The Next Valley Over

by Charles Gaines

  “While making a living, make room for life,” a sign in Kalispell told us, and we did just that a few hours later on the ravishingly pretty little Thompson River. Once you pass McGregor Lake and enter the Kootenai National Forest on Highway 2, you seem instantly to leave Montana and enter the tall evergreens and ragged, untended-looking country of the Pacific Northwest. The Thompson ran caramel-colored and four to eight feet across through big stands of Ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, Engleman spruce, larch, and hemlock. Tom and Tim fished downstream of the public campground where we parked, and I fished upstream with a dry fly over a nymph on a 2-weight rod, and made room for life by plucking a dozen or so spunky six-to-ten-inch rainbows out of jaunty little runs that reminded me of New Hampshire brook trout water.

  We fished the Thompson from five to seven, then drove on into Libby, showered and dropped our gear at a motel, and headed out to the Red Dog Saloon to meet up with Chris Child and Dan O’Brien, who had driven up from Utah and South Dakota to join us for the last sitting of the feast.

  A road-angling trip should always include some terra incognita. For Tom and me, this Kootenai country that Tim has been so impatient to show us is it, and we have saved it for last.

  In 1986, Tim Linehan moved from New Hampshire to the Yaak Valley of Montana, wanting to be a hunting and fishing guide in remote, beautiful country, and now he is that—taking people fishing on the Kootenai River and a few of its tributaries, hunting for elk and deer in the mountains, and shooting in the evergreens for ruffed grouse over his golden retriever. He and his bright and pretty wife and partner, Joanne, live in a wood-heated cabin in Yaak, a town with two bars and one general store, an hour-and-a-half drive north of Libby. It is shaggy, green, mountain-man country, with an aura to it as strong as train smoke. Its inhabitants are few, scattered, and independent, and they tend to have a passionate and protective love for the valley.

  Part of what Tim loves about his neck of the woods is its fishing—which is rebounding quickly from considerable degradation caused by excessive logging during the Reagan and Bush administrations, but is still virtually unknown compared to the glamourpuss rivers of southwestern Montana—and he is anxious to introduce us to it and a little nervous about how it will show itself.

  The major river of the fishery is the Kootenai, and we float a six-mile stretch of it in the afternoon after sleeping off a late night of pizza and steak and many pitchers of beer with Chris and Dan at the Red Dog. Dan O’Brien is a writer, a falconer, and a trainer of English setters. Chris Child sells real estate in Park City and was, for a while, my good-hearted partner in a sporting travel company. The three of us follow a bird-hunting movable feast each fall in Canada, and I know Chris and Dan to be nomadic revelers of the highest order.

  We go up to Mel Siefke’s house to rent a raft for these boys of mine. Mel is a taxidermist. He has lion dogs chained up outside, deer heads and mountain lions on his wall, and a six-pound brook trout in his freezer that someone has brought for him to mount. Where might this substantial brook trout have been angled? we wonder. Locally, Mel says; he can put us in touch with a guy who knows. And suddenly another valley appears and shimmers before the wearying road-anglers.

  The Kootenai below Libby Dam is a wide, big-shouldered tailwater that is Montana’s second largest river by volume. Its water is a glacial slate blue, running in a thick, even, deceptively slick-surfaced surge, and pooling into great, lightless holes that look like big-fish condos and are: the state record rainbow of twenty-nine pounds came out of one of them. We have a breezy, cool, tall-cloud afternoon under the steep, furrowed gaze of the Cabinet Mountains to the south, and fish mostly small dries to pods of rising fish in the current seams behind islands and in slicks along the banks. The rainbows we catch are plump and acrobatic and as chalky as the water.

  After another good late supper at the Red Dog, we drive over the hill to the Yaak Valley and go to sleep in the Overdale Lodge. I don’t see much of the place. I walk upstairs, drop my duffel in one of the bedrooms, and don’t even remember turning out the light.

  It is like waking up in the Peaceable Kingdom. From the large, cheerful, food-stocked kitchen where I make coffee, I look out on trout ponds, Canada geese and goslings, a hard-working osprey, and embracing, thickly evergreened hills. At Overdale there are trout to catch in the ponds, horses to ride, trails to hike, and ranch dogs to follow you around as you stroll the meadows, gathering your piscatorial energy for another day, your twelfth, on the water.

