To the east, according to his map, was a narrow northward extension of the lake, a passage five or six miles long which opened into a large bay with many islands, where a good-sized river entered, with the symbol for rapids. Lake trout were fine, beautiful fish, but most of his life he’d been a brook trout fisherman, and only occasionally a troller. For him the fish most familiar to his hand, least alien to touch, was the squaretail, the brookie, here called speckled trout or moucheté.
There were supposed to be large brook trout in the rivers hereabouts, especially in rapids. But up that long passage, into a place where no one else would be, miles away from anyone—did he really want to go there? Wouldn’t those islands loom strangely, and the bottom rise up to startle him? The far bay had a name, Baie Borne; and the river, Rivière Tâche—he didn’t know what they meant in French.
Along with his rods and tackle box he had, in his pack, a sandwich, some chocolate, two bottles of Laurentide Ale, and all of the usual outdoors stuff, such as a compass, Band-Aids, nylon line, aspirin, binoculars, safety pins, toilet paper, bug stuff—things gathered over the years. He didn’t consider himself fussy or overcautious in these matters. When he went out in a boat he wore a life vest, and when it might rain he wore a broad-brimmed felt hat and took along raingear. It was stupid to suffer the lack of any little thing. On his belt he wore his sheath knife and a pair of Sargent wire-cutter pliers.
He was drifting toward the entrance to the northern passage. He had a full three-gallon tank of gas. Why not go there? Because he was here in northern Quebec in some ridiculous way without permission, and because, for all his years and his knowledge of the water and the woods, there was still within him a small child afraid of the deep and the dark.
In his life he’d never jumped into new things, dangerous things; he’d crept in, somehow, slowly and cautiously, and got to the danger all the same. Not that there could be a real danger here, unless a storm came up, and even then he’d be in no mortal danger. He could always run to shore and wait it out, no matter how long the storm lasted. Even if his motor conked out, broken beyond his ability to fix it, he had a paddle. It would be only time that he could lose. So his friends might worry about him—so what? But it did worry him that they might worry—a small threat of anxiety, a small twinge of that psychic nausea. It all seemed so demeaning he decided he would have to go to the strange bay and the river. He liked to be alone. He did. He was always saying that he did. He started the motor and swung northeast, looking for the passage. Of course, he might go in, and he might not.
The entrance to the passage toward Baie Borne was narrow, full of boulders and with a definite current. He could see that the passage beyond widened and deepened quickly, however, so he throttled down and just made headway as he left the broad lake. He thought of those who explored caves—spelunkers (where did that word come from?) who sometimes crawled into holes so narrow they’d have to bet upon a larger space ahead because they couldn’t crawl out backwards. A cowardly thought on a bluebird day. But he got through without touching and went on, at least for now, with dark hills rising on each side.
He didn’t know how deep the water might be, but since he edged into this passage at trolling speed he let out the silver wobbler, its long leader, and a couple of colors. One swath on the western hills had been logged, and the greener brush was a wash of light. On top, some birches had been left, their tall trunks against the sky like African trees—a view of Kenya that slowly passed. A small bay opened on his left, and, yes, the map was disconcertingly true again. As he passed the bay’s entrance it silently let him by, its farther regions secret, not caring, set for eternity. A heavy cloud to the north, moving away, made his pathway dark.
His rod quivered—a snag or a hit. A fish, he knew as he picked it up, because it moved a little to the side, undulant, like a heartbeat, a small spasm of opinion. He shut off the motor and checked the star drag as he reeled, feeling the caught thing, the line alive between them. A pull from below answered the question of size; it was small, probably a lake trout. It came up against all of its will, no match for his eight-pound leader, the silver three-pronged hook in its flesh somewhere. He would see it soon.
