All Fishermen Are Liars (22 page)

As time went on, I decided to keep a fish. I hadn’t thought about this beforehand, but we’d been nibbling on some salmon Rob had smoked and it was real good. The second time I said how delicious it was, he told me his minimalist recipe, offered to smoke one for me and just like that I was hunting a salmon to kill. It would have to be the brightest possible fish. A day or two earlier we’d talked to a guy who said he’d killed a “slightly colored-up fish” and it was “not too bad.” But when you get into the area of gourmet food gathering, “not too bad” falls short of what you have in mind.

I hooked the fish I wanted on the afternoon of our last day. We went to the spot known as the Brush Pile for high tide and found
surprisingly few boats. I wondered if people knew something we didn’t. It was chilly and raining steadily, but this hadn’t struck me as a crowd that would be scared off by a little sprinkle.

Anyway, we anchored in the sweet spot and after a while I hooked a salmon. They all seem big at first, but after ten minutes this one still seemed big. He made a long downstream run, wallowed, and then swam back toward the boat with me furiously taking up slack line. Then he tried to bore into the sunken brush that gives this run its name, and I muscled him out. When we got him close enough for a look, we could see it was a dime-bright fish of about thirty pounds. He wouldn’t let himself be led into the shallows but kept ducking under the boat while Rob spun it one way and then the other with the oars trying to get him into the open. We were laughing from nervousness and because even we could see that this was pretty comical.

When we finally netted him, a few people nearby in boats and on the bank hooted and clapped and then turned to speak to each other in quieter tones, saying something like, “Did you see those two clowns tryin’ to land that fish?” Then we rowed to shore and killed him. He must have just come in with the tide because he still had the sea lice on him that would have fallen off after just a few hours in fresh water.

I never had second thoughts, but my happiness was leavened by the sting of regret you inevitably feel when you kill your own food instead of leaving the chore to someone else. You can’t help but wonder what that light in its eyes was and where it went so suddenly. But then that quickly evolved into something less stark and more complicated—something like what Jim Harrison was getting at when he said, “Everything edible is technically dead”—and by the time Rob snapped a hero shot, I was grinning like I’d won the lottery. To some here that would all sound a little too touchy-feely, but observing the abrupt transition from beautiful live animal to piece of meat is nothing more than a way of paying attention.

I’d caught that salmon on a fly I watched Rob tie the night before. It was a pretty thing with a long tail of sparse orange bucktail barred with a black marker and topped by a few strands of tinsel, a black chenille body with an oval gold rib, soft orange hen hackle and jungle-cock sides. Why that one and none of the others, I couldn’t say. It just struck me as elaborately formal, like an officer’s dress uniform. Before I tied it on, I held it up and said to Rob, “Damn it, I just like the looks of this.”

22

WYOMING

Doug and I left the last stream we fished in midmorning and drove two drainages west, making the usual stop at a crossroads general store to buy more food and fresh ice for the coolers, top off the gas tank and dispose of our accumulated camp garbage. There was a raven guarding the Dumpster from a safe distance; acting nonchalant while we emptied our trash, then gliding down when we walked away to see if we’d left him anything useful. On the way into the store, I passed too close to a parked pickup and got the evil eye from a pair of
blue heelers in the bed. On the covered porch a large man was saying to his skinny friend, “I found a buyer for that old Jeep, but I gotta make it run first.”

We were on our way to a little river a guide we’d talked to a few days earlier had told us about. He said it was a good cutthroat stream that wasn’t fished too much because it was sort of out of the way. Not unknown of course, but also not the kind of place the tourist bureau would direct you to or even know about. He added that from the upper end of the drainage where the stream fished best, you could drive on over a low pass and down to two other creeks that were also full of cutthroats. This guide—Ken by name—said he sometimes took clients up there because in this one relatively small area you could pick up three of the four subspecies of cutthroat needed to fill the Wyoming Cutt Slam. He added that he’d recently talked to two guys who wanted to prove some obscure point by getting all four cutthroats in the space of twenty-four hours. He said he probably could have managed it, but begged off because, “Guidin’ people in that much of a hurry didn’t sound like fun.”

We were on one of those trips that are left open-ended precisely to make room for this kind of mission creep, so we thought we’d check out this stream and then continue south over the pass to more cutthroat water. If nothing else, one of the creeks over there was supposed to hold Bonnevilles, a rare strain of cutthroat neither of us had ever knowingly caught.

