A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

by Norman Maclean

  I was in the same old box. Maybe he was telling me something I wouldn’t like but would dislike less if I heard it first as literature—or maybe I was wasting my time in being suspicious—maybe he was just my brother and a reporter passing on news items to me that were too personal or poetical to be published.

  “She’s kind of funny,” he said, when it was clear we were coasting down the western slope of our continent. “Yes,” he said, as though I had commented, “she’s kind of funny. The only place she’ll let you screw her is in the boys’ locker room in the high school gymnasium.”

  What he said next sounded as if it also were in answer to something I had said, and maybe it was. “Oh, she’s got that all figured out. She knows a window in the boys’ toilet that’s always unlocked and I push her up and then she reaches down and gives me a hand.”

  The next he said on his own. “She makes you screw her on the rubbing table.”

  I spent the rest of the way to Seeley Lake trying to figure out whether he was telling me he was in trouble with some dame or whether he was seeing to it that I kept enlarging my mental life even though I had gone off and married. I went on thinking until I noticed that I could smell witch hazel, rubbing alcohol, hot radiators with sweat clothes drying on them, and the insides of boys’ lockers that wouldn’t be cleaned out until the end of the football season.

  I also thought, “It’s damn hot right here now. The fishing isn’t going to be much good. The fish will all be lying on the bottom.” Then I tried to imagine a fish lying on its back on a rubbing table. It was hard to keep things fluid and not to fix on the picture of the fish helping the fisherman through the window in the toilet of the boys’ locker room. About then we drove into the big tamaracks where our cabin is. There suddenly it was cool. The tamaracks are from eight to twelve hundred years old, their age and height keeping the heat out. We went swimming even before we unloaded the car.

  After we had dressed but before we had combed our hair we carried out our swimming trunks and were hanging them on a clothes line that runs between two balsams. The line had been put up high where deer couldn’t catch their horns in it, so I was standing on my toes trying to get a clothespin to stay when I heard a car turn off the Forest Service road into our lane.

  My brother said, “Don’t look around.”

  The car drove right up behind my back and stopped. Its engine panted in the heat. Even though it was panting in the curve of my back I didn’t look around. Then somebody fell out of its front door.

  When I looked, clothespin still in hand, I saw I had been in error in thinking somebody had fallen out of the front door of the car, because the car had no front door. It had floorboards, though, in the front, and on the floorboards sat a Hills Bros. coffee can, a bottle of 3-7-77, and an open bottle of strawberry pop. In Montana, we don’t care whether the whiskey is much good if we can get strawberry pop for a chaser.

  Just as if the scene had been taken for a Western film, it was high noon. My brother-in-law nodded in the driver’s seat, as he probably had all the way from Wolf Creek.

  Old Rawhide picked herself up out of the tamarack needles where she had fallen, took a look around to get reoriented, and then started walking straight for me. She would have walked through my brother if he hadn’t reluctantly moved out of the way.

  “Glad to meet you,” she said to me, reaching out toward my hand that held the clothespin. Mechanically, I shifted the clothespin to the other hand, so she could shake the hand she was reaching for.

  Sometimes a thing in front of you is so big you don’t know whether to comprehend it by first getting a dim sense of the whole and then fitting in the pieces or by adding up the pieces until something calls out what it is. I put only a few pieces together before my voice called to me, “You’ll never make your brother believe you didn’t sucker him into this.”

  “How are you, anyway?” she asked. “I’ve brought Buster to go fishing with you.”

  She always called Neal “Buster.” She had slept with so many men that the problem of remembering their names boggled her mind. By now all men besides Black Jack, Long Bow, and her two rodeo artists she called Buster, except me—me she just called “you.” She could remember me but she could never remember that she had met me.

  “Buster hasn’t any money anymore,” she said. “He needs your help.”

  Paul said to me, “Help him.”

  I asked, “How much money does he need?”

  “We don’t want your money,” she said, “We want to go fishing with you.”

  She was drinking pink whiskey out of a pink paper cup. I went over to the car and asked the window next to the driver’s seat, “Do you want to go fishing?”