  Today that water is a charming little tributary of the Kootenai, the name of which Tim doesn’t want bandied about, and I don’t blame him. Call it Tiffany. Yaak Valley writer Rick Bass meets us in midafternoon and the six of us float eight miles of this sweetheart in two boats and a raft until dark. It is a cool, damp day with periods of rain and some spectacular plays of light during breaks in the clouds. Tiffany has dark water and meanders brightly during the first few miles into riffles and pools, then straightens and strolls, her banks in this lower section buxom with willows. There are lots of ducks, Canada geese, unshy deer. There is a small hatch of bluewing olives out for much of the afternoon, and six-to-fourteen-inch brookies and rainbows take parachute Adamses and elkhair caddises happily and scream around in the cold, tea-colored water. We have to drag the boats over a tree after it resists Rick’s and Tim’s efforts to cut it in half with a chainsaw that Rick has brought along with him like a lunch. Chris and Dan take turns rowing their raft and fish hard, gnawing away on the day like a haunch of beef. Tom and I can hear them making merry from a half-mile away all afternoon. In the last row-out mile or two of slow water, in the near-dark context of God knows what kind of conversation, Chris asks Dan what he would reply to King Arthur, should that personage appear on the banks astride his horse and offer to throw them a line for a tow. “We’ll take ’er, Art,” says Dan. “Want some chaw?”

  Joanne cooks dinner for all of us at the lodge tonight: elk steaks, chicken breasts, and bear sausage, squash stuffed with rice and lentils, fresh green beans and a salad, good wines and a fudge pie. It is the finest feasting yet, on this penultimate night of the trip.

  June 17. Mel Siefke has given us the name of the man in the know on the six-pound brook trout, and Tim has called him up. For our last afternoon of fishing he has agreed to take us into a series of beaver ponds near Libby where that fish and some others like it came from. Greg is the man’s name. He tells Tim on the phone that he and his group did not catch all of the big ones out of the ponds, and the ones they didn’t catch should still be there, including one of over twenty inches.

  We follow Greg and a friend of his named Glen down a long, potholed dirt road to four small beaver ponds lying in an enormous meadow that holds the remains of a homesteader’s cabin and graveyard and is snugged up to the very base of the Cabinet Mountains, one of the last remaining grizzly bear strongholds in the lower forty-eight. It is coming on six o’clock. The late light of this clearing afternoon has turned the meadow a Van Gogh gold. Waifish little wisps of cloud glide in and cling to the mountain’s skirts. It is as beautiful a last valley for this trip as any you could imagine, and I wader up as hurried along by imagination as I was on the Ruby almost two weeks ago. It is impossible to know, after all, from valleys before what holds in any new water: a brook trout as big as the Ritz? Old Mossyback? Some Last Word in fish?

  Chris and Dan go off in one direction, and Glen, Tim, and Tom in another. Greg graciously leads me over to the pond where he and his friends had left one hog uncaught a few weeks ago. We study the shallow, peaty water from a distance. We whisper about the exact whereabouts of the fish’s lie and what he might enjoy for a snack. Then I tie on a fly, walk as close as I dare, crouch, and make this final new water come real with a cast—the fly line unrolling along a plane between future and present, then dropping onto the pond’s still surface a question demanding an answer.

  After five or six more casts, Greg says, “He’s gone. We’d have seen him move to the fly or spook if he was
still in there.” I already know that this is our bleak answer here—having just spotted near my feet a recently discarded cardboard worm container. Greg and I go try another of the beaver ponds. There are fresh tire tracks leading into this one, another worm container on the shore.

  We walk back to the vehicles and meet the others. No one has seen a fish except Glen, who casts for a while to one shell-shocked brookie hiding under a log, perhaps the last fish in these ponds.

  Cigars are lit and a long-necked bottle of Dickel is passed around as we break down the rods to laughter and another gathering dark. When the bottle comes around to me, I take a pull to that Old Mossyback no longer here, somebody’s supper or mount, the payoff to someone’s trip down a potholed road, then take one more to whoever caught him. A kid maybe, I think: a road-angler in training.

