The Fish's Eye: Essays About Angling and the Outdoors

by Ian Frazier

  Fish were rising everywhere. You had to look closely to see them, because the rises were small and the currents brisk and many. A half-dozen fish—all of them big, probably—had taken the best feeding lanes, at the far side of the eddy, where it adjoined the main current of the river. Past experience had taught me that they would be beyond casting range. Other fish were rising in the eddy’s swirls, some in current lanes that were actually going upstream as the eddy turned. Those would be hard to reach, too, because the fly would have so little time to sit on the surface before the conflicting currents snatched the leader and caused the fly to drag. I tied on a plausible imitation—a size 18 Blue-Winged Olive; like the newly hatched duns I’d observed earlier in the day. Wading in carefully, I began to cast.

  And then nothing. Every time I fished, this seemed to happen. I did everything right, in my view, and got no response at all. I cast again, and again nothing. Nothing and nothing. This is a part of fly-fishing that can drive you mad—the stubborn, inexplicable blank nothing. Fish kept rising without noticing me. Normally I would fall into a gloomy frame of mind at this point, but somehow on this day I maintained an alert, lucky, improvisatory feeling. A guy in a tackle store in Missoula whom I had told about my recent lack of success advised me to fish with longer, finer leaders. He said that he fished with leaders sixteen feet long. I decided to make a radical change. I quit casting, cut off the fly, and made my leader twice as long. I tied on three feet of 5X tippet, three feet of 6X, and two feet of 7X, fine as hair, at the leader’s end.

  To the 7X leader, straining my eyes, I tied a little fly with white Mylar wings and a black body; it looked a lot like the spinners I’d seen. These little mayflies are called Tricory-thodes —tricos, for short. They’re especially abundant in the fall. Now the leader was so ephemeral and the fly so small that I wasn’t sure I was casting at all, but I waded back in and laid leader and fly on the eddy’s currents, I couldn’t see exactly where. When I went to pick up the line to cast again, I found it was attached to a good fish. The rod suddenly bent in a deep bow, the fish gave a short, sharp tug, and the 7X leader snapped.

  No failure this encouraging had happened to me on the river in weeks. Sure now that I had the right leader and the right fly, I tied on another trico spinner with black body and white Mylar wings. First I cut off the hair-fine 7X tippet—I have never caught a fish of any size on a 7X tippet, though I know it can be done—and instead used the length of 6X tippet as the leader’s end. Tying leader to fly was again a challenge to the eyes; finally I did it, fitting the hook over the edge of my left thumbnail to pull the knot tight.

  Again I studied the eddy. The fish were still rising. I began to cast, and I may have had a strike or two, but the circumstances of the light, the bright-yellow reflection of the trees on the far bank, made it impossible to observe the tiny fly as it floated. A few yards upstream from the eddy, very near the bank, fish were rising in a more straightforward current pattern in not difficult casting range. Even better, the surface reflection there was not yellow-gold leaves but only the mild blue eastern sky. I moved up and laid the fly on a fish that was rising regularly with little saucer-shaped rises. The fly drifted over him four or five times with no response. I cast beyond him for a while, aiming for a fish farther upstream. I recalled that, when I had tried here before, all the fish did that typical trout thing of continuing to rise while sidling in a leisurely manner out of casting range. Now, however, they were staying put.

  The closer fish, no more than twenty feet away, was still rising to the trico spinners. I put the fly over him again and—sploop!—he rose, I set the hook, and the line came tight. Immediately the fish turned downstream out of his lie with a good-sized shouldering wake. Wincing, I waited for the leader to part. Sometimes when I’m afraid I’ll lose a fish I pull too hard, hoping to get him to the surface so I can at least see him before he breaks off. Now I let line out as the fish made strong downward runs to one side and then the other in the deepest part of the eddy. Still, I had not caught a glimpse of him, and my desire to see him was like greed. I had my net in my left hand; many uncertain minutes passed with the fish down deep, refusing to budge. Then I saw a gleam of white as the fish rolled near the surface. I backed toward the shore and led him into the shallows. At my feet, he veered away again. Finally I scooped him with the net and walked all the way out of the water, to a muddy piece of bank among some bushes upstream. He was a beautiful heavy rainbow, about seventeen inches long—the biggest fish I had ever caught on such a tiny fly.

