Lines on the Water (8 page)

Then, as his bug lighted on the surface, he felt his line tighten and his rod began to bow.

He knew at once he had a big fish on. He didn’t know then that fish would actually move out of a pool. He had not much idea about how strong an Atlantic salmon that has spent four years in the sea could be.

The salmon might have sensed this about him. For a moment it didn’t do anything. It just sulked a bit, as he stood almost on top of it. And then he felt the reel begin to sing—
ZZzzzzZZZ
—and the fish began to move. More and more line went out, far into his backing. The day was clear, and the singing of the reel seemed to testify the beginning of a very private struggle. Then a fish jumped at the turn.

Another fish, he thought. And he realized in amazement that it was his fish. So trying to study the water beneath his feet, he began to move downriver towards it, trying to jump from rock to rock along the shore, reeling line in as he went. At times almost running. He and the fish seemed to be united not only in this struggle but in the fact that they were the only two creatures alive on this river.

Then he slipped and went down, and almost lost his rod. He got to his feet, and thought the fish was gone, only to suddenly feel the line tighten, the rod bow, and his line being taken out again.

He decided it was best to wade right across the river, to the other bank, for the fish had gone about a small bend on
that side. At one point he found himself in water up to his chest and barely able to stay up.

The fish jumped again, but he managed to reach the other side; his rod, however, jutted out from a group of tangled thorns. And he knew there was positively no way he would be able to
beach
the fish from the side he was on. He was now about thirty feet from the fish, and holding it quite well, so he again started to cross the river—only to find, for some reason, that the fish started upriver when he did. When this happened his line was tangled around himself.

Here in water up to his waist, he had to hold the rod over his head, and turn counter-clockwise to free himself. When he got everything straightened out, the fish was still on.

He followed the fish back upriver, and came to a small beach, jutting a foot or so out from the bushes. The fish wasn’t in a pool and there were rocks everywhere. At any given second he might snap his leader on a rock.

The fish was showing its back as it dug deep into its reserve and made its way out to the middle of the river, swirling the water away from it.

And then it began to run a little and turn on its stomach. So he knew it was spent. Once its nose was turned into shore, he backed right up against the side of the bushes and brought it in on a small landing.

He was exhausted. He was soaking and his arms ached. The fish was a male close to fifteen pounds. He had hooked in on a small bug at the lower end of the pool in about two and a half feet of water. There was still sea lice on it, and it had probably just come into the pool before he did. Perhaps as he had started his two-hour long trek down from Clearwater to Island Pool, it was making its way up past those rocks where he had played the life from it.

The day was starting to cloud, the water looked darker, and there was still a long way to go. The trees on either side of the river were silent, and thrust out to the sky in that self-absorbed way trees always have. He made his way, with his fish, downriver towards some place called White Birch he had not been to before. He carried the fish in one hand, the rod in the other, and tried to navigate the slippery stones, or along the paths that were overgrown with grass and alders.

He came to White Birch in the evening. The no-see-ums were at his hands and face, and every time he stopped mosquitoes flitted above him. But the pool, with its rock in the middle and its fine flow of dark water on the far side, was too inviting. He had to give it a try. Besides, he could easily cast and beach a fish here he decided.

He made a bed for his fish and walked up to the top of the pool and looked it over. It was an exceptionally fine pool.

Here you cast out to the far side letting your fly move towards the boulder that sits in the middle. The fish will lie behind that boulder, or just in front, but they will also lie between the boulder and the far cliff, nearer the top of the pool where the water enters the pool in a darkish-brown run.

It was prime time for fishing now and on the third cast he hooked a large grilse, just on the outside of the rock. The grilse swallowed the bug and jumped three times in succession, tired, and he landed it after a fifteen-minute fight. Then, with two fish, a rod, and no place to put them, he started up the hill, trying to find the path.

He looked here and there and began to cut up the side of the hill, and realized that though it may still be off-white on the late-evening water, it was already dark in the deep Sevogle wood.