  *Since this story was written, this river, too, has been bought and privatized by the ubiquitous Ted Turner.

  COLLISION AT HOMOSASSA

  EACH SPRING THEY SLIDE INTO THIS PLACE, COMING FROM the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. One day this stretch of shallow water on either side of the river’s mouth will be practically lifeless—a few scuttling rays, a prowling tiger shark, a school or two of bait fish—and the next, as if someone had waved a wand, there will be tarpon everywhere, thousands of them, bright as a brass band, bringing the water alive with their silver gathering. They come from the south—that is all anyone knows—and when they leave in little more than a month, they will go north. People will spot a few of them off Apalachicola, Florida, and Pass Christian, Mississippi, and the Chandeleur Islands of Louisiana, and Port Aransas, Texas, as they make their way westward toward Mexico, but they won’t be seen again anywhere else in the world in the numbers they are seen here at the mouth of the Homosassa River on the west coast of Florida between the middle of May and the middle of June.

  Most saltwater gamefish live like Greek playboys, following pleasure and abundance from one sunny spot where the living is good to the next. Though no one is sure of this, the tarpon probably come to this particular place for the pleasures and abundance of sex. One may imagine them coming in from the deep water at night, on a rising tide, under a waxing three-quarter moon, sensing the landmarks, the certain and particular characteristics of the place, and then registering pleasure or relief from the instincts switching off that brought them to it—like getting off a train late at night, and recognizing, just from the way the air feels, a place you are happy to have traveled a long way to return to; and like, then, taking a deep breath and feeling yourself relax.

  It is not a large place—two or three miles wide from the mangrove islands to deeper water, and maybe ten or twelve miles long from Pine Island, south of the river’s mouth, to the St. Martins Islands north of it. Throughout, the water has an average depth of about eight feet and a temperature, when the place is perfect, of around eighty degrees Fahrenheit. It is salt water freshened by the flow of 600 million gallons a day from the Homosassa River, and it is very clear. Near the southern end, around the area known as “Oklahoma,” the bottom is white; at Black Rock and around the bird racks and off the point, the white sand is mottled by a green-brown sway of turtle, moss, and needle grasses. There are a few deep channels, but mostly the place is one big flat, eight feet or so of clear water over a variegated bottom, and unexceptional except for whatever about it causes these returning herds of tarpon to take a deep collective breath and stay to dally.

  At eighty pounds, this particular tarpon is a little smaller than the average here and a good bit smaller than the largest, making him, more than likely, a male. It is his second year returning to the place. He came into it last night in a school of a hundred fish, joining hundreds of others already arrived. Physically, like those others, he fits this earliest scientific description of his species, published in a Latin book in Amsterdam in 1658:

  Among common sea fish is found the Camaripunguacus, which at maturity attains the bulk and size of a man and is exceedingly fat. It possesses a very large toothless mouth, its lower jaw fixed and its upper shorter. The eyes are large and silvery; its tail broad, somewhat forked; and to its dorsal fin when erect there is a long appendage attached like a thick rope running straight toward the tail. The entire fish is covered with scales which are closely placed upon it, and so beautifully diversified is the silver with the blue that it seems coated as if with pure silver.

  When the sun rises, the silvery, eighty-pound male tarpon is crisscrossing the flat in patterns that the place itself designs, swimming unhurriedly just below the surface, the opaque tip of his dorsal fin and the top fork of his tail occasionally breaking the surface, near the middle of a shifting, regimental line of tarpon three or four fish wide and over fifty fish long. Because he is a young tarpon, he will travel with this school all day, following its pattern over the flat, learning the place, feeding rarely and without much interest, and breaking from time to time with other fish from the school into the circles known as “daisy chains.” It may be that daisy chains are what these fish are here for. One of the sea’s solemn, ceremonial mysteries, they are probably spawning circles, in which a number of male tarpon swim nose-to-tail around one big female or more; when the female drops her eggs, the smaller males rush in from the edges of the circle, whirling their silver sides up, competing to spray the eggs with sperm. Between the flash and spending energy of the chains, the eighty-pound male tarpon moves with the school in easy sweeps over the flat, unrushed for the time being by the urge to breed or feed, and unbothered in this place where big sharks are rare by fear of his one natural enemy, with whom he has shared shallow water since the Mesozoic. Of his other enemy here, unnatural, above the surface, he is unaware until later that morning.

