I had no choice now but to cast into the willows if I wanted to know why fish were jumping in the water all around me except in this hole, and I still wanted to know, because it is not fly fishing if you are not looking for answers to questions.
Since I hadn’t used this cast for some time, I decided to practice up a bit, so I dropped downstream to make a few casts into the bushes. Then I walked cautiously upstream to where the osiers were thickest, watching my feet and not rattling any rocks.
The cast was high and soft when it went by my head, the opposite of what it would have been if it was being driven into the wind. I was excited, but kept my arm cool and under my control. Instead of putting on power as the line started forward, I let it float on until the vertical periscope in my eye or brain or arm or wherever it is told me my fly was over the edge of the nearest osiers. Then I put a check cast into the line, and it began to drop almost straight down. Ten or fifteen feet before the fly lights, you can tell whether a cast like this is going to be perfect, and, if necessary, still make slight corrections. The cast is so soft and slow that it can be followed like an ash settling from a fireplace chimney. One of life’s quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.
The leader settled on the lowest branch of the bush and the fly swung on its little pendulum three or four inches from the water, or maybe it was five or six. To complete the cast, I was supposed next to shake the line with my rod, so, if the line wasn’t caught in the bush, the fly would drop into the water underneath. I may have done this, or maybe the fish blew out of the water and took my fly as it soared up the bush. It is the only time I have ever fought a fish in a tree.
Indians used to make baskets out of the red branches of osiers, so there was no chance the branches would break. It was fish or fisherman.
Something odd, detached, and even slightly humorous happens to a big-fish fisherman a moment after a big fish strikes. In the arm, shoulder, or brain of a big-fish fisherman is a scale, and the moment the big fish goes in the air the big-fish fisherman, no matter what his blood pressure is, places the scale under the fish and coolly weighs him. He doesn’t have hands and arms enough to do all the other things he should be doing at the same time, but he tries to be fairly exact about the weight of the fish so he won’t be disappointed when he catches him. I said to myself, “This son of a bitch weighs seven or eight pounds,” and I tried to allow for the fact that I might be weighing part of the bush.
The air was filled with dead leaves and green berries from the osiers, but their branches held. As the big Brown went up the bush, he tied a different knot on every branch he passed. He wove that bush into a basket with square knots, bowlines, and double half hitches.
The body and spirit suffer no more sudden visitation than that of losing a big fish, since, after all, there must be some slight transition between life and death. But, with a big fish, one moment the world is nuclear and the next it has disappeared. That’s all. It has gone. The fish has gone and you are extinct, except for four and a half ounces of stick to which is tied some line and a semitransparent thread of catgut to which is tied a little curved piece of Swedish steel to which is tied a part of a feather from a chicken’s neck.
I don’t even know which way he went. As far as I know, he may have gone right on up the bush and disappeared into thin air.
I waded out to the bush to see if any signs of reality had been left behind. There was some fishing tackle strung around, but my hands trembled so I couldn’t untie the complicated knots that wove it into the branches.
Even Moses could not have trembled more when his bush blew up on him. Finally, I untied my line from the leader and left the rest of the mess in the willows.
Poets talk about “spots of time,” but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. I shall remember that son of a bitch forever.
A voice said, “He was a big one.” It could have been my brother, or it could have been the fish circling back in the air and bragging about himself behind my back.
I turned and said to my brother, “I missed him.” He had seen it all, so if I had known of something else I would have mentioned it. Instead, I repeated, “I missed him.” I looked down at my hands, and the palms were turned up, as if in supplication.
“There wasn’t anything you could have done about it,” he said. “You can’t catch a big fish in the brush. In fact, I never saw anyone try it before.”
I figured he was just trying to sprinkle me with comfort, especially when I couldn’t help seeing a couple of gigantic brown tails with gigantic black spots sticking out of his basket. “How did you catch yours?” I asked. I was very excited, and asked whatever I wanted to know.
He said, “I got them in shallow, open water where there weren’t any bushes.”
I asked, “Big ones like that in shallow, open water?”
He said, “Yes, big Brown Trout. You are used to fishing for big Rainbow in big water. But big Browns often feed along the edges of a bank in a meadow where grasshoppers and even mice fall in. You walk along the shallow water until you can see black backs sticking out of it and mud swirling.”
This left me even more dismayed. I thought that I had fished the hole perfectly and just the way my brother had taught me, except he hadn’t told me what to do when a fish goes up a tree. That’s one trouble with hanging around a master—you pick up some of his stuff, like how to cast into a bush, but you use it just when the master is doing the opposite.
I was still excited. There was still some great hollow inside me to be filled and needed the answer to another question. Until I asked it, I had no idea what it would be. “Can I help you with money or anything?” I asked.
Alarmed by hearing myself, I tried to calm down quickly. Instead, having made a mistake, I made it worse. “I thought you might need some help because of the other night,” I said.