It is a steep hill, the south branch of the Sevogle is a hard river to reach at any time, and as he kept going he felt he had missed the path, but he was also confident that he would find it again. Carrying two fish and a rod, and trying to get over windfalls as high as his waist or chest, with soaking wet jeans and slippery sneakers, was a hard enough venture. But he kept faith that off to his upper right was the old logging road that would walk him back to his car.

At certain points along the rise of the hill, it plateaus out for a few feet just to rise again. Here all kinds of small animals,
insects and plant life live out their lives in the warm summer air; squirrels and partridge, chipmunks and chickadees, constantly going about their business without ever caring or bothering about ours, and never understanding why we with chainsaws or oil and gas would bother them.

Trying to get up and down these hills is hard enough, but it’s always worse when you don’t have a bag to store your fish—and have no hands to keep the branches from your face. Your face can get torn up fairly badly if you aren’t careful.

At one of these plateaus he stopped and looked about. It was boggy off to his right, but he felt the road had to be in that direction. Only the sky held a shaft of fading light. The wood itself was dark. He knew he didn’t want to twist an ankle in here.

He didn’t get too many feet until he came to a giant windfall just over waist high. He managed to sit upon it, looking back towards the direction he had come in, still hearing the river faintly, and heaved himself over it. It was a three-foot drop on the other side into a dark undergrowth. And he fell headlong into it, fish and rod in hand, onto the stomach of a giant black bear.

“It gave me a fright,” he said.

The bear had crawled up in there to die some time that spring, far away from the tracks of man, thinking never to be found.

Later, and in almost ink dark, Peter made it out to the logging road, both fish in tow, and walked the eight miles back to his car.

We ran the Norwest with canoe twice my first summer. We usually ran the river after a rain, and with the water dropping. With the water dropping the fish would take, the grassy banks seemed more fertile, and the runoffs propelled twigs and leaves into the water. But the more the water dropped, the more it cleared. By mid-morning the sky would be hot enough, tempered with small distant clouds. The flies were ferocious, and made me think of writing a song to them. There is a song called “The Little Blackfly.” There is also a poem about blackflies by Alden Nowlan. Nowlan describes hating them so much it almost turns to love.

On my first canoe trip I hooked a grilse above Wilson’s Pool on a Red Butt Butterfly. I was with Fred Irving. He pointed to a small run and said, “Throw your fly there.”

I did—and
bang
.

But I lost it because I was overanxious. That is, I tried to pull the fish into shore and turned away from it when it jumped. It wasn’t that well hooked but hooked well enough to land if I’d had the patience and experience. When the line went slack I felt for the first time that inescapable loss mixed
with old and ancient desire. Tolstoy’s character Dolohov in
War and Peace
once said about bear hunting: “Sure, everyone’s afraid of a bear—but once you set eyes on him your only fear is that he’ll get away!”

Everyone might feel empathy for the salmon as well, but when you hook one you have this desire to never lose it.

Later that month Peter and I took a tent with us. We camped halfway along the Norwest run, at Cedar Pool, and pitched a tent in the dark. We were both sunburnt and tired. We had been on the river many days at that time. I had even had a fish or two to show for it. We cooked up supper in silence and crawled into the tent, assuring ourselves that the first light would wake us, and we’d be in the pool before anyone else. Our rods were ready to go as we drifted off to sleep.

We were awakened by shouts of excitement.

We sleepily got up and went outside. Already the morning was warm, and three people were in the pool, with two more canoes parked on either side of our tent. A woman of about forty-five had a fish on, and was playing it at the lower part of the pool. The other two people had already taken fish, which rested in the fish bed they had made. One was a salmon about ten pounds, the other a grilse. The woman had watched the fish come for the fly once, rested it, and threw back to it again.

They picked up their fish and congratulated each other. Then nodding to us, packing their fish in the canoes, they headed downriver.