Ken’s directions matched the map, and we easily found the stream and the dirt road that followed it up a narrow, unpopulated valley. This was an ordinary little watershed with no snow-capped peaks suitable for real estate with expensive views and slopes too low for a ski area. There’d been some firewood cutting but no logging, some open-range grazing but no signs of actual ranching. The work that was done here over the years had been marginal and low-paying, and like much of the West, the place now had that used and abandoned
look that made it seem more feral than truly wild. At uneven intervals we crossed small tributaries with names like Blind Mule Creek and Dead Horse Creek that recalled those older, harder times.

This was a gentle valley with a low but steady gradient, and the stream was a uniform riffle lacking the obvious pools, plunges and glides of recognizable trout water. It didn’t look all that inviting—or at least didn’t look like a photo from a daydream-inducing coffee table book—so we drove on up the road at a speed that made the ticking of gravel in the wheel wells sound like corn popping. It was a warm, windless summer day. We had the windows down and a plume of dust hung behind us like a wake. It was fifty miles to the pass. If we saw water we wanted to fish, we’d stop. Otherwise we’d go on over the top and look at the creeks on the other side. We were four days, two streams and dozens of trout into the trip; intoxicated by movement and comfortable in the faith that farther up the road there’d be something better.

At about the forty-mile mark, we came to a Forest Service sign saying that the two bridges up ahead were under repair and the pass was closed. “Shit,” Doug said. “Why didn’t they tell us that down at the mouth of the valley?”

Well, probably because this was a hundred and some miles of dirt road that went nowhere in particular except south and didn’t see a lot of through traffic. Since we left pavement, we’d seen exactly one other vehicle: a pickup with another pair of blue heelers in back. When we passed on the narrow road, the dogs barked at us ferociously as the driver touched a finger to the bill of his cap in a neighborly way.

By this time we’d decided that the stream we’d been following could qualify as the longest continuous riffle in North America and we didn’t much like the looks of it. It was said to hold the original Snake River cutthroats that were indigenous to the drainage, but with no apparent holding water, we thought it could only support a
struggling population of small native fish. That might account for the lack of traffic and the fact that we hadn’t seen a single fisherman in forty miles.

Doug pulled in at the first two-track we came to and parked in a grove of spruce trees along the stream. The slope had been gradual, but we’d slowly passed from a cottonwood and juniper bottom into open coniferous woods where the air had the tang of altitude. This was the point you inevitably reach on an aimless trip that’s either a dead end or the cusp of a breakthrough: time to stop, get out of the truck and think things over.

But of course this wasn’t a complicated equation. We couldn’t get over the pass and it was too late in the day to turn back. We’d stopped at a place that would do well enough for a quick overnight, so we decided we’d work out our next move in the morning. In the meantime, we had two hours of daylight left and decided we might as well spend half of it fishing before we came back and pitched camp.

Working out where to put a dry fly in what appears to be a bank-to-bank riffle is an exercise in attentiveness. It all looks more or less the same at first, but only because you’re not looking closely enough. So you make a few tentative casts, testing the drift and the speed of the current, which is invariably either faster or slower than it looks. You’re warming up, idly dribbling the ball while you wait for the juju to kick in. There may or may not be any trout in here, but if there are, you know they’ll be tucked in whatever dead water they can find, waiting to dart into the current to grab passing insects. Riffles aren’t typically good holding or wintering water, but they
are
the oxygen-dissolving, insect-generating engine of any trout stream. If nothing else, this thing amounted to a fifty-mile-long bug factory.

So your dry fly bobs along at speed on what appears to be a monotonous washboard surface, only to stall momentarily in miniature slicks or pressure waves. Sometimes you’re still in the process of registering that this has happened when the fly simply vanishes.
Maybe it went down in a rise that was indistinguishable from all the other moving bumps of current, or maybe it was sucked under by errant drag on your leader. The early-evening light is simultaneously dull and shiny, so it’s hard to be sure, but the fly you’re watching is suddenly not there and you instinctively tighten up.

My first trout seemed to come out of nowhere. It was an eight-inch cutthroat: nothing to write home about, but a fish nonetheless and a well-fed, muscular little guy at that. When I cradled him in the water to remove the hook, he felt as round, hard and slick as a bratwurst covered in wet silk.

My second fish
didn’t
seem to come out of nowhere. I was bearing down now, with that sense familiar to fishermen that tomorrow may be another day, but in the present time and place, this is your only chance to get it right. I was picking out the spots where the current seemed to suggest divots in the bottom large enough to shelter a trout, and after a dozen more casts my fly was quietly sucked into one. It was another fat eight-incher and I wondered if this is what Ken had meant. If so, I couldn’t argue. As a small-stream fisherman with modest expectations and a weakness for wild cutthroats, I might also describe a mountain creek full of fat eight-inchers as “good.”