  Clearly, he had memorized a line in case he could not hear. He said, “I would like to go fishing with you and Paul.”

  I told him, “It’s too hot to go fishing now.” The dust was still drifting through the woods from the gravel turnoff to our lane.

  He repeated, “I would like to go fishing with you and Paul.”

  Paul said, “Let’s go.”

  I said to Paul, “Let’s all get in our car, and I’ll drive.”

  Paul said, “I’ll drive,” and I said, “OK.”

  Old Rawhide and Neal didn’t like the idea of all of us going in our car. I think they wanted to be alone but they had become frightened or tired of being alone and wanted us somewhere around, though not in the front seat. Paul and I didn’t argue. He got in the driver’s seat and I sat next to him, and they mumbled to themselves. Finally, she started moving their stuff to our back seat—first the pink pop and then the red Hills Bros. coffee can.

  I thought I noticed for the first time that they didn’t have a fishing rod with them. If it had been anybody but Paul I would have asked him to hold it a minute while I checked to see if their rods had been left in their car, but for Paul the world of mercy did not include fishermen who left their tackle behind. He was tender to me and quick to offer them help, and would never kick about having to take them fishing at high noon while all the fish were lying at the bottom, but it would be just too damn bad for them if they didn’t think enough about fishing to be able to fish when they got there.

  They leaned on each other and slept. I was glad I did not have to drive—I had too many things to feel about. For instance, I felt about why women are such a bunch of suckers and how they all want to help some bastard like him—and not me. I felt an especially long time about why, when I tried to help somebody, I ended up offering him money or taking him fishing.

  One steep grade and we were out of the pines and the cool chain of lakes and into the glare of Blanchard Flats. Paul asked, “Which way do you want to turn when we get to the junction with the Blackfoot road?” “Up,” I said. “The canyon is too rough water for them to fish. Let’s turn up to the head of the canyon where there are some fine holes before the river goes into the cliffs.” So we left the main road at the head of the flats and bumped over glacial remains until we came to a big fork in the river with Ponderosa pines beside it where we could park our car in the shade.

  In the middle of the river where it had forked was a long sand bar. If you could wade out there, you had a perfect fishing spot. Big fish on either side of you, and no sunken logs or big roots or rocks to foul you up when you were landing them—just sand to skid them over so that they scarcely noticed they lay on land until they gasped for water.

  Although I had fished this hole many times, I went to take another look at it before I put up my rod. I approached it step by step like an animal that has been shot at before. Once I had rushed down rod in hand to demolish a fish on the first cast and actually had made the first cast when part of the mountain on the other side started falling into the river. I had never seen the bear and he evidently had never seen me until he heard me swear when I was slow in reacting to the first strike. I didn’t even know what the bear had been doing—fishing, swimming, drinking. All I know is that he led a landslide up the mountain.

>   If you have never seen a bear go over the mountain, you have never seen the job reduced to its essentials. Of course, deer are faster, but not going straight uphill. Not even elk have the power in their hindquarters. Deer and elk zigzag and switchback and stop and pose while really catching their breath. The bear leaves the earth like a bolt of lightning retrieving itself and making its thunder backwards.

  Paul had his rod up when I got back to the car. He asked me, “Are Neal and his friend coming?” I looked in the back of the car where they were still asleep, except that they stirred when I merely looked so maybe they weren’t. I said, “Neal, wake up and tell us what you want to do.” Much against his will, he made fitful efforts to wake up. Finally, he shed Old Rawhide off his shoulder and got out of the car stiffly, already an old man. Looking over the bank, he asked, “What about that hole?” I told him, “It’s a good one. In fact, so are the next four or five.”

  “Can you wade out to the sand bar?” he asked, and I told him not usually but it had been so hot lately the river had dropped a foot or more and he shouldn’t have any trouble.

  “That’s what I’ll do, I’ll stay here and fish,” Neal said. He never once referred to her. Besides being devoted to the art of ignoring women, he also knew that Paul and I didn’t think she should be here, so he may have thought if he didn’t mention her we wouldn’t notice her.

