If one of the boys had forgotten a life jacket, Lucas would turn the truck around and drive the full hour home rather than launch the boat one vest short.

I had watched him do exactly that.

I had been in the truck the day he turned it around for a forgotten vest, forty minutes from the launch, the boys groaning in the back, and I remembered being faintly exasperated and more than faintly proud.

He would not be moved.

There is no fish worth a life, he said, and he said it lightly, but he meant it all the way down.

That was the bedrock of the man.