While I was relating my past to the present rock, there was another big splash in front of me, but this time I didn’t bother to jump.
Beaver, hell! Without looking, I knew it was my brother. It didn’t happen often in this life, only when his fishing partner was catching fish and he couldn’t. It was a sight, however rare, that he could not bear to watch. So he would spoil his partner’s hole, even if it was his brother’s. I looked up just in time to see a fair-sized boulder come out of the sky and I ducked too late to keep it from splashing all over me.
He had his hat off and he shook his fist at me. I knew he had fished around his hat band before he threw the rocks. I shook my fist back at him, and waded to shore, where my basket was still thumping. In all my life, I had got the rock treatment only a couple of times before. I was feeling more perfect than ever.
I didn’t mind that he spoiled the hole before I had filled my basket, because there was another big hole between us and father. It was a beautiful stretch of water, against cliffs and in shadows. The hole I had just fished was mostly in sunlight—the weather had become cooler, but was still warm enough so that the hole ahead in shadows should be even better than the one in sunlight and I should have no trouble finishing off my basket with a Bunyan Bug No. 2 Yellow Stone Fly.
Paul and I walked nearly the length of the first hole before we could hear each other yell across the river. I knew he hated to be heard yelling, “What were they biting on?” The last two words, “biting on,” kept echoing across the water and pleased me.
When the echoes ceased, I yelled back, “Yellow stone flies.” These words kept saying themselves until they subsided into sounds of the river. He kept turning his hat round and round in his hands.
I possibly began to get a little ashamed of myself. “I caught them on a Bunyan Bug,” I yelled. “Do you want one?”
“No,” he yelled before “want one” had time to echo. Then “want one” and “no” passed each other on the back turns.
“I’ll wade across with one,” I said through the cup of my hands. That’s a lot to say across a river, and the first part of it returning met the last part of it just starting. I didn’t know whether he had understood what I had said, but the river still answered, “No.”
While I was standing in quiet, shady water, I half noticed that no stone flies were hatching, and I should have thought longer about what I saw but instead I found myself thinking about character. It seems somehow natural to start thinking about character when you get ahead of somebody, especially about the character of the one who is behind. I was thinking of how, when things got tough, my brother looked to himself to get himself out of trouble. He never looked for any flies from me. I had a whole round of thoughts on this subject before I returned to reality and yellow stone flies. I started by thinking that, though he was my brother, he was sometimes knot-headed. I pursued this line of thought back to the Greeks who believed that not wanting any help might even get you killed. Then I suddenly remembered that my brother was almost always a winner and often because he didn’t borrow flies. So I decided that the response we make to character on any given day depends largely on the response fish are making to character on the same day. And thinking of the response of fish, I shifted rapidly back to reality, and said to myself, “I still have one more hole to go.”
I didn’t get a strike and I didn’t see a stone fly and it was the same river as the one above, where I could have caught my limit a few minutes before if my brother hadn’t thrown rocks in it. My prize Bunyan Bug began to look like a fake to me as well as to the fish. To me, it looked like a floating mattress. I cast it upstream and let it drift down naturally as if it had died. Then I popped it into the water as if it had been blown there. Then I made it zigzag while retrieving it, as if it were trying to launch itself into flight. But it evidently retained the appearance of a floating mattress. I took it off, and tried several other flies. There were no flies in the water for me to match, and by the same token there were no fish jumping.
I began to cast glances across the river under my hat brim. Paul wasn’t doing much either. I saw him catch one, and he just turned and walked to shore with it, so it couldn’t have been much of a fish. I was feeling a little less than more perfect.
Then Paul started doing something he practically never did, at least not since he had been old enough to be cocky. He suddenly started fishing upstream, back over the water he had just fished. That’s more like me when I feel I haven’t fished the hole right or from the right angle, but, when my brother fished a hole, he assumed nothing was left behind that could be induced to change its mind.
I was so startled I leaned against a big rock to watch.
