A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

by Norman Maclean

  Another problem soon arises after one gets help enough to start writing upon retirement. It arises from the fact that one can get started writing then only by not letting anyone know he has. He is so secret about it that even his own children don’t know he has taken their advice. But being covert makes him suspicious of his own actions, and so he soon stands in need of some sort of public sanction. It was at this point that I accumulated my second round of debts.

  I had just finished my first story and was wondering what it was like and whether I should be allowed to go on when the secretary of a scholarly club I belong to telephoned to tell me it was my turn to give the paper at the next monthly meeting. The club calls itself the Stochastics (the Thinkers), and originally they were all biologists who, however, in keeping with recent cultural changes have taken in a certain number of humanists and social scientists. On the whole, the experiment has proved successful, since no distinction can be observed among these different social classes in the amount they drink before and during dinner and during the scientific and scholarly speeches that follow.

  Suddenly, I saw my chance to escape from creative claustrophobia. I said to the secretary, “I have just finished a paper I would be glad to read.” The first story I wrote was the short one based on a couple of summers I spent in logging camps. The secretary replied, “That’s fine. Do you happen yet to have a title for it? You know I have to send out the title along with the speaker on the postcard announcing the meeting.”

  In the process of creating this story, then, I have had at least one inspired moment, because in a flash I answered, “On the postcard where it says ‘Title’ put down ‘Logging and Pimping’ and where it says ‘Speaker’ put down ‘Norman Maclean, noted authority.’”

  Finally I could hear breathing over the telephone, so, to aid in the process of resuscitation, I added, “It’s a scholarly work—as scholars say, a genuine contribution to knowledge.”

  Afterwards, the secretary told me the attendance at the meeting was the largest in the records of the society. However, I was left in some doubt whether this scholarly reception was for the story or the title.

  Nevertheless, I was invited back for a repeat performance the following autumn when the Stochastics have what they call their “heterosexual meeting” and the wives are invited. By this time I had almost finished the story “USFS 1919.” In the spirit of the occasion I read them the section that has a woman in it, even though she happens to be a whore. She and I were so well received by the faculty wives that I didn’t need any more moral support until I was nearly finished with the book.

  In retirement the realization comes late that getting a book published—all the way published—is a major step in the act of creation. Unless one has friends left at the end of life, this realization may come too late. To make a very long story short, I will connect it back to the Stochastics, only in this case to individual members who had written enough books when they were young to realize that I shouldn’t be left wandering around unprotected and alone at this moment of life. I wish to thank especially David Bevington, Wayne Booth, John Cawelti, Dr. Jarl Dyrud, Gwin Kolb, Kenneth Northcott, and Edward Rosenheim. I am sure that, without them, what I would have now would be some handwritten children’s stories too long to tell children.

  The University of Chicago Press is proud of its tradition of never allowing its authors to thank any of its staff by name. I respect this tradition, but some members of the Press had to be sufficiently interested in these stories to seek and obtain permission to publish a work of original fiction for the first time in its long history. I would be emotionally numb if I did not appreciate such an honor. Perhaps I can find other ways of letting them know, if I may use an old Western phrase, that I am forever grateful to them.

  I accumulated still another set of debts soon after the University Press and its Board agreed to publish its first book of fiction. It’s primarily fiction all right, but most children’s stories have a fairly obvious secondary intention of instruction and these stories are no exception. Children, much more than adults, like to know how things were before they were born, especially in parts of the world that now seem strange or have even disappeared but were once lived in by their parents, so I acquired the habit long ago of slipping in pictures of how men and horses did things in Western parts of the world where often the main thoroughfares were game trails. Moreover, it was always important to me to lead my children into real woods, not the woods of Little Red Riding Hood—to me, the constant wonder has been how strange reality has been. So a time came in creation when my thinking took a classical critical turn, and I remembered that Socrates said if you paint a picture of a table you have to call in expert carpenters to know whether you have done well. The following are the chief experts I consulted to find out how well I had painted the land I love and fly fishing and the logging camps and Forest Service I had worked in when I was young.

  For their sensitive and expert reading of “A River Runs through It,” I am indebted to Jean and John Baucus, owners of the great Sieben sheep ranch, which runs from the Helena valley to Wolf Creek to the Big Blackfoot River, a triangle of the earth that contains a great deal of my life and several of my stories. For expert opinion on my story about the Bitter-roots and my early years in the Forest Service, I turned to W. R. (Bud) Moore, Chief of Fire Management and Air Operations in the United States Forest Service. As a woodsman, he is a legend in our mountain land and is made of such stuff as honorary doctoral degrees although he never went beyond grade school. When he was in his early teens, he spent his winters running a trapline across the Bitterroot Divide, where I started working for the Forest Service. In the winters, now that he is retired from the Service, he spends two days of a week that’s crowded with writing, teaching, and research in running a trapline from Rock Creek across the Sapphire mountains to the Bitterroot Valley. I advise none of my young readers to try to follow him on snowshoes across this desperate stretch of country.

