“Whoa,” he said, as he set the hook and took up the slack in the line, then watched it spool out, despite a healthy drag. “That’s a big fish. That’s a motherfucker.”
Indeed it was, and it put up a motherfucker of a fight, but at length Pete prevailed. He reeled it in, and taking no chances that the line would snap, lifted it by hand from the water. It had small black speckles on its side, a long pink stripe on a silver background, pale fins, a huge and muscular tail, and enormous globular eyes. Its gills flared as it struggled in vain to get oxygen. But it didn’t flop and thrash and squirm around, which was odd for a fish. It made no effort at all to get away, just lay in Pete’s hands as though it had already given up, or didn’t care. Pete cradled it a moment, half-mesmerized by its size, then bashed its head on the rock until it was dead. Then he stood back and admired it.
“Now that’s a fish. Whoa is that a fish. Hell, it’s even legal.” He glanced at Carl, feeling generous. “Want to do the honors?”
“The honors?”
“Gut it. It’s all yours.”
Carl was dumbstruck. He told himself it was just a fish, with just a fish’s bulging and accusatory eyes, which, as if to make things easier on him, were filming over. Without thinking, he reached into his pocket for his jackknife. He was flattered by Pete’s offer, happy to be included. His consent was reflexive and automatic. But on touching the knife, he got a sick feeling inside and halted.
“Need a knife?” asked Pete. “Use mine.”
He stared at the fish, his fish, and shook his head. “You do it. To the victor go the spoils.”
Pete smiled. “Fair enough. I’ll do the dirty work, but I’m over my limit. I need you to carry it back.”
Reluctantly, Carl agreed, assuming that he was being tested, not merely by Pete, or even mostly by Pete. There was a lesson here, something he did not fully understand. It made him uneasy, but he was determined to see it through. The fish, now stiff and lifeless and—you couldn’t get around it—fishy smelling, no longer seemed quite so godlike. A divinity it was not.
But maybe, just maybe, it was divinity’s messenger.
It was dark by the time they reached the cabin. The men were tired but happy. Spirits were running high. A night in the woods, a bed beneath the stars . . . who could ask for more? Burt uncorked a bottle of wine, while Pete fried the fish, including his monster fish, which he divvied up into four portions.
Carl received his with trepidation. How could he possibly eat this fish? How could he not? He worried it would stick in his throat and he would make a fool of himself. He feared he would offend someone or something, some higher power or force. He stared at his plate, paralyzed with indecision. Then all at once, as if by a will of its own, his hand moved. He watched his fork rise, hover a moment, then stab the fish and thrust a piece in his mouth. Without thinking, he started to chew. It was tender and sweet, and he did not gag. On the contrary, it slid down his throat like butter. Eat me, it seemed to be saying. Have no fear. Eat me and be content. Be whole.
After dinner Burt got a call from his wife with the news of a new arrival on the home front, a new pet, snuck in, as it were, through the back door. A rat to replace the hamster that had been so cruelly devoured. He took the news with equanimity, but after hanging up, he had a good deal more to say. He had doubts, grave doubts, about this newest acquisition and sought the group’s opinion. What did the guys think? Any useful advice?
“Rats are smart,” said Pete.
“You know this for a fact?”
“I’ve heard.”
“They are,” said Carl. “I had one once. It learned to do all sorts of things.”
“Like what?”
“Sit up. Climb on my shoulder. Play catch. Beg for food.”
“Catch?” asked Nick.
“We pushed a little ball back and forth.”
“This was an athletic rat,” said Burt.
“Either that, or it knew which side its bread was buttered on,” said Pete.
Burt nodded. It was good news either way. “So you think it’s safe to assume our rat is smart enough to avoid being eaten?”
He looked to Carl, who, by virtue of his experience, was now the resident expert on the subject. Carl felt flattered by the attention, a rare sensation, which made the truth that much harder to divulge. His rat, in fact, had been eaten, and the fault was entirely his. He’d taught it only too well, to the point of robbing it of some essential part of its nature. He had trained it to be so trusting that on the day he’d inadvertently left the cage door unlocked, it had ventured out without fear or caution, thereby falling victim to Carl’s other pet, a normally docile cat.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s smart enough. If you’re smart enough to leave the cage door locked.”