The fish was dark and narrow—a small pike about fourteen inches, hardly a keeper. The brown eyes in the slanted skull saw him. The way to grab a large pike, he’d been told, was to put your thumb and middle finger into its eye sockets, squashing the eyes into the skull: this was supposed to stop their thrashing. He reached down and grabbed this one behind its head, the smooth body a muscle, and forced the tines of the hook down and out, a fragment of white cartilage, broken by a barb, flowing half-loose. His too-strong hands let the small pike go back down. As he let it go he felt a little magnanimous, slightly closer to the vision all fishermen would like to have of themselves someday—a distinguished older man with well-patched waders and a split-bamboo rod, Yeats’s fisherman, a “wise and simple man,” the paragon of dignified age who is usually observed in the middle distance as he performs each ceremonial fishing rite with understated skill. He always catches a fine brown trout and of course releases it, his sparse gray hackle glowing in the falling light, a tiny hatch, like reversed snow, haloing his old felt hat. Oh, yes, the classic fisherman, his aesthetics honed to the finest moral patina. With age was supposed to come wisdom that was not detachment, mastery that was not boredom, experience that never bred despair.
His canoe moved steadily north through the dark water. He hoped the northern cloud would soon pass and the water would turn a less forbidding blue again. Was he really going to go all the way to the river and its indicated rapids, or not? Looking back, he saw the entrance from the lake had disappeared behind God knew how many hills. That the larger bay and its many islands would come up, inevitably, on map and in real distance, had some of the quality of the sudden boulders that had appeared beneath him in the broad lake.
The motor plugged on smoothly; the long bow moved ahead exactly where he had it go. He might troll, but decided not to because of apprehension about what he might catch. No, not apprehension but because to catch something here might delay him too much. He would catch a Silkie, a monster half fish, half woman, both natures writhing with hatred as they died. He could see in the deep the golden scales on the thighs, the fishbelly-pale shoulders, the inward-turning teeth of a pike. If he trolled he would be mixing exploration, which was perhaps neutral with the gods, with the intent to do harm.
He leaned forward and hefted the gas tank; of course it was still heavy. He could go ten times the map distance with that much gas, and he knew it. If he were at home he would be safe, though deprived of the opportunity to make this lovely, lonely choice. Of course, his wife was home right now, her unhappiness a distant and unsettling power.
Rivière Tâche must be a mile or so farther, with rapids at its mouth, and in some wonderment at his deliberate progress he steered on toward it. Rocks here and there caused tan blushes near the surface of the water, between deep places where to look down was to see, hopefully, nothing but the dark water-gray of depth.
Baie Borne: perhaps borne was a cognate—“…from which no traveler returns.” A border? Another land? Across its wide blue he moved, now over sand with patches of weeds here and there, water lilies of some kind with floating round leaves, and then into the positive current from the river. The spruce came nearer on each side, and ahead were rocks and some white water. The southeast wind was at his back, so he shut off the motor, the wind holding him against the current, and got his fly rod out of its tube. In his reel was a sinking line, an old leader, and a tippet he was too lazy or impatient to change. He was always nervous as he strung the leader through the eyelets, but he got the line correctly strung and chose for a fly a mediumsized Gray Ghost. His fingers trembled as he tied his knot and clipped off the tag end. The water was five or six feet deep, the rocks below darker. denser-looking than the boulders out in the bay. His canoe turned in the wind and current, and he tilted the motor up before casting.
He would begin here and then go up toward the frothings of white water.
After the first cast, which was only a half-decent cast, in fact a lousy cast, with the leader dropping in a messy coil not ten yards away, he began to strip in his line, worrying only about getting a knot in his leader and not at all about a fish. But the line jerked out straight and his supple pole bent. “My God!” he said. “It’s a fish!” He wasn’t ready at all, and there was a sense of wrong, of bad timing, as though he’d rather not have a strong fish on just yet, after such a stupid mess of a cast. But the fish was there, whatever it was. He should have changed the tippet; surely more than three pounds had already stretched it out. His nerves went down to the invisible tippet as he let out line, let it out and recovered it. Careful, now! The fish ran up-current, then held for a moment before running down along the far bank, not quite to a snag angled into the water—a complicated dead spruce. He just managed to decrease by tender force the radius of the fish’s run down that bank. Then it stopped, and he kept what he hoped was a permissible pressure on it, and then just a little bit more, but he couldn’t move it. He was afraid of the sudden emptiness of no connection. “Don’t happen,” he said. “Don’t happen.”
