Clearly, the Madison was too high. But I was going forward with this thing by hook or by crook because no other options were currently available to me. I started at the top of a long braided channel, casting the new fly into the flow and studying the point of my line as it came back to me. Except for some bottom tapping, nothing enlivened the drift of the nymph, and a good spell passed with my arm starting to tire from keeping the rod high and the line out of the water. I pushed through willows at the gravel bar and started down another channel with the same results. I felt guilty for giving the three useless flies to the youngster. I continued through three channels, two hours, and five fly changes: Peeking Caddis, Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear, Prince Nymph, Squirrel Tail, and finally, the venerable English Pheasant Tail Nymph, size #16. I tried to keep the leader slicing deep into the water without drag, while the end of the fly line eased along behind, telegraphing the movements of the nymph drifting below. No dice; the river was too high.
I drove on to a small tributary of the upper Missouri. It lay in a high country with such long winters and high moisture that it had a peatish, muskeglike feel in places. The word “creek” seemed right for it and suggested its crumbling banks and easy meanders. The moose and colorful reed birds correctly implied a brief, damp summer. But the amount of water in it was exactly right, not too low and not too high. Here we would have an encounter.
I walked the level, rich-smelling pastures where sandhill cranes croaked out their love to each other. In sloughs off the river, the eared grebe swam daintily and rolled for a dive like a tiny, crested loon. Where irrigation drawdown had exposed luscious, wormy mud, the elegant Wilson’s phalarope stepped carefully in search of a meal. Along the ranch road that passed a small impoundment of water, a fertilizer truck sailed through clouds of drifting mayflies. This country was swollen with a sparkling exhalation of life: wild grass and bright yellow patches of balsamroot flowers, water igniting in spring light. As I stood on a bank over the river, drawing the tapered line through the guides of my rod and looking off toward the wild hills of new sagebrush to the east, I realized evening was coming on and I had forgotten to eat.
The water curled around boulders with a bulge and moved in a nervous rush against my legs as I fished upstream. Here and there were small glassy panels of undisturbed water, and in one of these panels the end of the line stopped. I lifted the rod tip and felt the weight that to an angler is not just weight.
A rainbow trout ripped straight downstream and with the full strength of the river on his tail, prepared to defeat me and my tackle-fueled pyramid scheme. All the pressure of slow fishing rested on the solid shoulders of the fish and I stumbled and wallowed along behind, underplaying him, trying to remember if the leader had any wind knots and knowing that the tiny, barbless hook was but a faint connection. Still, I had managed to detain this fish, and for the moment we were living in each other’s lives.
When the trout held in a bar of current, his pink stripe shone up through the cold green water of springtime. And that’s where it stops in memory, so that such things may be accumulated and produce a renewable happiness. I led him into the slower water at the river’s edge, supported his cool belly in the water with my hand, and let him go.
The cafe in town had homemade soup, a jukebox, a telephone, and enough light in the booths to read the newspaper. It all seemed very complete.
Runoff
THE FISHING LIFE in Montana produces a particular apprehension that affects fishermen like a circadian rhythm: irrational dread of runoff. Early spring is capable of balmy days, and though the water is cold, the rivers are as benign as brooks in dreams, their pools and channels bright and perfect. But year-round experience shows that in short order they will be buried in snowmelt and irrigation waste, their babied low-water contours disappearing under a hoggish brown rush. Once runoff commences, the weather is often wonderful. The canopies of cottonwood will open like green umbrellas. But it can be a long wait before the rivers clear, a lull so long it seems possible to lose track of the whole idea of fishing.
In early spring, it is time to begin when friends say, “I know I should get out. I just haven’t had the time.” Here is the chance to steal a march, to exercise those fish whose memory has been dulled by the long winter. Crazy experiments can be undertaken, such as photographing a trout held in your left hand with a camera held in your right hand. Before-the-runoff is time out of time, the opportunity to steal fishing from an impudent year.
You know you’ve started early enough when the first landowner whose permission you ask stares at you with xenophobic eyes. His first thought is that you are there to pilfer or abuse his family. Let him examine your rod and scrutinize your eyes. Those of a fisherman are often not so good, so keep them moving. Spot a bit of natural history and describe it for him: “Isn’t that our first curlew?” Above all, don’t say that your dad and your granddad before you fished this same stretch at their pleasure. The landowner of today is unlikely to appreciate any surprising seniority; he’s having hell holding onto the place. Turn and walk calmly to your vehicle. Don’t back to it.
I wandered around the various forks of my home river separated by many miles of rolling hills. One would be running off, the other clear, depending upon the exact kind of country it drained. I clambered down slick or snowy rocks to dangle my thermometer in the water. But in the spring there was, even on a snowy day, a new quality of light, as if the light had acquired a palpable richness that trees, grass, and animals could also feel, a nutritious light coming through falling snow. There had come a turning point and now spring was more inexorable than the blizzards. I knew the minute this snow quit there would be someplace I could fish.
The next morning was still and everything was melting. I went to a small river out in the foothills north of where I live. This early in the year, when I drive down through a ranch yard or walk across a pasture toward the stream, my heart pounds for a glimpse of moving water. Yet moving water has, all my life, been the most constant passion I’ve had. It can be current or it can be tide, though it can’t be a lake and it can’t be mid-ocean, where I have spent baffled days and weeks more or less scratching my head. Today the river was in perfect shape, with enough water that most of its braided channels were full. There were geese on the banks and they talked at me in a state of high alarm as they lifted and replaced their feet with weird deliberation.
As soon as I got in the river, I felt how very cold the water was. Nevertheless, a few caddises skittered on top. An hour later, some big gray drakes came off like a heavenly message sent on coded insects, a message that there would indeed be dry-fly fishing on earth again. I’m always saying, though it’s hardly my idea, that the natural state of the universe is cold. But cold-blooded trout and cold-blooded mayflies are indications of the world’s retained heat, as is the angler, wading upstream in a cold spring wind in search of delight. Nevertheless, the day had opened a few F-stops at the aperture of sky, a promise and a beginning. I caught one of the mayflies and had a long look: about a No. 12; olive, brown, and gray the operative colors; two-part tail. I had something pretty close in my fly box, having rejected the Red Quill and the Quill Gordon as close but no cigar.
A couple of brilliant male mergansers passed overhead. They are hard on fish and despised, but their beauty is undisputed. In a short time they would migrate out of here, though I didn’t know where they went. They were referred to in Lewis and Clark’s journals as the “redheaded fishing duck,” a better name.