“Amen to that,” said Burt, whereupon he and Pete, along with a bottle of scotch, retired to the deck outside. Nick and Carl remained in their chairs.
For a while neither of them spoke. Carl had a storehouse of conversation starters, bland and impersonal and non-threatening, none of which seemed right for the occasion. The day’s events had left their mark on him, and he had deeper thoughts. But he feared saying something stupid. Or worse, being ignored. Of all the men Nick was the most approachable, but this was no sure thing. As children he and Carl had been playmates, but by adolescence they’d drifted apart. Nick was smart, athletic and popular. Carl was none of those things. Carl, frankly, was an embarrassment, but Nick was usually too much a gentleman to say anything. Usually, but not always.
There was one particular incident. Nick had been a star on the high school baseball team, and in the last inning of a crucial game, Carl, a fill-in, had let a routine grounder trickle through his legs, allowing the winning run to score. Nick had been the pitcher of that game, and afterwards had been irate. Contrary to every lesson of good sportsmanship he’d ever learned, not to mention his school-wide reputation as an upstanding guy, he let Carl have it in front of all their teammates, called him out and publicly humiliated him. ‘What were you thinking when you joined the team,’ he had screamed, spittle flying. ‘What are you ever thinking? What’s with you, Carl? What are you doing out there? Hasn’t it occurred to you that you don’t belong?’
Nick was just a kid at the time, frustrated by losing. Caught up in the moment. In retrospect, he understood this, but understanding did not mean he forgave himself. The way he’d taken it out on Carl, the weakest of the weak, the most ill-equipped to stand up for himself, the most insecure. Targeting and scapegoating him . . . it was a terrible thing to do, and it haunted him to this day. Carl had had a rough life, and in some small but finite way he, Nick, had made it worse.
“Pretty up here,” he said, breaking the silence.
Carl nodded. “Yeah. It’s beautiful.”
Nick glanced at him. “How you doing these days, Carl?”
“I’m good,” he said, keeping it simple.
“You still selling insurance? At that place? You still there?”
“Yeah. Still am.”
“You like it, huh? The work. It suits you.”
Carl frowned. He sensed the beginning of something he wasn’t sure he liked. “It’s all right. It pays the bills.”
“Funny, I never pegged you for a salesman. Back when we were kids. Never would have guessed that’s what you’d be.”
Carl was surprised to hear this, the surprise being that Nick had thought about him at all.
“I was thinking back to high school,” said Nick. “Senior year. Remember?”
“Sure. Giants finished 2 games out of first. Niners won their first Super Bowl.”
“You remember that baseball game we played? The one against South City.”
Carl hadn’t seen this coming, but a lifetime of defensiveness had given him the tools he needed to protect himself. Almost effortlessly, he swept the failure and humiliation of that day under the rug, replacing them with a happier memory, the Montana to Clark pass that same year that sent the Niners to
the Super Bowl. It was the year his sister died of cancer, six years to the day after their mother had also died of the same disease. Both had melanomas, and now he had one, too. He’d gotten the diagnosis a month before. The doctors were urging him to get treatment, but he was thinking he’d let nature run its course.
“I want to apologize,” said Nick. “I was a real asshole that day. I had some stuff on my mind, unrelated stuff, but hey, who doesn’t? That’s no excuse. I’m really sorry.”
Carl shifted in his chair. Confessions made him nervous. Not only did they stir things up, but he assumed there was a catch.
“No big deal,” he said. And then, as an afterthought, “I’m sorry that it’s bothered you.”
“I’m sorry that I blew up at you.”
“Heat of the moment.”
“And that I waited so long to say something.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. No problem.”
Nick gave him a look.
Carl squirmed a little. “I have a question for you.”
“You bet. Anything.”
“It’s about fishing.”
“Fishing?”
“Yeah. How do you catch one?”
