Mortality being what it is, any new river could be your last. This charmless notion runs very deep in us and can produce, besides the tightening around the mouth, a sweet and consoling inventory of all the previous rivers in your life. Finally, the fit is so perfect that it creates the illusion that there is but one river, a Platonic gem. There are more variations within any one good river than there are between a number of good rivers. I have been fortunate in that my life-river has a few steelhead in the lower reaches, as well as Oregon harvest trout and the sea-run browns of Ireland; Michigan brook trout in the deep bends, braided channels in hundred-mile sections from the Missouri headwaters trout theme park; and, here and there, the see-through pools of New Zealand and the dark bends of Tierra del Fuego rivers where sea-run browns roll so profoundly. Fire and water unlock the mind to a kind of mental zero gravity in which resemblances drift toward one another. The trout fisherman finishes his life with but one river.
All this is getting fairly far-fetched. Still, like the trout, we must find a way of moving through water with the least amount of displacement. The more we fish, the more weightlessly and quietly we move through a river and among its fish, and the more we resemble our own minds in the bliss of angling.
I came to a pool where a tree had fallen. The leaves were long gone, and its numerous branches tugged lightly in the slight current that flowed through the pool. A remarkable thing was happening: a good-size brown was jumping among the lowest branches, clearly knocking insects loose to eat. Every three or four minutes, it vaulted into the brush over its window and fell back into the water. I knew if I could get any kind of a float, I would have a solid taker. I looked at all the angles, and the only idea I could come up with was that it was a good time to light a cigar. In a moment, the excellent smoke of Honduras rose through the cottonwoods. I waited for a solution to form, but it never happened. In the end, I reared back and fired a size 14 Henryville Caddis into the brush. It wound around a twig and hung in midair. The trout didn’t jump at it suicidally, nor did I get the fly back.
Angling doesn’t turn on stunts. The steady movements of the habitual gatherer produce the best harvest. This of course must be in the service of some real stream knowledge. But some fishing, especially for sea-run fish, rewards a robotic capacity for replicating casts, piling up the repetitions until the strike is induced. I once thought that the biggest things a steelheader or Atlantic salmon fisherman can have — not counting waders and a stipend — were a big arm and a room-temperature IQ. Now I know better, having found out the hard way.
The river made an angular move to the south into the faraway smoky hills. In the bend some workmanlike drywall riprap reflected the Scandinavian local heritage. The usual western approach would be to roll an old car into the river at the point of erosion. Instead I found neatly laid cobbles that gave the impression the river was slowly revealing an archaeological enigma or at least the foundations of a church. But for the next forty yards, the clear water trembled deep and steady over a mottled bottom, and I took three hearty browns that flung themselves upon the bright surface of the run. When I was young and in the thrall of religion, I used to imagine various bands of angels, differentiated principally by size. The smallest were under a foot in height, silvery and rapid, and able to move in any plane at will; these three trout fitted neatly among those imaginary beings.
The river lay down at the bottom of a pencil-thin valley, and though I could see the wind in the treetops, I could barely feel it where I fished. The casts stretched out and probed without unwarranted shepherd’s crooks, blowbacks, or tippet puddles. I came to a favorite kind of stretch: twenty or thirty yards of very shallow riffle with a deep green slot on the outside curve. In this conformation you wade easily in thin, fast water and gain a bit of elevation on your quarry. The slot seemed to drain a large oxygenated area, and it was the only good holding water around. Where had I seen so much of this? The Trinity? The Little Deschutes? This, too, had slipped in the telescoping of rivers.
I couldn’t float the entire slot without lining part of it. So I covered the bottom with my first casts, doping out the drift as I did, preparing for the long float through the heart of the spot where I was sure to raise a fish. The slot was on the left-hand side of the river and contoured the bank, but the riffle drained at an angle to it. A long, straight cast would drag the fly in a hurry. When the first casts to the lower end failed to produce, I tried a reach cast to the right, got a much better drift, then covered the whole slot with a longer throw.
The Henryville Caddis had floated about two yards when a good brown appeared below it like a beam of butter-colored light. It tipped back, and we were tight. The fish held in the current even though my rod was bent into the cork, then shot out into the shallows for a wild aerial fight. I got it close three times but it managed to churn off through the shallow water. Finally I had it and turned its cold form upside down in my hand, checked its length against my rod and removed the hook. These, I decided, were the yellowest, prettiest stream-bred browns I’d ever seen. Then I turned it over and lowered it into the current. I love the feeling I get when the fish realize they’re free. There seems to be an amazed pause. Then they shoot out of your hand as though you could easily change your mind.
The afternoon wore on without specific event. The middle of a bright day can be as dull as it is timeless. Visibility is so perfect you forget it is seldom a confidence builder for trout. The little imperfections of the leader, the adamant crinkles standing up from the surface, are clear to both parties.
No sale.
But the shadows of afternoon seem to give meaning to the angler’s day on about the same scale that fall gives meaning to his year. As always, I could feel in the first hints of darkness a mutual alertness between me and the trout. This vague shadow the trout and I cross progresses from equinox to equinox. Our mutuality grows.
A ring opened on the surface. The fish refused my all-purpose Adams, and I moved on to an even-depth, even-speed stretch of slick water that deepened along the right-hand bank for no reason: there was no curve to it. The deep side was in shadow, a great, profound, detail-filled shadow that stood along the thin edge of brightness, the starry surface of moving water in late sun. At the head of this run, a plunge pool made a vertical curtain of bubbles in the right-hand corner. At that point, the turbulence narrowed away to a thread of current that could be seen for maybe twenty yards along the smooth run. Trout were working.
I cast to the lowest fish from my angle below and to the left. The evenness of the current gave me an ideal float, free of drag. In a moment of hubris I threw the size 14 Adams, covered the fish with successive casts for about five minutes while it fed above and below. I worked my way to the head of the pool, covering six other fish. Quickly, I tied on a Royal Wulff, hoping to shock them into submission. Not a single grab. The fish I covered retired until I went on, then resumed feeding. I was losing my light and had been casting in the middle of rising fish for the better part of an hour: head and tail rises with slight slurps. There were no spinners in the air, and the thread of the current took whatever the food was down through the center of the deep water beyond my vision. This was the first time all day that the river had asked me to figure something out, and it was becoming clear I wouldn’t catch a fish in this run unless I changed my ways. The selective trout is that uncompromising creature in whose spirit the angler attempts to read his own fortune.