with them both, the impatient mother and the dismayed boy, because I imagined I knew the reason for his absent-mindedness: behind those ocean-blue eyes, no matter where he was or what he did, the boy had been, as always, fishing.

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