“Nice morning,” Peter managed.

The pool was dead after that, even though we had it all to ourselves. And we packed up and went back up in the afternoon. We came to a camp that overlooked the river. It flowed below us, as Peter sat on an old couch and spoke to me about his working the pool. It would be better to throw a line as close to the bank as possible. He pointed to a rip, three-quarters of the way down, and told me he had seen a fish there. I could see nothing, though I looked for ten minutes.

As he spoke, unknown to him, a mouse scampered out of the couch and climbed up on his shoulder, listening to his story.

Later he went down and crossed the river, and began to fish through. I had a good vantage point where I could see how his fly moved over every inch of water. He threw it exactly where he wanted. Suddenly in that dark rip, three-quarters of the way through the pool, he hooked a fish.

“I figured it was there,” he said.

For the next month or so I travelled miles of water, and seemed to get worse every time I went out. Nothing worked to my advantage, because I couldn’t use my left hand effectively
enough to strip line, and when I cast the line itself would bunch up at the first eye of the rod. My left hand was my great deterrent. I decided it might be better if I cut it off. I seriously thought about it on more than one occasion those first few summers. I had a good knife, and though I never actually did cut my hand off, my left hand got in the way so much I had on more than one occasion given myself some serious injuries. For instance, I couldn’t open a door with my left hand, or button a shirt button, or pick up a cup of coffee. So it was certainly not earning its keep. About the only thing it was good for was getting my line tangled up in it.

Once as a boy I had cut my left hand to the bone, trying to build a camp. I went to the first house I came to, looking for first aid. A nice lady opened the door, looked at me, shrieked, slammed the door and locked it.

“It’s only a little blood—scaredy cat,” I managed. I went about the windows of the house, holding my hand out, touching the panes of glass, and smearing all her windows with blood in an effort to show her how harmless I was. Sometimes I would reach a certain window before she came into that room, always with a slight acrimonious smile on my face.

Finally I had to make my way home alone.

At any rate, I left the hand exactly where it was for the time being, dangling down somewhere, and got on without it. I
tried to strip line leaving it in the water, but that was as ineffective as anything else. Once doing this I picked up the line, the fly came catapulting back and hit me in the eye. So I walked about with a black eye for three days.

“How did you get the black eye?”

“Fishing.”

“Sure. Fishing. How in God’s name can you get a black eye fishing?”

“You have to work at it, but it can be done,” I maintained.

But then, that was my arm. I could write a book about my feet. Often at night, back home, far from the river, I would have to soak my left foot in a tub to get it moving again for the next day. I would bend over and slap at my toes to see if they still worked. I would pry them apart, try to wiggle them. I have the problem of instant arthritis, and sometimes coming out of a pool I would sit on the bank for an hour because my left foot was so sore. Once or twice I would go crawling about on the beach as if I had been shot at by a sniper and was trying to find cover.

So that play-acting with Mr. Simms about my left foot aching came back to haunt me.

Everyone has their problems and this was, and is, mine. I am making no more of it than a man of conscience or integrity should. But I will never lessen the effect upon me over the
years. I will never say that it didn’t affect me to be polite to those who have no knowledge of its effect. I will only say I was born with it, and can do nothing about it. Nor would I change it now, even if I could. It is not bragging when I say that for me to have two good arms seems entirely like cheating.

As I grew older I became more and more determined to do whatever I wanted to do and now look upon it as an obligatory challenge. And an obligatory challenge means exactly what it implies: You suffer the aches and pains and ridicule along the way.

If I have no balance, which is dangerous when you are crossing a swift river in waders, I would forgo the waders. I would cross the river anyway. People who know me have seen me do this time and again, without any comment about it. Besides, I rationalized that water was only cold in early June—by mid-June I didn’t need them. I’ve gone down in waders before—once when I was crossing the Norwest Miramichi alone. All of a sudden my feet were bobbing along like buoys and my head was slapping the rocks.