  Old Rawhide woke up and handed Paul the bottle of 3-7-77. “Have a snort,” she said. Paul took her hand and moved it around to where she was offering the drink to Neal. As I said, for several reasons, including our father, Paul and I did not drink when we fished. Afterwards, yes, in fact, as soon as our wet clothes were off and we could stand on them instead of the pine needles one of us would reach for the glove compartment in the car where we always carried a bottle.

  If you think what I am about to tell you next is a contradiction to this, then you will have to realize that in Montana drinking beer does not count as drinking.

  Paul opened the trunk of our car and counted out eight bottles of beer. He said to Neal, “Four for you and four for us. We’ll sink two of them in each of the next two holes for you. They’ll make you forget the heat.” He told them where we would bury the bottles and then he should have thought before he told them he would hide our beer in the two following holes where we would finish fishing on our way back from the cliffs.

  What a beautiful world it was once. At least a river of it was. And it was almost mine and my family’s and just a few others’ who wouldn’t steal beer. You could leave beer to cool in the river, and it would be so cold when you got back it wouldn’t foam much. It would be a beer made in the next town if the town were ten thousand or over. So it was either Kessler Beer made in Helena or Highlander Beer made in Missoula that we left to cool in the Blackfoot River. What a wonderful world it was once when all the beer was not made in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or St. Louis.

  We covered the beer with rocks so it wouldn’t wash away. Then we started walking downstream a fishing distance. It was so hot even Paul was in no great rush. Suddenly he interrupted the lethargy. “Some day,” he said, “Neal is going to find out about himself and he won’t come back to Montana. He doesn’t like Montana.”

  My only preparation for this remark was that I had seen him studying Neal’s face when he was waking up. I said, “I know he doesn’t like to fish. He just likes to tell women he likes to fish. It does something for him and the women. And for the fish, too,” I added. “It makes them all feel better.”

  It was so hot we stopped and sat on a log. When we were silent we could hear the needles falling like dry leaves. Suddenly the needles stopped. “I should leave Montana,” he said. “I should go to the West Coast.”

  I had thought that, too, but I asked, “Why?”

  “Here,” he said, “I cover local sports and personal items and the police blotter. I don’t have anything to do. Here I will never have anything to do.”

  “Except fish and hunt,” I told him.

  “And get into trouble,” he added.

  I told him again, “I’ve told you before I think I could be of some help if you want to work for a big paper. Then maybe you could do your own stuff—special features, even some day your own column.”

  It was so hot that the mirages on the river melted into each other. It was hard to know whether the utterances I had heard were delphic. He said, “Jesus, it’s hot. Let’s hit the river and cool off.”

  He stood and picked up his rod, and his beautiful silk-wrapped rod shimmered like the air around it. “I’ll never leave Montana,” he said. “Let’s go fishing.”

  As we separated he said, “And I like the trouble that goes with it.” So we were back to where we had started, and it was so hot the fishing just couldn’t be any good.

  And it wasn’t. In the middle of a heat spell death comes to running water at high noon. You cast and cast on top of it, and nothing comes up out of it. Not even frogs jump. You begin to think you are the only moving thing in it. Maybe in the evolutionary process all life migrated from water to dry land, all except you and you are on the way with the part of you not in the water parching in the unaccustomed air. With the sun bouncing back at you from the water and hitting under your eyebrows, even your hat doesn’t do any good.

  I knew it was going to be tough before I started, so I tried to be extra sharp. I fished in front and back of big rocks where the fish ccould be in the shade and the water would bring them food without their having to work for it. I concentrated, too, on the water that slid under bushes where the fish could lie in the shade and wait for insects to hatch in the limbs and drop before them. There was nothing in the shade but shadows.

  On the assumption that if an idea doesn’t produce anything at all, then the opposite might work, I gave up shade entirely and walked into the open meadow that was crackling with grasshoppers. To one familiar with a subject, there is no trouble to find reasons for the opposite idea. I said to myself, “It is summer and the grasshoppers are out in the sun and the fish will be, too.” I put on a cork-bellied fly that looked like one of those big, juicy, yellow hoppers. I fished close to shore where even big fish wait for grasshoppers to make one mistake. After fishing with the floating cork grasshopper, I put on a big fly with a yellow wool body that would absorb water and sink like a dead grasshopper. Still, not even a frog jumped.