He didn’t know what kind of fish it was, only that it was big and strong. If it was a brook trout it would be the biggest one he’d ever seen, he was sure of it, a salmon-sized brook trout. It might be a pike, or a large walleye, or a lake whitefish—what else was there here? With one hand he freed his boat net from the paddle: presumptuous to think of netting a fish he couldn’t even move. But then the fish came in a little, maybe just a foot or so; the canoe was moving, so it was impossible to tell. But the fish didn’t like that, and pulled so hard, so suddenly, he knew the tippet had to break, and for a moment thought it had, hollow moment, but the fish had come toward him, and now it veered away upstream, the line cutting the surface. He must keep the fish from winding the leader around a rock—just to the limit of what he could do with a three-pound tippet, which was probably good for at least five pounds, except that it was old, so God knew what strength it had. He mustn’t get used to its holding.
He had to see this fish. He wanted to own it, to have it. What a will it had, what strength! But the long minutes with his rod quivering, line in and out in desperation, might be too worrying for him. He’d deliberately put himself into a situation in which he felt anxiety. Why had he done that?
Beneath the water the cold muscles fought for life against this fragile extension of his touch. How sickening it must be to be pulled by the invisible—like having a fit, epilepsy, a brain spasm. What did the fish think pulled him so hard, and what part of him said no? He must know the fly itself was too small to have such power; everything he’d ever hunted and eaten told him that, but some force wanted to haul him away from the dark rocks to the ceiling of his world and out of it. Everything smaller than he that moved in his world was food, yet now this small thing he’d tried to eat was overpowering him, little by little, with a constant pressure that felt like death. What else must he know in his neurons, in his lateral canals, and in all the circuits of his perfect body, when he’d lived a life of caution, too, hunter and hunted both?
The wild thing deep in the current was so tenuously bound to him by his skill and desire…. By what skill? He was a nervous wreck, trembling and sighing. His line looped at his feet, a coil of it encircling the shank of the paddle. If the fish ran now it would be all over, so he held the rod high and reached down to free the line. The bunched collar of his jacket pushed his hat forward, and because he hadn’t thought to fasten the chin strap a gust blew his hat overboard. He reached for it and nearly shipped water, came upright again, and noticed that his tackle box, weighted by the open tray, had dumped lures and eyelets and split shot and all kinds of necessary little objects into the bilge. His hat floated away; the coil of line was still around the paddle. He saw but didn’t feel on his line the fish as it came to the surface of the water in a quick, inturning swirl. It was black on its back, deep in the body, spotted, with a flash of orange at the fins; every memory, every known subtlety of shape and behavior, said trout, said eight to ten pounds, the fish of his life that would make this moment, for better or for worse, forever a brilliant window of memory.
He did clear the line from the paddle, and miraculously the fish was still on. He hauled in line as the fish came straight at him. He’d meant to get a multiplying reel and make it lefthanded, so he could reel all this line in—why hadn’t he done that? Why hadn’t he done that long ago, as Ray Bergman had suggested in his book? The stripped line slopped half in and half out of the boat, some of it among his spilled lures so that he’d probably have a bloody Christmas tree of ornaments on it when it came up again.
Something shoved him hard in the back—a mean, hurtful sort of shove; the canoe had drifted into the bank, and it was a dead spruce stub that wanted to push him onto his face. The fish moved upstream again, well out from the bank, thank God. If he could just get hold of the paddle, or even that nasty stub, and push himself away from the bank. He couldn’t see why the fish was still on. It could just run away if it wanted—take out his line and all his backing and easily snap the tippet. Of course, the next thing the wise and skillful fisherman would do would be to capsize the boat.