  I laid the fish, still in the net, on a shoreline rock and whacked his head with another rock. There was that moment when the eyes went dull. Then I unhooked the fish and took it from the net and held it up and said a prayer, exalted. Killing one good fish is enough for me. I drove home and cleaned the trout and sautéed it carefully, and my wife and I ate it for dinner, leaving the bones as clean as an exhibit in an ichthyology museum.

  2

  One reason I moved to Missoula was an article in the Missoulian newspaper which my friend Bryan sent to me. It was about fly-fishing for whitefish in local rivers in the middle of winter. The accompanying photograph showed Daryl Gadbow, the article’s author, standing in a wide expanse of river and unfurling a long, looping cast over pewter-colored water while snowflakes came down all around. I looked at that photograph many times. The fishing regulations in Montana let you catch and keep certain species, including whitefish, all winter long. I had never fly-fished in winter. Fly-fishing on a snowy afternoon seemed like a luxurious winter pastime.

  Not long after we got to Missoula, I met Daryl himself. (I had met him once before; as it happens, he is Bryan’s brother-in-law.) Daryl writes about fishing and other outdoor subjects for the Missoulian. He grew up in Missoula and remembers as a boy hunting for pheasants in fields where Target and Barnes & Noble stores now sprawl. His adventures are well known around town. Once, in the mountains, he was chased up a tree by a grizzly bear. While hunting on a nearby Indian reservation, he came upon the body of a dead man. He spends many days on the water all year round. When he and I met at parties, we talked about fishing at lengths that caused people to roll their eyes and edge away. I told him that I had admired his article about winter fishing for whitefish, and that it was partly why I moved here. Daryl said that some winter day he would take me along.

  Our second winter, it really snowed. That part of the country is arid, and when snow comes it is often drier and lighter than snow back East, falling in a fine powder that piles up almost weightlessly. On windless days it accumulated in the links of the chain-link fence around the playground at my daughter’s elementary school, filling the lower half of each link with a triangle of white. On Christmas Eve day and Christmas Eve, thirty inches of snow fell. It buried the lights on people’s shrubs; you could see them glowing through the snow. At night, by porchlight against the black sky, I followed the courses of individual flakes coming down. Some fell almost plumb straight, some descended in clockwise or counterclockwise spirals, and some meandered back and forth among the other snowflakes as if lost. The air never got terribly cold; ice lined the edges of the rivers, but from bank to bank the water did not freeze. Framed with white, the rivers took on a coppery sheen, like car windows made of privacy glass.

  One Sunday afternoon Daryl called me up, and we grabbed our gear and went. He drove to a spot on the Bitterroot in the town of Lolo, about ten miles upstream. We followed narrow streets with high snow berms in a neighborhood of one-story ranch-style houses, and we parked in a plowed-out turnaround at a dead end. Daryl’s dog Rima jumped out and began to play, pouncing and feinting and throwing new-fallen snow in the air with her nose. Sitting on the truck’s tailgate, we pulled on our waders and strung our rods. As we crossed the rocky floodplain on the way down to the river’s edge, the drifts came above our knees.

  In a landscape blurred and softened by snow, the river seen close-up seemed to have an extra clarity, the stones on its bottom distinct and precise, like
the one in-focus part of a fuzzy photograph. Daryl stationed me at a knee-deep riffle where he said there were lots of whitefish, while he and Rima moved just upstream. I tied on a seven-foot-long leader and a pheasant-tail nymph with a brass bead at the eye of the hook to give it flash and make it sink. About eighteen inches above the fly I added two pieces of lead split shot, biting them onto the leader with my teeth. Casting a weighted rig like that requires a slinging-and-flinging motion I have never quite mastered; the tackle went whistling close to my ear. I began to sling it upstream and across, letting it drift back down, trying to feel out with the line the lowest part of the riffle, where I knew the fish to be.

  Suddenly I saw a flicker of white and jerked the rod, and the fish began to run. It fought hard and stayed stubbornly far out in the river; for a few minutes I thought it might be a trout. When I got it in close, I saw it was indeed a whitefish, with a torpedo-shaped body and silver, fingernail-sized scales and a back darkening to mossy green. As I landed it, Rima barked with excitement and jumped at the fish and for a moment locked on point, her nose quivering and needle-straight, at the fish lying in my net on the shore. I killed it and put it in the pouch in the back of my fishing vest. Daryl said the best way to eat a whitefish was smoked. I said I would fry it up fresh that night and have it for dinner, just for the sake of experiment.