Doug passed me on the bank heading upstream and we compared notes. He’d done about the same—a couple of small trout—but he was into it now, too, and so didn’t stop to chat.

A little farther on I cast to the kind of spot you could miss from any distance in the confusion of chop, but up close I could see a boil of current indicating a bigger submerged rock. Behind it was a jumpy slick large enough to hold a football, and when I put a cast over this, I saw the head and shoulders of a trout roll downstream as he took the fly. The motion was mercurial in the low, chromy light, but there was unmistakable life and purpose in it.

I set up on a heavier fish that pulled the slack line from my left hand and then took more off the reel as it ran down and across the
current. I’d been so convinced that there wouldn’t be any big fish in here that for a second I wondered if I’d foul-hooked an otter, but I was walking it downstream and playing it back to my side of the creek and there was just no way this wasn’t a trout. By the time I landed it, Doug was standing beside me. I don’t remember if I called to him or if he just saw the bend in the rod and came down to see what I had.

It was a beautiful cutthroat no less than sixteen inches long and so deep-bodied I couldn’t get my hand around it. Doug said, “Well look at that.”

We fished late and didn’t get camp set up before dark, so we ended up doing the last few chores by the uncertain light of headlamps. Finding a place to pitch your tent is more time-consuming than tossing your duffel on the bed in a hotel room. At a bare minimum, you want a level patch with no rocks or exposed roots that’s in soil soft enough to sink a tent peg and that’s not under any of the leaning dead trees loggers call “widow makers.” But beyond that there’s also some seemingly pointless pacing and circling reminiscent of a dog looking for a place to lie down. As any golden retriever could tell you, you’re not after perfection, just the kind of down-home feng shui that avoids disharmony.

By the time we were fed and watching the fire from folding chairs, the air had turned cold and the sky was full of stars. It was only then that I settled into the relief every traveler feels at having temporarily lit somewhere.

The next morning was clear and frosty, and we lingered over breakfast and a second pot of coffee until the day’s busyness began among the pine squirrels, chickadees and caddis flies. When things seemed right, we got in where we’d left off the night before and waded upstream in ankle-deep water, flicking short, busy casts. In morning sun the clear water was a moving window. Strictly speaking, the stream was still a continuous riffle, but I could now see tubs, channels and potholes that stood out clearly where the rocky bottom
went from mottled grayish brown to the faint olive cast that betrays depth. I’d spot the color first and only then notice the corrugated nervousness of the current where it stalled into what passed for holding water. On a cast with the right upstream mend, a dry fly would dance down into this bumpy slick and seem to downshift. A second or two later, as often as not, a nice cutthroat would roll on it in an unhurried, businesslike way and I’d come up tight, still surprised after all these years at the sudden live weight of a fish.

We worked upstream at a good clip. There were long stretches of shallow, fishless water—calf-deep, fast and wobbly with loose cobbles—but we stayed in the river for fear of missing even one little slick where a trout might be hiding. The biggest fish were lying in the best-looking spots as if this were an illustration in a book by an expert fisherman. I was feeling like a pretty handy sport, not only catching trout, but wading past the barren water and calling my shots: skipper behind that little rock; fat fifteen-incher at the head of that slick. Unexamined happiness is the purest kind, but it didn’t sully the experience to think that although there are plenty of things I’d change about my life given the chance, this wasn’t one of them. During a break for lunch Doug and I admitted that we were both embarrassed at having almost driven right by all this and grateful for the dumb luck that had made us stop.

I’m not saying where this stream was for the usual obvious reasons, but I
will
say that the great state of Wyoming has more than its fair share of these small, surprisingly good trout streams that fall outside the boundaries of efficient itineraries and are therefore largely ignored or overlooked. This is the predictable result of 97,812 square miles with a population roughly one sixth that of Denver and with the pressure from visiting fishermen concentrated along well-worn tourist routes where hospitality is a profession. It’s not that the folks out in the countryside are standoffish, but a friend once said that every time I go to Wyoming the population of liberals temporarily doubles
and that doesn’t always go unnoticed. But then I go there to fish, not to discuss politics.

We fished for two days, covering a sweet spot that stretched five miles upstream from camp and ended abruptly where a tributary emptied into a good run. This is where Doug landed two trout as perfectly matched as bookends, both about eighteen inches long. These were the two biggest cutthroats we landed, but there had been some others that came close. Above that confluence pool, both forks were too small to be much more than nursery water, but we waded up both just to make sure. At the highest point I heard a distant piping sound that might have been an unfamiliar bird or the backup horn on a bulldozer working on the bridges upstream. I stopped to listen but lost it in the white nose of running water.