The river combined in a single channel, where the volume of water produced a steady riffle of two or three feet in depth. I started where it tailed out and worked my way up to where slick water fell off into the rapids. The mayflies were not in great numbers but they were carried down this slick and over the lip into the riffle. My staring magnified their plight into postcards of Niagara Falls, a bit of sympathetic fancy canceled by the sight of swirls in the first fast water. I cast my fly straight into this activity and instantly hooked a good rainbow. It must have been the long winter’s wait or the knowledge that the day could end at any minute, but I desperately wanted to land this fish. I backed down out of the fast water while the fish ran and jumped, then I sort of cruised him into the shallows and got a hand on him. He was a brilliant-looking fish, and I thought I could detect distress in his eyes as he looked, gulping, out into midair. I slipped the barbless hook out and eased him back into the shallows. Two sharp angles and he was gone in deep green water.
It started to cloud up and grow blustery. The temperature plummeted. I went back to my truck, stripped off my waders, put up my gear and started home, passing the old black tires hung on fenceposts with messages painted on them about cafes and no hunting. I kept thinking that the sort of sporadic hatch that had begun to occur was perfect for leisurely dry-fly fishing, if only the weather had held. By the time I got to the house it was winter again and I was trying to look up that dun, concluding for all the good it would do me that it was Ephemerella compar. Even as I write this, I visualize a trout scholar in pince-nez rising up out of a Livingston spring creek to correct my findings.
When you have stopped work to go fishing and then been weathered out, your sense of idleness knows no bounds. You wander around the house and watch the sky from various windows. From my bedroom I could see great gusts of snow, big plumes and curtains marching across the pasture. Did I really catch a rainbow on a dry-fly this morning?
The next day broke off still and sunny, and spring was sucking that snow up and taking it to Yucatán. At the post office I ran into a friend of mine who’d seen a young male gyrfalcon — a gyrfalcon! — hunting partridges on my place. Within an hour I was standing with my fly rod in the middle of a bunch of loose horses, looking off a bank into a deep, green-black pool where swam a number of hog rainbows. I had been there before, of course, and you couldn’t approach this spot except to stand below where the slow-moving pool tailed out rather rapidly. The trouble was you had to stay far enough away from the pool that it was hard to keep your line off the tailwater, which otherwise produced instantaneous drag. You needed a seven-foot rod to make the cast and a twenty-foot rod to handle the slack. They hadn’t built this model yet; it would need to be a two-piece rod with a spring-loaded hinge driven by a cartridge in the handle, further equipped with a flash suppressor. Many of us had been to this pool to learn why the rainbows had grown to be hogs who would never be dragged onto a gravel bar. They were going to stay where they were, with their backs up and their bellies down, eating whenever they felt like it. I had to try it anyway and floated one up onto the pool. I got a drag-free drift of around three-eighths of an inch and then went looking for another spot.
Geese and mallards flew up ahead of me as I waded, circling for altitude in the high bare tops of the cottonwoods. The air was so still and transparent you could hear everything. When the mallards circled over my head, their wingtips touched in a tense flutter and made a popping sound.
In a little back eddy, caddises were being carried down a line of three feeding fish. I arranged for my fly to be among them and got a drift I couldn’t begin to improve upon, so a nice brown sucked it down. I moved up the edge of the bar to other feeding fish. The geese on the bar who’d been ignoring me now began to watch and pace around. I noted one of the fish was of good size and feeding in a steady rhythm. I made a kind of measuring cast from my knees. The geese were getting more nervous. I made a final cast and it dropped right in the slot and started floating back to the good fish. I looked over to see what the geese were doing. The trout grabbed the fly. I looked back and missed the strike. I delivered an oath. The geese ran awkwardly into graceful flight and banked on around to the north.
This was a wonderful time to find yourself astream. You didn’t bump into experts. You didn’t bump into anybody. You could own this place in your thoughts as completely as a Hudson Bay trapper. The strangely human killdeer were all over the place, human in that their breeding activities were accompanied by screaming fights and continuous loud bickering. When they came in for a landing, their wings set in a quiet glide while their legs ran frantically in midair. The trees in the slower bends were in a state of pickup-sticks destruction from the activity of beavers. A kingfisher flew over my head with a trout hanging from its bill. I came around a bend without alerting three more geese, floating in a backwater, sound asleep with their heads under their wings. I decided not to wake them. I ended my day right there. When I drove up out of the river bottom in my car, I looked back to see a blue heron fishing the back eddy where I’d just caught a trout. On the radio were predictions of high temperatures and I knew what that low-country meltoff would mean to my days on the river.
Spring was here and it was hot. In one day it shot up to the eighties. I could feel the purling melt coming out from under the snowbanks. Runoff was going to drop me in midstride.
I drove away from the places I thought would get the first dirty water, away from the disturbed ground. At daybreak out on the interstate I found myself in a formation of Montana Pioneers driving Model-Ts. This piquancy didn’t hold me up long and I soon made my way to a wonderful little district where various grasses, burgeoning brush, wildflowers, and blue-green strips of fragrant sage had all somehow got the news that spring had sprung. The cover was so deep in places that deer moving through it revealed only their ears, which flipped up and disappeared. An old pry bar lay lost in the grass, polished smooth by use. Ranchers never had the help they needed and they were all masters of prying. These bars had the poetry of any old tool, whether a dental instrument, or old greasy hammers, or screwdrivers around a man’s workshop, especially when the tool owner is not in immediate evidence, or is dead.
The river whispered past this spot in a kind of secretive hurry. I got in and waded upstream, then sat on a small logjam to tie on a fly. The logs under me groaned with the movement of current. I was suddenly so extremely happy, the sight of this water was throwing me into such a rapturous state, that I began to wonder what it could mean. I sometimes wondered if there wasn’t something misanthropic in this passion for solitude.
I put my thermometer into the river, knowing already it was going to come out in the forties. Taking the river’s temperature is like taking your own temperature, with all the drama of the secret darkness of the interior of your mouth; you wait and wait and try to wait long enough. Is it 98.6 or am I right in thinking I don’t feel too good? The water was 49 degrees, fairly acceptable for now.
Across from my seat was an old cabin. These old structures along Montana trout rivers are part of their provenance, part of what comes back to you, like the wooded elevations that shape and bend and push and pull each river so that as you try to re-create one in your mind the next winter, there is a point where you get lost, always an oxbow or meander where a certain memory whiteout occurs. I am always anxious to return to such a stretch and rescue it from amnesia.