  I am also indebted to three expert women of the Forest Service for giving me a helping hand while I was writing these stories—Beverly Ayers, archivist of photographs, and Sara Heath and Joyce Hayley, cartographic technicians. They are absolutely first rate and have the added gift of always knowing what it is I am looking for, even when I don’t.

  I turned the story about my brother and fly fishing over to George Croonenberghs, who tied flies for my brother and me over forty years ago, and David Roberts, who has lived a long life fishing and hunting and writing about them three or four times a week. They are the two finest fly fishermen I know.

  They also bring to mind an indebtedness of another time and order. They and I are indebted to my father for our love of fly fishing—George Croonenberghs received his first lessons in fly tying from him, and David Roberts still writes an occasional column about him. As for me, all my stories can be thought of as partial acknowledgments of my indebtedness to him.

  Perhaps it is a question to you why I needed the great expert on the Cheyenne Indians, Father Peter Powell, to read my stories when only one Cheyenne Indian appears in them and she is not a full blood. I needed this great and good man in his most pristine calling—to assure me there are still moments in my memories that are touched with the life of the spirit.

  Finally, I have published practically nothing that has not profited from the criticisms (which she calls “suggestions”) of Marie Borroff, first woman full professor in English at Yale. If you think I am wasting a lady’s time in asking her to read stories about logging camps and the Forest Service as they were half a century ago, then I probably will have to tell you the kind of thing she tells me. Before I give you an example, though, perhaps I should add that she is also a poet. Of my first story (the one about logging) she said (among other things) I was concentrating so on telling a story that I didn’t take time to be a poet and express a little of the love I have of the earth as it goes by. Compare now the two long stories I wrote after she told me this with my first story, which is short,
and you should get some notion of how carefully I listen to the lady from Yale.

  This, then, in summary, is a collection of Western stories with trees in them for children, experts, scholars, wives of scholars, and scholars who are poets. I hope there are others also who don’t mind trees.

  A River Runs through It

  In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

  It is true that one day a week was given over wholly to religion. On Sunday mornings my brother, Paul, and I went to Sunday school and then to “morning services” to hear our father preach and in the evenings to Christian Endeavor and afterwards to “evening services” to hear our father preach again. In between on Sunday afternoons we had to study The Westminster Shorter Catechism for an hour and then recite before we could walk the hills with him while he unwound between services. But he never asked us more than the first question in the catechism, “What is the chief end of man?” And we answered together so one of us could carry on if the other forgot, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.” This always seemed to satisfy him, as indeed such a beautiful answer should have, and besides he was anxious to be on the hills where he could restore his soul and be filled again to overflowing for the evening sermon. His chief way of recharging himself was to recite to us from the sermon that was coming, enriched here and there with selections from the most successful passages of his morning sermon.

  Even so, in a typical week of our childhood Paul and I probably received as many hours of instruction in fly fishing as we did in all other spiritual matters.

  After my brother and I became good fishermen, we realized that our father was not a great fly caster, but he was accurate and stylish and wore a glove on his casting hand. As he buttoned his glove in preparation to giving us a lesson, he would say, “It is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o’clock.”

  As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God’s rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word “beautiful.”

  After he buttoned his glove, he would hold his rod straight out in front of him, where it trembled with the beating of his heart. Although it was eight and a half feet long, it weighed only four and a half ounces. It was made of split bamboo cane from the far-off Bay of Tonkin. It was wrapped with red and blue silk thread, and the wrappings were carefully spaced to make the delicate rod powerful but not so stiff it could not tremble.

  Always it was to be called a rod. If someone called it a pole, my father looked at him as a sergeant in the United States Marines would look at a recruit who had just called a rifle a gun.

  My brother and I would have preferred to start learning how to fish by going out and catching a few, omitting entirely anything difficult or technical in the way of preparation that would take away from the fun. But it wasn’t by way of fun that we were introduced to our father’s art. If our father had had his say, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him. So you too will have to approach the art Marine- and Presbyterian-style, and, if you have never picked up a fly rod before, you will soon find it factually and theologically true that man by nature is a damn mess. The four-and-a-half-ounce thing in silk wrappings that trembles with the underskin motions of the flesh becomes a stick without brains, refusing anything simple that is wanted of it. All that a rod has to do is lift the line, the leader, and the fly off the water, give them a good toss over the head, and then shoot them forward so they will land in the water without a splash in the following order: fly, transparent leader, and then the line—otherwise the fish will see the fly is a fake and be gone. Of course, there are special casts that anyone could predict would be difficult, and they require artistry—casts where the line can’t go over the fisherman’s head because cliffs or trees are immediately behind, sideways casts to get the fly under overhanging willows, and so on. But what’s remarkable about just a straight cast—just picking up a rod with line on it and tossing the line across the river?

