No expression crossed his face as I fought and landed a very hardy eight-pounder fresh from the sea. I released the fish and stood up, enormously pleased with everything. Orri made a forward motion with the back of his hand. “Back to work. This is not a vacation.”
Jack Hemingway joined us for a day. He was going from river to river and would continue to do so, he said, until every source of funds had dried up. Few people who were parachuted behind German lines in World War II would’ve thought to bring a fly rod, but Jack did. To this superficial observer he seemed a happy man. In any case, something contributed to giving a seventy-five-year-old the enthusiasm and energy of a boy. I kept thinking of Jack as “Bumby,” the infant of his father’s Moveable Feast, baby-sat by F. Puss, the cat, and imagining the tempestuous times in which he’d grown up in France among the century’s most evolved characters. Jack turned out great, and a real fisherman. He called his most recent birthday party The Son Also Rises. It was a pleasure to sit near one splendid river and talk about others with someone who had lived so fully for such a long time. We each have Gordon setters who are related to one another, so we tried to fathom their clownish and not entirely comprehensible personalities. Jack trained his on chukars in southeastern Washington; I trained mine on huns in Montana sagebrush; but we both could marvel at the cooperation we’d had from these grouse dogs. So many things you love to do: the best combination, we here decided, was hitting the Bulkley in British Columbia for steelhead at daybreak and sundown, and hunting roughed grouse through the day, with a little nap somewhere in between. But now we were in Iceland. How good. How utterly good.
My companions, David, Bo, and Tarquin, were well acquainted with the Selá and went to each day’s fishing with a purpose. I went forth rather more uncertainly with my tiny map of the river. Bo usually sent me off with a small disquisition about the nature of my beat, and then I was on my own. It is surprising how much a steady current of the unknown adds to the excitement of angling. One knows what salmon-holding water looks like, generally. But “generally” doesn’t get it. In streambed hydrology the fabulous secrets known to the fish are revealed to us only by experience. On the Selá I fished with continuous puzzlement but a kind of excitement that may not survive familiarity. I walked among small bands of sheep very unlike the bland animals of my home country. These are more wild, more alert, and probably haven’t had the brains bred out of them in the genetic search of some economic edge like thicker wool or leaner mutton. I clambered down through a shattered granite slope among wildflowers and deep grass to a long run beneath a falls where the sparkling slicks and runs, ledges and boulders, were thrown before me like a complex hand laid down by a demonic bridge player. For a long moment, rod at my side, I was overcome by the richness of the possibilities and the sense that this opportunity could be wasted in the many beckoning but probably fishless runs.
There were wading maneuvers that enabled one to fish the pool which involved following rocky ridges out into the torrent and covering the water in a series of overlapping casts. I’d had good coaching on this from my companions, but a river, once you are out in it, has several kinds of sorcery that make you wonder if you are truly doing things as you should. Further, you cannot follow instructions very well, except to make a beginning, because it shuts off the faint pulse of intuition, the cutting for sign, the queer alertness that comes when you are fishing suitably. Coming to know water offers the prospect of crossing what Conrad called a “shadow line,” beyond which a profoundly satisfying sense of where you are, even what you are, enters your soul, and you begin to fish with such simplicity and doubtlessness that it is of little consequence if you fail to catch something.
I remember a conversation with Bo when we were in Argentina, the inevitable contention as to what makes a good fisherman. I think Bo had grown tired of anecdotes about effective fishermen, anglers on what the permit wizard Marshall Cutchin calls the “production end” of the sport. Perversely, I took the position that a good fishermen should be an effective catcher of fish, citing, as an analogy, the case of a man at a driven shoot who, though enjoying himself, never hit anything. Would we call him a great shot anyway? At this Bo politely folded his tent with the gracious comment, “I see I’m going to lose this one.” But actually I prefer his argument. My analogy would have held up if it had concerned hunting rather than shooting, where the feathered targets and other aspects of the malady obscure the very real differences. Shooting has more in common with golf than it does with hunting. There are great hunters who kill very little and great fishermen who never kill anything. And it’s a kind of greatness that not only doesn’t require recognition but one which recognition tends to discredit. A great fisherman should strive for equanimity in the face of achievement, and this cannot be trafficked. Probably all who write about fishing should be disqualified, except those who, like Walton, Haig-Brown, Kingsmill-Moore, Aksakov, Plunket-Greene, are celebrants. Most fishing writers have tried to show us how much smarter they are than everybody else, creating an atmosphere of argument and competitition.
So, having fished my way through the enchantments of perfectly clear Icelandic sea-bound water and the myriad puzzles of its movement among submerged boulders and right down to the tailout without so much as a pull, I retreated to the shore and took the spit of raised bottom out to the last position in the lower pool. Against the pale yellow of the slabrock in the tail, I could see two small salmon holding. They were at the end of a long cast, and to get a good mend it was necessary to make the cast and then immediately strip the slack for the mend. I covered these fish for a good while, several changes of fly, and failed to interest them. I reeled up and tried to decide if I should fish the run through again or go downstream. Leaving such good-looking water is never easy. As I looked at the two uncooperative grilse in the tailout, I noticed a dark shape slightly below them. I tried to recall if the bottom was discolored there but the shape moved up beside the grilse, which it dwarfed. This was a terrific salmon.
I went right back to what I had been doing on behalf of the smaller fish and had as much success. I was really feeling driven about this, not having seen a fish anything like this one all trip long. There was no shift of movement, no ardent elevation, much less a boil, when my fly crossed the fish’s window. I did note that the grilse were getting agitated, either to move up into deeper water or to simply depart this atmosphere of disturbance I’d created. Perhaps the big fish would go with them, too.
I decided to change the game entirely, before I wore out my welcome. I put on a 120-grain sink tip and tied a small, black Madeleine to the end of my leader. I made the same presentation, except that the whole ensemble was a couple of feet down, slap in front of the fish. He moved slightly. I had to assume something had happened, so I lifted the rod and concluded I was either into the fish or the bottom. My line bellied out downstream briefly, then tightened as the leader sheared upstream.
The salmon took a hard left onto the shallows where he made a fearful uproar. I told myself that I would never land this fish and I was right. Ploughing around in the rocks, flinging water everywhere, he liberated himself as decisively as he had taken my silly little fly.
But I was so jubilant because for a moment at least we had agreed about something! It was like a brief truce in a marriage, following which one partner says, “I’m out of here.”