The wild Neosho glides through the ancient waters, a ghost of the Ozarks that few men have known. His home lies in the sacred streams where Arkansas bleeds into Missouri, where Kansas touches Oklahoma – waters as old as time. He is beautiful and rare, this fish, with a proud jaw that speaks of nobility and a body made lean by the rushing currents.

He is not like his northern cousin, the smallmouth. No, the Neosho is something finer, something wilder. His dorsal fin cuts the water like a lover’s whisper. His scales catch the dawn light like fragments of lost stars.

But now the northern smallmouth comes, unwanted, uninvited, into these crystal waters. They threaten our proud prince of the Ozarks, this last wild remnant of what these streams once held. Time is running out, like water through cupped hands. We who know him, who have watched him dance in the deep pools at sunrise, must become his guardians. For if we lose him, we lose something precious – a piece of wildness that can never be reclaimed, a romance with the ancient waters that will never come again.