  Well, until man is redeemed he will always take a fly rod too far back, just as natural man always overswings with an ax or golf club and loses all his power somewhere in the air; only with a rod it’s worse, because the fly often comes so far back it gets caught behind in a bush or rock. When my father said it was an art that ended at two o’clock, he often added, “closer to twelve than to two,” meaning that the rod should be taken back only slightly farther than overhead (straight overhead being twelve o’clock).

  Then, since it is natural for man to try to attain power without recovering grace, he whips the line back and forth making it whistle each way, and sometimes even snapping off the fly from the leader, but the power that was going to transport the little fly across the river somehow gets diverted into building a bird’s nest of line, leader, and fly that falls out of the air into the water about ten feet in front of the fisherman. If, though, he pictures the round trip of the line, transparent leader, and fly from the time they leave the water until their return, they are easier to cast. They naturally come off the water heavy line first and in front, and light transparent leader and fly trailing behind. But, as they pass overhead, they have to have a little beat of time so the light, transparent leader and fly can catch up to the heavy line now starting forward and again fall behind it; otherwise, the line starting on its return trip will collide with the leader and fly still on their way up, and the mess will be the bird’s nest that splashes into the water ten feet in front of the fisherman.

  Almost the moment, however, that the forward order of line, leader, and fly is reestablished, it has to be reversed, because the fly and transparent leader must be ahead of the heavy line when they settle on the water. If what the fish sees is highly visible line, what the fisherman will see are departing black darts, and he might as well start for the next hole. High overhead, then, on the forward cast (at about ten o’clock) the fisherman checks again.

  The four-count rhythm, of course, is functional. The one count takes the line, leader, and fly off the water; the two count tosses them seemingly straight into the sky; the three count was my father’s way of saying that at the top the leader and fly have to be given a little beat of time to get behind the line as it is starting forward; the four count means put on the power and throw the line into the rod until you reach ten o’clock—then check-cast, let the fly and leader get ahead of the line, and coast to a soft and perfect landing. Power comes not from power everywhere, but from knowing where to put it on. “Remember,” as my father kept saying, “it is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o’clock.”

  My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

  So my brother and I learned to cast Presbyterian-style, on a metronome. It was mother’s metronome, which father had taken from the top of the piano in town. She would occasionally peer down to the dock from the front porch of the cabin, wondering nervously whether her metronome could float if it had to. When she became so overwrought that she thumped down the dock to reclaim it, my father would clap out the four-count rhythm with his cupped hands.

  Eventually, he introduced us to literature on the subject. He tried alway
s to say something stylish as he buttoned the glove on his casting hand. “Izaak Walton,” he told us when my brother was thirteen or fourteen, “is not a respectable writer. He was an Episcopalian and a bait fisherman.” Although Paul was three years younger than I was, he was already far ahead of me in anything relating to fishing and it was he who first found a copy of The Compleat Angler and reported back to me, “The bastard doesn’t even know how to spell ‘complete.’ Besides, he has songs to sing to dairymaids.” I borrowed his copy, and reported back to him, “Some of those songs are pretty good.” He said, “Whoever saw a dairymaid on the Big Blackfoot River?

  “I would like,” he said, “to get him for a day’s fishing on the Big Blackfoot—with a bet on the side.”

  The boy was very angry, and there has never been a doubt in my mind that the boy would have taken the Episcopalian money.

  When you are in your teens—maybe throughout your life—being three years older than your brother often makes you feel he is a boy. However, I knew already that he was going to be a master with a rod. He had those extra things besides fine training—genius, luck, and plenty of self-confidence. Even at this age he liked to bet on himself against anybody who would fish with him, including me, his older brother. It was sometimes funny and sometimes not so funny, to see a boy always wanting to bet on himself and almost sure to win. Although I was three years older, I did not yet feel old enough to bet. Betting, I assumed, was for men who wore straw hats on the backs of their heads. So I was confused and embarrassed the first couple of times he asked me if I didn’t want “a small bet on the side just to make things interesting.” The third time he asked me must have made me angry because he never again spoke to me about money, not even about borrowing a few dollars when he was having real money problems.