  The brain gives up a lot less easily than the body, so fly fishermen have developed what they call the “curiosity theory,” which is about what it says it is. It is the theory that fish, like men, will sometimes strike at things just to find out what they are and not because they look good to eat. With most fly fishermen, it is the “last resort theory,” but it sometimes almost works. I put on a fly that George Croonenberghs had tied for me when he was a kid and several decades before he became one of the finest fly tyers of the West. This fly, tied in a moment of juvenile enthusiasm, had about everything on it from deer hair to fool-hen feathers.

  Once when I was fishing on the upper Blackfoot I saw a strange thing with a neck and head being washed downstream while trying to swim straight across. I couldn’t figure out what it was until it landed and shook itself. Then I recognized that it was a bobcat, and, in case you don’t know what a wet bobcat looks like, it looks like a little wet cat. While this one was wet, it was a skinny, meek little thing, but after it got dry and fluffy again and felt sure that it was a cat once more, it turned around, took a look at me, and hissed.

  I hope my old fishing pal, George Croonenberghs, doesn’t mind my saying that this juvenile creation of his struggling in the water looked something like the bobcat. Anyway, it looked like something interesting to a fish.

  Out of the lifeless and hopeless depths, life appeared. He came so slowly it seemed as if he and history were being made on the way. After a while he got to be ten inches long. He came closer and closer, but beyond a certain point he never got any bigger, so I guess that’s how big he was. At what seemed a safe distance, the ten-incher bega
n to circle George’s Bobcat Special. I have never seen such large disbelieving eyes in such a little fish. He kept his eyes always on the fly and seemed to let the water circle him around it. Then he turned himself over to gravity and slowly sank. When he got to be about a six-incher he reversed himself and became a ten-incher again to give George’s fly a final inspection. Halfway round the circle he took his eye off the fly and saw me and darted out of sight. This undoubtedly is the only time that a fish ever seriously studied George’s juvenile creation, although I still carry it with me for sentimental reasons.

  I abandoned the curiosity theory, got down on my belly and had a drink of water and was thirstier when I finished. I began to think of that beer, and of quitting this waste of time. In fact, I would have quit and sat in the shade, except that I didn’t want to be sitting in the shade when my brother asked, “How many did you get?” and I had to answer, “I went for the horse collar.” So I said to myself prayerfully, “I’ll try one more hole.”

  I don’t like to pray and not have my prayers come true, so I walked a long way on the bank looking for this last prayerful hole. When I saw it, actually I wasn’t looking hard because it was an ordinary piece of water, but when I took a sudden second look I could see that fish were jumping all over it. Almost at the same moment I smelled something, and it smelled bad. In fact, on a hot day it smelled very bad. I didn’t want to get any closer, but hitherto nonexistent fish were jumping right in front of me. I circled the dead beaver halfway down the bank and made for the water. I knew I was set.

  When I saw the dead beaver I knew why the fish were jumping. Even a weekend fisherman would know that the dead beaver had drawn a swarm of bees that were flying low over the ground and water. Being my kind of fisherman, I knew I had the right fly to match them, and I did not think that my brother would. He didn’t carry many flies—they were all in his hat band, twenty or twenty-five at the most, but really only four or five kinds, since each one was in several sizes. They were what fishermen call “generals,” each a fly with which a skillful fisherman can imitate a good many insects and in different stages from larval to winged. My brother felt about flies much the way my father, who was a fine carpenter, felt about tools—he maintained anybody could make a showing as a carpenter if he had enough tools. But I wasn’t a good enough fisherman to be disdainful of tools. I carried a boxful of flies, the “generals” and also what fishermen call the “specials”—flies that imitate a very specific hatch, such as flying ants, mayflies, stone flies, spruce bugs. And bees.