Probably he took my reference to the other night as a reference to his Indian girl, so, to change the subject, I said, “I thought maybe it cost you a lot to fix the front end of your car the night you chased the rabbit.” Now I had made three mistakes.
He acted as if his father had offered to help him to a bowl of oatmeal. He bowed his head in silence until he was sure I wouldn’t say anything more. Then he said, “It’s going to rain.”
I glanced at the sky which I had forgotten about since the world had become no higher than a bush. There was a sky above all right, but it was all one black cloud that must have been a great weight for the canyon to bear.
My brother asked, “Where’s Neal?”
The question caught me by surprise, and I had to think until I found him. “I left him at the first bend,” I said finally.
“You’ll get hell for that,” my brother told me.
That remark enlarged my world until it included a half-ton truck and several Scottish women. “I know,” I replied, and started taking my rod down. “I’m through for the day,” I said, nodding at my rod.
Paul asked, “Do you have your limit?” I said, “No,” even though I knew he was asking if I wasn’t already in enough trouble without quitting short of my limit. To women who do not fish, men who come home without their limit are failures in life.
My brother also felt much the same way. “It would take you only a few minutes to finish up your limit with Brookies,” he said, “they are still jumping all over. I’ll smoke a cigarette while you catch six more.”
I said, “Thanks, but I’m through for the day,” although I knew he couldn’t understand why six more little Eastern Brook Trout would make no difference in my view of life. Clearly by now it was one of those days when the world outside wasn’t going to let me do what I really wanted to do—catch a big Brown Trout and talk to my brother in some helpful way. Instead there was an empty bush and it was ab
out to rain.
Paul said, “Come on, let’s go and find Neal.” Then he added, “You shouldn’t have left him behind.”
“What?” I asked.
“You should try to help him,” he replied.
I could find words but not sentences they could fit. “I didn’t leave him. He doesn’t like me. He doesn’t like Montana. He left me to go bait fishing. He can’t even bait-fish. Me, I don’t like anything about him.”
I could feel all the excitement of losing the big fish going through the transformer and coming out as anger at my brother-in-law. I could also feel that I was repeating myself without quite saying the same thing. Even so, I asked, “Do you think you should help him?”
“Yes,” he said, “I thought we were going to.”
“How?” I asked.
“By taking him fishing with us.”
“I’ve just told you,” I said, “he doesn’t like to fish.”
“Maybe so,” my brother replied. “But maybe what he likes is somebody trying to help him.”
I still do not understand my brother. He himself always turned aside any offer of help, but in some complicated way he was surely talking about himself when he was talking about Neal needing help. “Come on,” he said, “let’s find him before he gets lost in the storm.” He tried to put his arm around my shoulders but his fish basket with big tails sticking out of it came between us and made it difficult. We both looked clumsy—I in trying to offer him help, and he in trying to thank me for it.
“Let’s get a move on,” I said. We hit the trail and started upstream. The black cloud was taking over the canyon completely. The dimensions of the world were compressed to about 900’n x 900’n x 900’n. It must have been something like this in 1949 when the giant fire from Mann Gulch, the next gulch up the Missouri, swept over the divide into the Elkhorn. Mann Gulch was where the Forest Service dropped sixteen of its crack smoke jumpers, thirteen of whom had to be identified later by their dental work. That’s the way the storm came down the Elkhorn—about to obliterate it.
As if a signal had been given, not a fish jumped. Then the wind came. The water left the creek and went up in the bushes, like my fish. The air along the creek was filled with osier leaves and green berries. Then the air disappeared from view. It was present only as cones and branches that struck my face and kept going.
The storm came on a wild horse and rode over us.
We started across the meadow at the bend to look for Neal but soon we weren’t even sure where we were. My lips ran with wet water. “The bastard isn’t here,” I said, although neither of us knew exactly where “here” was. “No,” my brother said, “he’s there.” Then he added, “And dry.” So we both knew where “there” was.
By the time we got back to the truck the rain had become steady, controlled now by gravity. Paul and I had put our cigarettes and matches inside our hats to keep them dry, but I could feel the water running around the roots of my hair.
The truck emerged out of the storm as if out of the pioneer past, looking like a covered wagon besieged by circling rain. Ken must have hurried back from the beaver dams in time to get out a couple of old tarpaulins, cut some poles and then stretch the tarps over the box of the truck. It was up to me and not my brother to be the first to poke my head through the canvas and be the “African dodger” in the sideshow at the old circus who stuck his head through a canvas drop and let anyone throw a baseball at it for a dime. With my head in the hole, however, I froze, powerless to duck anything that might be thrown or even to determine the order in which things appeared. The actual order turned out not to be of my choosing.
First it was the women who appeared and then the old mattress, the women appearing first because two of them held carving knives and the other, my wife, held a long fork, all of which glittered in the semidarkness under the tarps. The women squatted on the floor of the box, and had been making sandwiches until they saw my head appear like a target on canvas. Then they pointed their cutlery at me.