Nick absorbed this for a moment. He had hoped for something different, something deeper, something more along the lines of a heart to heart talk. Confession, discussion, forgiveness, redemption: something like that. He had forgotten how reluctant Carl was to engage in such things, how guarded and deflective he could be.
But he was a man of his word. “How do you catch a fish? Well, let’s see. First off, you have to learn to read a river. Second, you have to learn to think like a fish. Reading a river isn’t hard, but it takes practice. You look for the riffles, the holes, the shady spots. Where it runs fast, where it slows, where the water’s nice and cool, where it’s too hot. Basically, you look for places that a trout would want to hang out. Which gets to the second point. What does a trout look for, what does it want out of life? That depends somewhat on the trout, the time of day, whether it’s breeding season or not, stuff like that. But the one constant, the one thing you can depend on, unless there’s been a big hatch and they’re completely stuffed, is that a trout wants to eat. That’s what gets him up in the morning. Food. Your job is to give it to him.
“But trout are smart and wily, the big ones especially. You can’t just toss out food or dangle it in front of their faces, because they won’t buy it, they won’t bite. They know what’s real and what’s not. You have to convince them that you’re real. If you’re fly fishing, that means using a fly that’s actually out and on the river and presenting it in a way they recognize. If you’re using a lure, it means convincing that trout that your lure is another fish, a minnow usually, and you have to know how that minnow acts. Trout are predators, ferocious when they want to be, and ferociously territorial. Sometimes they’ll bite out of pure aggressiveness. Sometimes you can trick them into thinking they have to defend their territory. Once I got a trout to bite by annoying it so much it finally got fed up and took the bait. But most of them won’t be taunted like that. They’re too suspicious and they have good memories. When they see something that doesn’t look right, they’ll just ignore it.”
“You think a fish ever wants to be caught?”
“I’ve seen some who like to fight. Almost like they took the hook just for the chance to show off. And one time I had a fish jump in the boat. But that was pure accident.”
Carl did not think his fish got caught by accident. His fish, that’s how he thought of it, the one that Pete reeled in. He did not think it had taken the lure out of hunger or aggression either. When Pete pulled it out of the water, before its eye went dead, the eye had met his. A look passed between them, a look that seemed to tell him why it had taken the bait and made the leap, the jump from life to death. It had to do with fearlessness and sacrifice and, strange to say, humanity. The strong had to look out for the weak. The eye seemed very clear on that. Big fish had to take care of little ones.
“It goes like this,” said Nick. “The trout takes the fly, we take the trout. Predator becomes prey, if you want to think of it like that. But it works better for me, or at least I get more satisfaction, more pleasure, when I think of it as one predator outsmarting another.”
The men slept hard and woke early. Morning was near perfect. Light grew in the east, turning the sky blue, then green, then gold, spilling over the mountain crest. In the broad drainage below the cabin the pines and firs, stretching as far as the eye could see, glowed like embers. The air was cold and clear. The men stood outside, their breath misting, their hair unkempt, their faces happily unshaved.
After breakfast Nick held a clinic on flies. Judging by the previous day, he thought that an assortment of nymphs and emergers should do, but he was a boy scout when it came to fishing and left nothing to chance. Every day was different on the river. Every river was different every day. He recommended a variety of flies, and he and Burt stocked up. Pete cracked open a brand new Panther Martin lure to go with his Super Duper, yellow Roostertail and gold Kastmaster. As a reward for carrying the big fish, he gave Carl—poor, abashed Carl—the lure that had caught it. Then the four of them piled into the car.
They stopped in Twin Pines again for sandwiches, where they got the tail end of a story of a big rig crash and burn, then the report of another mountain lion sighting on the Middle Fork. A male this time. Seemed like the big cats were getting bolder lately.
They decided to try a new spot on the river, a few miles up from Mosquito Flat. After parking, they took an old Forest Service road that was wide enough for the four of them to walk abreast. Carl couldn’t remember the last time this had happened, marching along shoulder to shoulder with his buddies. Pete was smiling. Burt was singing, unabashedly off key.