  Storm clouds moved in, and the afternoon light became a wintry gloom. Snow began to fall hard, hissing in the bare branches of the cottonwood trees. The river scenery—bare-rock bluffs, dark-red willows, and tawny grasses along the shore—faded like something you see as you’re falling asleep. Daryl and I waded in deeper, crossed the river, tried different spots. The water in the Bitterroot actually felt warmer than the melted snow trickling around our ears. My fly line began to make a raspy sound in the line guides as it passed over the edges of ice building up in them. Steam rose from the water and moved in genie-sized wisps with the current. For a couple of hours, getting colder, we caught nothing more.

  Then I was standing chest-deep at a new place we’d driven to some miles downstream. Daryl was near one bank, throwing long, effortless loops of line, keeping more in the air at one time than appeared physically possible, like a juggler’s trick. As I watched, one of those casts descended to the water and got its reward: his rod suddenly bent, and far from him the hooked fish jumped. As often happens, I was mysteriously persuaded that I would catch the trout of my life if only I could get to a part of the river difficult to wade to and far away. In this case, the ideal water seemed to be at the opposite bank, beneath an undercut bluff with snow-covered roots protruding. But as I approached, the bottom shelved off alarmingly and the river came up to the very top of my waders.

  Stymied, I stopped and cast from where I was. I had on the same pheasant-tail nymph, with a smaller nymph in a Hare’s Ear pattern tied to the hook on a short length of monofilament for a dropper fly. I flung the line, dispiritedly, and flung again. Not being where I wanted had dimmed my concentration. After fly and dropper sank, I let them drift back to me as I’d been doing all day. Then a fish hit, hooked itself, and began to zip back and forth down deep. I thought it might be big, but then it jumped and flipped over in the air and I saw that it was a battling little trout. I pulled it in and landed it quickly. Before I let it go, I admired the fish lying on its side in the wet brown mesh of my net: a rainbow of about eleven inches, not skinny but rounded and full-bodied. Trout, especially little ones, have a more precise appearance than other fish, somehow—as if they were drawn with a sharper pencil, their details added by a more careful hand. Daryl’s fish, the one I saw jump, turned out to be a rainbow of more than twenty inches. It looked impressive even from a distance when he held it up to show before releasing it. The whitefish I kept, which was about fifteen inches, made a satisfactory (though bony) dinner for my wife and me when I cooked it that evening. But the little rainbow I caught is the fish I remember from the day. It fit with the wintry light, the clarity of the river, the shivery air. The strong streak of color on its sides was the exact same red as the backs of my cold, red hands.

  3

  My friend Don and I have been fishing together since we were boys. He and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Ohio, and have been friends for forty-five years. Don is now a college professor. He lives in Portland, Oregon—a distance from Missoula, but near enough for us and our families to visit back and forth. Every year, sometimes twice a year, Don drove from Portland to Montana to go fishing with me.

  Walking down a dirt road in Ohio with Don, both of us age twelve, on our way to fish for largemouth bass in a swamp pond in Tinker’s Creek State Park: nowadays, stuck in the traffic jam or looking out at one, even the possibility of such a childhood seems amazing to me. Or fishing for bass in Argyle Lake State Park, in central Illinois, after Don moved there, he and I casting top-water plugs on the reflection of the sunset sky, plugs named Hula Popper and Jitterbug, excellent bass-getters, which burbled and gurgled on the surface until a sudden popping downsink from below engulfed them and the hooked fish exploded upward, shaking its head in the air and rattling the lure’s metal hardware: again, I’m amazed and daunted by that happiness, and at my not realizing then how great it was.