In the middle of the box there was a leak where the tarps sagged and did not quite come together. Behind in the far end of the box was the old mattress, but, because of the cutlery, I couldn’t see it in detail.
My wife said, pointing the long fork at me, “You went off and left him.”
My mother-in-law, stroking her knife on steel, said, “Poor boy, he’s not well. He was exposed to the sun too long.”
With the only words I was able to utter while my throat was in this exposed position, I asked, “Is that what he told you?”
“Yes, poor boy,” she said, and wiggled to the rear of the box and stroked his head with one hand while keeping a firm hold on the carving knife with the other. Being short a hand, she left the steel behind.
The cracks between the tarps let in a lot of water but not much light, so it took some time for my eyes to get adjusted to my brother-in-law lying on the mattress. The light first picked up his brow, which was serene but pale, as mine would have been if my mother had spent her life in making me sandwiches and protecting me from reality.
My brother stuck his head through the tarps and stood beside me. It made me feel better having a representative of my family present. I thought, “Some day I hope I can help him as much.”
The women made my brother a sandwich. As for me, my head and shoulders were under cover, but the rest of me might as well have been under a rain spout. Paul was in the same shape, and no one made a move to push closer together and make room for us inside. The bastard had the whole upper end of the box to himself. Instead of lying all over the mattress, all he had to do was sit up.
Outside, the water came down my back on a wide front, crowded into a narrow channel across my rear end, and then divided into two branches and emptied into my socks.
When the women weren’t using their hardware to make sandwiches for Neal they were pointing it at me. I could smell all the sandwiches they weren’t making for me and I could smell water leaking through canvas and turning to vapor from the warmth of crowded bodies and I could also smell the vapor of last night’s booze rising from the old mattress. You probably know that Indians build their sweat baths on the banks of rivers. After they become drenched with sweat they immediately jump into the cold water outside, and, it may be added, sometimes they immediately die. I felt that at the same time I was both halves of myself and a sweat bath and a cold river and about to die.
I entertained a series of final thoughts. “How could the bastard suffer from too much sun? The bastard hasn’t seen more than a couple of hours of sunlight since he left Montana to go to the West Coast.” I had a special thought for my wife. To keep things straight with her, I thought, “I did not leave your brother. Your brother, who is a bastard, left me.” All this, of course, was internal. For my mother-in-law I tried to think of the time she must have committed adultery. For both my wife and her mother, I thought, “The only thing the matter with the bastard is that all the antifreeze he poured into his radiator last night at Black Jack’s has drained out.”
It rained all the way back to Wolf Creek, and we were stuck in the gumbo all the way from the Elkhorn to Jim McGregor’s ranch house, where the road turned to gravel. Of course, Ken drove the truck and Paul and I pushed. I pushed on an empty stomach. Just before I felt the sides of my stomach collapse, I went around to the driver’s side of the cab, and asked, “Ken, how about getting your brother off his mattress to help us push?”
Ken said to me, “You know more about a truck than that. You know I have to have ballast in the rear end, or the rear wheels will just spin and not pull us out of the mud.”
I went back to the rear end, and Paul and I pushed the ballast to the ranch house. It was just as hard pushing downhill as uphill. We might as well have been in eastern Montana pushing a half-ton truck plus ballast up the Powder River, where they invented gumbo.
When we reached Wolf Creek, Paul stayed to help me unload the truck, which was overweight with mud and water. We unloaded the mattress last. Th
en I started for bed, being all in, or maybe being just weak from hunger, and Paul left for Helena. On my way to my room I saw Neal and his mother at the front door. The ballast had put on two red-white-and-blue Davis Cup sweaters. He was lying to his mother who had caught him before he got all the way out. He was in the pink of condition. I knew of two grocery crates who would be glad to see him.
I went to bed and fought off sleep until I collected enough of my wits to come to a fairly obvious conclusion and to consolidate it into one sentence. “If I don’t get out of my wife’s home for a few days I am not going to have any wife left.” So I telephoned my brother the next morning from the grocery store where no one at the house could hear. I asked him if he didn’t have a little time coming yet from his summer vacation, because I needed to be at Seeley Lake for a while.
Seeley Lake is where we have our summer cabin. It is only seventeen miles from the Blackfoot Canyon and not much farther from the Swan, a river beautiful as its name as it floats by the Mission Glaciers. I think my brother still felt yesterday’s rain running down his back, when no one moved to let us crawl under the tarp, so he understood what was on my mind. Anyway, he said, “I’ll ask the boss.”
That night I asked my wife a question—in dealing with her I had a better chance to dominate the situation by asking a question than by making a series of declarative sentences. So I asked my wife, “Don’t you think it would be a good idea for Paul and me to spend a few days at Seeley Lake?” She looked right through me and said, “Yes.”
I survived the next day and the day following, when Paul and I crossed the Continental Divide and left the world behind, so I thought. But the moment we started flowing into the Pacific, Paul began to tell me about a new girl he had picked up. I listened on my toes, ready to jump in any direction.
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories Page 7