Where was his hat? Over by a sandbar, beached by the wind. He could get it later, if there was going to be a later. His arms seemed to be pushing as well as pulling—pushing against his tendency to pull too hard—and were getting tired. He must keep the fish working against the pitifully small pressure he dared use. He knew he was never going to possess this fish, because it was too good, too beautiful, for the stupid, incompetent likes of Richard Adgate.
For a long time the fish hung into the current. He managed to reach the paddle and to push away from the hostile bank—at least for the moment, though the canoe turned perversely in the current and wind as if it, too, had an opinion about the outcome.
He had time to think that he was not enjoying any of this. His hopes were ridiculous; whatever gods of luck there were had chosen him for their sport.
Yet the fish fought for its life, and did Richard Adgate want to kill to have? He had to kill in order to have—a soft hesitation immediately gone banished as too stupid to consider. Just a sickish little echo of a feeling was left, and what did it matter anyway? If only he hadn’t been so impatient, and had put on a new leader, maybe six to eight pounds; this was no little midsummer trout brook in New Hampshire. What all this showed was a major flaw in his character, the story of his life. Unprepared was his motto.
But the fish stayed on. The wind had been coming up, blowing the canoe up into the current, but at least near the center of the river. Though he’d been turning and turning, he began to see a pattern in the fish’s runs; it liked a certain oval area of water and never went to either bank or to the dead spruce. Maybe bigger monsters lurked there and kept it away, although what of its own element might frighten a fish this large he didn’t want to think about. Maybe the fish was as stupid as he was, but you didn’t get that large by being stupid.
Time passed, and passed, his arms aching, his nervousness institutionalized, or solidified, a sort of seismic temblor in the seat of pain. He had a vaguely hopeful theory that the longer he kept the fish from its fish-business, the weaker it would have to become. Sure, just think of salmonids as weaklings.
He found himself guiding, turning, touching the living fish but thinking of other things. He wondered if he would ever be brave enough to camp out alone here, say on one of the small islands in this bay, alone in the dark night. Could he endure the blackness of that night, the silence of it, when even in broad daylight he was unnerved by the strange coves of a small bay seen in passing?
A rose-white slab glinted over there on the surface—a large fish rolled, and it was his fish, on its side for a moment, its tail giving a tired-looking scull or two before it sank down again. Then there were a few pulls, weaker shakes of the head, weak
though irritated: what is this thing pulling on me all the time? And he thought all at once that he might actually bring the fish to the side of the canoe. Maybe. It had been on more than half an hour, now, probably because of his caution, or his cowardice.
The fish came, slowly. When it first saw the canoe, it ran, but not far, and he gently snubbed its run and turned it again. If he startled it too much it would simply run away from him, because it was not really as weak as it seemed. Nothing was as it seemed. With the rod in his left hand, the line snubbed with his fingers, he sneakily got the big boat net handy, then went back to his gentle urging, turning, and soon the fish was next to the canoe. With desperate strength he took the net and scooped it up and into the canoe amidst all the spilled and tangled gear and line and who cared what? He was on his knees, his hands over the net and his fish. What teeth it had! It was a brook trout all right, but changed by size into something oceanic, jaws like forearms, gill covers like saucers.
The Gray Ghost was deep in its tongue, the tippet not even in existence any longer. His metal stringer was in the mess in the bottom of the boat, and he clipped one hanger through the trout’s lower jaw and another around a thwart into the chain—of course he would never trust it in the water. As if it understood, the trout wrestled itself out of his grasp, into the air, then came down thrashing on the mess of lures, eyelets, spoons, net, line, sinkers, flies, reel-grease tubes, spinners, hooks, split rings—all the picky little toys and trinkets a fisherman collects.
Leah, New Hampshire Page 24