  Don has certain things he says. He always has had. Certain ideas or notions or characters he invents occupy his mind, and he plays with them, conjugates and declines them, idles with them as you might idle with a basketball, shooting hoops from various angles and distances against the side of the garage. Indeed, I have seen him play with the latest new idea and shoot hoops like that simultaneously. This idea-play of his beguiles me, and I prefer it to most any comedy I see in movies or on TV, and I repeat his latest invention, and our friends and others sometimes take it up, and it passes, in a small way, into the language. An example? Well, years ago, when he was living in Illinois, he came up with the notion of Huddleston’s Mangy Mutts—tick-infested, bladder-problem, mangy, slobbering cur hounds that roamed, according to him, all over the town (Colchester, Illinois), committing various outrages and depredations. Don’s disquisitions on the Mangy Mutts often ended with the statement “Someone’s-got-to talk—to Pete Huddleston—about—those—DOGS!”

  When we were fishing in Montana, Don was in a Generalissimo Beerax phase. Beerax (pronounced Bee-rax) was a tyrannical figure of awesome power who commanded a vast all-bee army. Many messages that Don left on my answering machine back then were nothing but an expressive beebuzzing. Still, on an insect level, I understood them. To my kids, Don sometimes described Beerax and his army in scary detail: “Column after column, rank after rank, wave after wave of drone-bee soldiers, their multifaceted compound eyes perfectly expressionless, their skin hard and chitinous, their long, pointed stingers red-hot, their minds filled with only one thought—fanatical loyalty to their commander, Generalissimo Beerax! Day after day, week after week, they pass in review, their marching columns all that can be seen on any TV screen, on any channel, the endless parade interrupted only by news broadcasts reporting yet another victory for Generalissimo Beerax’s all-bee armies! You say you want to watch Saturday-morning cartoons? Think again, my young friends! You’ll watch nothing but Beerax’s drone-bee soldiers, endlessly marching, on every channel! Beerax has a single goal: world domination, along with complete control of the world’s precious titanium supplies and the enslaving of little boys and girls like you who he will turn into flesh slugs and put to work in the titanium mines, far under the earth, where radioactive worms fall on you from the dimly lit ceiling!”

  Talking about subjects like Beerax, and the beard of country-and-western singer Kenny Rogers, and Kenny Rogers’s beard lacquer, and on and on, Don and I fished with a dedication seemingly less than hard-core. We were persistent, however. One spring, while on sabbatical, Don lived in an apartment in Missoula and took courses at the university. During those months we fished all the time. Driven by early-season angling fever, we went out in April, when the river was really too swollen with rain and snowmelt.
A downpour started; raindrops landed on the olive-colored water, became gray pearls as they hit, skittered everywhere in their gray-pearl form, and vanished. We got drenched and caught nothing, but I found some oyster mushrooms on a log on a midstream island. We took them home and had them for dinner, cut in slices and sautéed.

  Once we happened to be by a bridge over the Bitterroot River forty miles upstream from Missoula when a large early-spring mayfly called the gray drake began to hatch. Fish were rising promiscuously in the deep water underneath the bridge, among the big granite riprap boulders along the shore. Quarters were too cramped for both Don and me to be under the bridge at the same time—to cast, you had to use a vicinity-clearing horizontal motion of the rod, because of the beams close overhead—so I stood back and watched. A heavy fish was rising in a semicircular basin made by two adjoining riprap stones. The range was maybe a dozen feet. Don tied on a Gray Drake, whipped his rod sideways back and forth, cast, missed, missed again, and finally put the fly right on the trout. Because of the light bouncing off the water, he couldn’t see the fly, but from where I stood it registered on the glare like a blip on a radar screen. With the smallest of sips the trout took it under. In the next second the fish felt the hook, bent the rod double with an emphatic thrash, and popped the fly right off. Desolation and misery.

  We lost other big fish, too. Did I secretly not want to catch them? More troubling, did I secretly not want Don to? I don’t know what to conclude. Once he and I went to the ospreynest pool on the Bitterroot just outside the city limits. When we got there, fish were rising in such numbers that I got overexcited and for a while was almost useless. I happened to have the right fly for this particular mayfly, but it took me three tries to tie it onto Don’s line. He waded in and cast and immediately hooked me in the shoulder of my vest with his backcast. I unhooked myself and moved upstream, out of the way. He waded into a deep hole we knew about by a brush pile, and a fish rose a rod length away. Don cast and the fish took the fly and made a hat-sized bulge in the surface as he sounded. Don’s rod doused down, down again almost to the water; and then, oh, the horrid deflation, the dawning self-reproach, when suddenly the rod unbent and the line went slack!