  There is slick calm at eleven o’clock. The water is a glassine envelope, and above it, through its unruffled silver break with the air, the tarpon’s round eye might make out a stick-figure rhythmically waving a high wand against a pale blue sky. The fish is along one edge of the school, swimming eastward. Two feet in front of him, something appears, moving through the water in slow, short surges. Four inches of chicken feathers wrapped to a hook, it looks to the tarpon like a thing very easy to eat; perhaps it makes him mad. Without changing course or speed, he opens his mouth and sucks the thing in. There is a slight tug at the corner of his mouth, and then a sudden jerk. The tarpon snaps his head away from the jerk and thrashes, and the school bolts away to the north. There are five more quick jerks at the corner of the tarpon’s mouth, and then a steady pressure there as the fish runs after the school; a hundred yards out, he jumps, twisting three feet out of the water and rattling his head to shake the pressure. For the next half hour the fish runs and jumps and tosses his head against that pressure, and with every movement lactic acid builds in his muscles, finally closing him down, reducing his struggle to weak circles against the pull drawing him upward toward a long black shadow on the surface. When he is there, a silver hook slices through the water, trailing bubbles, pinning his lower lip to the shadow. There is movement like a crawl of worms inside his mouth, and then, as inexplicably as being suddenly caught, he is suddenly free, drifting away from the shadow, his gills flaring for oxygen, his flesh knotted with exhaustion.

  The shadow is the hull of a boat. The boat is called the Tarpon Fly. Inside it, Billy Pate watches the tarpon swim slowly away, then he checks his fly and leader for any damage the fish might have done to them. The Tarpon Fly is one of twenty-two similar boats—sixteen-to-twenty-foot skiffs with big engines and clear decks—that are out on this flat today, all within sight of each other, all fishing for tarpon. In practically every boat there are only two people: one, a professional guide, stands on a platform over the engine in the stern, poling the skiff; the other, an angler, stands in the bow, usually on another platform, holding a rigged fly rod, an assemblage of tackle not much larger than the fly outfits used in fresh water to catch three-pound bass. They are here off the mouth of the Homosassa River to stalk and catch big tarpon on this
very light tackle, and they are, almost all of them, among the world’s most expert and dedicated at doing that. More than the numbers, it is the size of the tarpon here that draws them to this place for this month every year. Nowhere in the known fishing world are more big tarpon found in clear, shallow water than here. Numerous 200-pound fish are seen and hooked here every spring, though one of these has yet to be caught on fly tackle, and that catching remains the unbroken four-minute mile of tarpon fishing, the big dream that pulls most of these anglers back year after year. And for the past two years the world fly-rod record for tarpon has been set here, two years ago by Billy Pate with a 182-pound fish, and last year by Tom Evans, who upped the record to 186½.

  Though many tarpon are caught at Homosassa, very few are killed. Since they are all but worthless as a food fish, and since the great majority of the anglers here have no interest in hanging one on a wall, the only tarpon brought into the dock as a rule are ones believed to be potential records. The small male tarpon Billy Pate has just released was neither 200 pounds nor a new world record, neither of the things Pate is here for, and so he was freed. Very likely, tarpon do not care how much they weigh—but for this one, caught and released by perhaps the finest fishing athlete in the world, a 106 pounds or so was a matter of life and death.

  Like other world-class athletes, Billy Pate works more than plays at what he does. He holds and has held more significant saltwater fly-rod records than any angler ever, and though many of those records are for billfish (he was the first angler to catch all six of the major billfish on a fly), tarpon are the heart of his work. Since 1964 he has spent more than a hundred days a year fishing for them in southern Florida and the Keys, in the Yucatán, Honduras, Costa Rica, Africa, Nicaragua, Brazil, Jamaica, Trinidad, the Bahamas, and Venezuela; and he reckons that in that period, in those places, he has “jumped,” or hooked, over two thousand of them.