To reach my pool, I had to wade across the riffle above the logjam and then work my way around a humongous dead cow inflated to a height of five feet at the ribcage. The smell was overpowering but I needed to get to that pool. A mule deer doe was back in the trees watching me with her twin yearling fawns. One was already getting little velvet antlers.
For some reason I was thinking how many angry people, angry faces, you saw in these romantic landscapes, as though the dream had backfired in isolation. There were the enraged visages behind pickup truck windshields with rifles in the back window at all seasons of the year. I remembered an old rancher telling me about a rape that had just occurred in Gardiner, and in his eyes was the most extraordinary mixture of lust and rage I have ever seen. He lived off by himself in a beautiful canyon and this was the sort of thing he came up with. A friend of mine from the Midwest looked at the chairs in a restaurant covered with all the local cattle brands and cried out in despair, “Why are these people always tooling everything?” The pleasures of being seduced by the daily flux of the masses were not available. All the information about the world had failed to produce the feeling of the global village; the information had only exaggerated the feeling of isolation. I had in my own heart the usual modicum of loneliness, annoyance, and desire for revenge, but it never seemed to make it to the river. Isolation always held out the opportunity of solitude: the rivers kept coming down from the hills.
Having reached my pool, having forded the vast stench of the cow, I was rewarded with a sparse hatch of sulfur mayflies with mottled gray wings. I caught three nice browns in a row before it shut off. I knew this would happen. A man once told me, after I’d asked when you could assume a horse would ground-tie and you could go off and leave him knowing he’d be there when you got back: “The horse will tell you.” When I asked an old man in Alabama how he knew a dog was staunch enough to break it to stand to shot, he said: “The dog will tell you.” There are times for every angler when he catches fish because the fish told him he could, and times when the trout announce they are through for the day.
Two of the most interesting fish of the next little while were ones I couldn’t catch. One was on the far edge of a current that ran alongside a log. The trout was making a slow porpoising rise. I managed to reach him and he managed to rise, but drag got the fly and carried it away an instant before he took. The next fish, another steady feeder, rose to a Light Cahill. The dinner bell at a nearby ranch house rang sharply. I looked up, the fish struck, and I missed it.
I caught a nice rainbow by accident, which is the river’s way of telling you that you’ve been misreading it. And then thunder and lightning commenced. I got out of the river. Bolting rain foretold the flood. I went up and sat under the trunk lid of my car, quite comfortably, and ate my lunch, setting a Granny Smith apple on the spare tire. The thermos of coffee seemed a boon almost comparable to the oranges we kept on ice during the hot early weeks of bird season. The rain steadied down and I could watch two or three bends of the river and eat in a state of deep contentment. I didn’t know of a better feeling than to be fishing and having enough time; you weren’t so pressured that if you got a bad bank you couldn’t wait until the good bank turned your way and the riffles were in the right corners. The meal next to a stream was transforming, too, so that in addition to the magic apple there was the magic peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
The rain stopped and I went down to where an irrigation ditch took out along a rip-rapped bank. I had a very nice Honduran cigar to smoke while I watched a heron fish the shallows. The air was still. When I puffed a great cloud of smoke and it drifted across the little river, I imagined it was the ghost of my grandfather, who loved to fish. The ghost glided past the heron, who politely ignored him.
I just knew something was going on. There was a readiness; the rain had barely withdrawn. The sky looked so heavy you felt if you scratched it you’d drown. This was the storm that would loosen the mountain snows, and the glistening fingers of this small river system would turn as brown as a farmer’s hand. Time, in its most famous configuration, was running out. This could be my last day on the stream for a good while. Having broken out of the pattern of home life and work, you might as well keep going.
I crawled down into a canyon made by the river. It was not far from where I had been fishing and the canyon was not that deep. But I needed both hands to make the descent, lowering myself from projecting roots and points of rock, and I had to throw the rod down in front of me because there was no good way to carry it. I found myself between tall cream-and-gray rock walls. The river flowed straight into dissolved chimneys, rock scours, solution holes and fanciful stone bridges.
The sky overhead was reduced to a narrow band over which the storm had re-formed. More killdeer conducted their crazed, weeping, wing-dragging drama around my feet. The storm became ugly and I looked all around the bottom of the small canyon for a safe place to be. Lightning jumped close overhead with a roaring crack. The rain poured down, periodically lit up by the lightning. What little I knew about electricity made me think that bushes were a poor connection, so I burrowed into a thick clump of laurels, became mighty small, and studied the laureclass="underline" round, serrated leaf, brownish yellow bark, a kind of silvery brightness from afar. It had become very gloomy. By looking at the dark mouths of the caves in the far canyon wall, I could monitor the heaviness of the rain while the steady rattle on the hood of my parka filled in the blanks. I spotted a lightning-killed tree at about my level on the far side. The river had seemed so cheerful and full of green-blue pools. Now it was all pounded white by rain and only the darker V’s of current indicated that it was anything but standing water.
Then the air pressure lightened. The dark sky broke wide open in blue. An owl crossed the river, avoiding the return of light. The rain stopped and the surface of river was miraculously refinished as a trout stream. I looked at the drops of water hanging from my fly rod. I thought of the windows of the trout opening onto a new world and how appropriate it would be if one of them could see my fly.
The standing water along roadsides in spring is a wonderful thing. On the way home, I saw a flight of northern shoveler ducks, eccentric creatures in mahogany and green, and off in a pasture stock pond, teal flew and circled like butterflies unable to decide whether to land. I wondered what it was about the edges of things that is so vital, the edges of habitat, the edges of seasons, always in the form of an advent. Spring in Montana is a kind off pandemonium of release. Certainly there are more sophisticated ways of taking it in than mine. But going afield with my fishing rod seemed not so intrusive, and the ceremony helped, quickening my memory back through an entire life spent fishing. Besides, like “military intelligence” and “airline cuisine,” “sophisticated angler” is an oxymoron. And if it wasn’t, it would be nothing to strive for. Angling is where the child, if not the infant, gets to go on living.
It was ten minutes to five. There was absolutely no wind. I could see the corners of a few irrigation dams sticking up out of the ditches. The cottonwoods were in a blush of green. I was ready for high water.
The Big Hole
I FISH ALL THE TIME when I’m at home, so when I get a chance to go on a vacation, I make sure to get in plenty of fishing. I live in south-central Montana, and because of drought and fires this year it resembles one of the man-made hells such as the Los Angeles basin. I make a trip every summer to fish the Big Hole River, and this year, knowing it was somewhat out of the range of smoke and ash and heat, I particularly looked forward to it. My friends Craig and Peggy Fellin have a small fishing lodge, with a capacity of eight, and I was perhaps their most regular annual guest.