After half a mile the road narrowed to a single file trail that wound through brush before depositing them at the river. They got their gear together, then Nick and Burt and Pete took off. Carl did his thing and brought up the rear.
He found a little pebbled beach, where he fished for an hour without a single bite. On what turned out to be his final cast, he snagged his line. Trying to free it, he snapped it, bringing an end to his dubious distinction of never having lost a lure. For a while after that he watched the river, his mind drifting, his senses pleasantly dulled. A cloud of tiny insects hovered over the water . . . he had no idea what kind they were, and the trout themselves didn’t seem to care about them one iota. A trio of swallows, on the other hand, were feeding to their heart’s content, soaring, gliding, slicing through the air like dive bombers. High above them, tilting on the upper drafts and seemingly indifferent to the goings on below, were the ubiquitous vultures.
He had a bite to eat, splashed some water on his face to wake up, then went to look for his friends. On the way he was enveloped by a swarm of mosquitoes, a fair number of which landed on his arm, probing it briefly before puncturing—or attempting to puncture—his skin. Apparently, they found nothing wrong with his blood, which gave him a kind of grim satisfaction. Having cancer shamed him, and he knew it would only get worse. Maybe he would go ahead and have the treatment. It was possible, he supposed, that doing something about it would actually be preferable to doing nothing at all.
The trail he was on paralleled the river, and where the canyon narrowed and its walls steepened, he was forced to climb. At the top of the climb, he paused to catch his breath. Downstream, he saw Nick, crouched over the water, head and neck stretched out like a bird of prey, a crane or a heron. Not far from him, Burt was sitting on a log, rod between his legs, tying on a new fly. Upstream of both of them Pete was balanced on a rock, making long, smooth casts across the water.
As he came down the trail, he heard a rustling in the bushes ahead. It was the sound a squirrel might make, a large squirrel, stirring up dead leaves. Pete heard it too . . . Carl saw him turn, and then he saw his eyes widen. His mouth opened as if to sp
eak, and then he froze.
From out of the bushes a head appeared, followed by a long body, then a stiff and black-tipped tail. Carl had never seen a mountain lion before, but there was little doubt that this was one. It was lean and muscular and big, with a tan coat that blended with the surroundings. Its head was angled downward and swung slowly back and forth as it walked. For a moment he hoped that it wouldn’t notice Pete, but this was little more than wishful thinking. It had noticed him from the beginning, had noticed all of them, and had already selected the one that was the most isolated and had the least chance of escape. It halted briefly, perked up its ears, glanced from side to side, then crept forward.
Pete was paralyzed with fear. This was something Carl had never seen. If asked, he would have said it was impossible. The lion, on the other hand, seemed to expect no less, and in response, or perhaps simply to further disable its victim, it let out a deep and terrifying growl. It regarded its prey, which was now within striking distance, then crouched down, flexed its powerful hind legs and prepared to pounce.
Carl was frightened, but he was not crippled. His fear, in fact, was strangely muted, as though it belonged to someone else. He yelled and looked for something to throw. Finding nothing, he raced ahead. Pete shouted at him to get back. “Don’t be stupid,” he croaked.
Alerted by the noise, Nick and Burt began to throw rocks, which fell harmlessly short of their mark.
Carl halted not twenty feet from Pete and the lion. Pete looked terrified. The lion was about to launch itself, and Carl edged sideways until he was in its field of vision. He had a plan, and the lion glanced at him, but a glance was not enough. For what he intended, he needed its full attention, and he knew instinctively how to get it. Ironically, it was the same thing he’d always done to avoid attention in the past. He made himself look small. Small and meek, inviting the lion to consider him in lieu of Pete.
It growled, unhappy with this wrinkle in its plans. Eying the newcomer, it snarled and bared its teeth to study its reaction. Clearly, the new animal on the scene was frightened: its hands were trembling, and it gave off a smell. It was a different smell than the other one. There was a sickness to it. Tempted, the lion shifted position. Yes, this was a better choice, and it prepared to attack.
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