Almost immediately he started hauling them in. Big ones, and he didn’t spend much time landing them either. I thought he gave them too little line and took them in too fast, but I knew what he was up to. He expected to make a killing in this hole, and he wasn’t going to let any one fish thrash around in the water until it scared the rest off. He had one on now and he held the line on it so tight he was forcing it high in the air. When it jumped, he leaned back on his rod and knocked the fish into the water again. Full of air now, it streaked across the top of the water with its tail like the propeller of a seaplane until it could get its submarine chambers adjusted and submerge again.
He lost a couple but he must have had ten by the time he got back to the head of the hole.
Then he looked across the river and saw me sitting beside my rod. He started fishing again, stopped, and took another look. He cupped his hands and yelled, “Do you have George’s No. 2 Yellow Hackle with a feather not a horsehair wing?” It was fast water and I didn’t get all the words immediately. “No. 2” I caught first, because it is a hell of a big hook, and then “George,” because he was our fishing pal, and then “Yellow.” With that much information I started to look in my box, and let the other words settle into a sentence later.
One bad thing about carrying a box loaded with flies, as I do, is that nearly half the time I still don’t have the right one.
“No,” I admitted across the water, and water keeps repeating your admissions.
“I’ll be there,” he called back and waded upstream.
“No,” I yelled after him, meaning don’t stop fishing on my account. You can’t convey an implied meaning across a river, or, if you can, it is easy to ignore. My brother walked to the lower end of the first hole where the water was shallow and waded across.
By the time he got to me, I had recovered most of the pieces he must have used to figure out what the fish were biting. From the moment he had started fishing upstream his rod was at such a slant and there was so much slack in his line that he must have been fishing with a wet fly and letting it sink. In fact, the slack was such that he must have been letting the fly sink five or six inches. So when I was fishing this hole as I did the last one—with a cork-body fly that rides on top of the water—I was fighting the last war. “No. 2” hook told me of course it was a hell of a big insect, but “yellow” could mean a lot of things. My big question by the time he got to me was, “Are they biting on some aquatic insect in a larval or nymph stage or are they biting on a drowned fly?”
He gave me a pat on the back and one of George’s No. 2 Yellow Hackles with a feather wing. He said, “They are feeding on drowned yellow stone flies.”
I asked him, “How did you think that out?”
He thought back on what had happened like a reporter. He started to answer, shook his head when he found he was wrong, and then started out again. “All there is to thinking,” he said, “is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”
I said to my brother, “Give me a cigarette and say what you mean.”
“Well,” he said, “the first thing I noticed about this hole was that my brother wasn’t catching any. There’s nothing more noticeable to a fisherman than that his partner isn’t c
atching any.
“This made me see that I hadn’t seen any stone flies flying around this hole.”
Then he asked me, “What’s more obvious on earth than sunshine and shadow, but until I really saw that there were no stone flies hatching here I didn’t notice that the upper hole where they were hatching was mostly in sunshine and this hole was in shadow.”
I was thirsty to start with, and the cigarette made my mouth drier so I flipped the cigarette into the water.
“Then I knew,” he said, “if there were flies in this hole they had to come from the hole above that’s in the sunlight where there’s enough heat to make them hatch.
“After that, I should have seen them dead in the water. Since I couldn’t see them dead in the water, I knew they had to be at least six or seven inches under the water where I couldn’t see them. So that’s where I fished.”
He leaned against a big rock with his hands behind his head to make the rock soft. “Wade out there and try George’s No. 2,” he said, pointing at the fly he had given me.
I didn’t catch one right away, and I didn’t expect to. My side of the river was the quiet water, the right side to be on in the hole above where the stone flies were hatching, but the drowned stone flies were washed down in the powerful water on the other side of this hole. After seven or eight casts, though, a small ring appeared on the surface. A small ring usually means that a small fish has risen to the surface, but it can also mean a big fish has rolled under water. If it is a big fish under water, he won’t look so much like a fish as an arch of a rainbow that has appeared and disappeared.
Paul didn’t even wait to see if I landed him. He waded out to talk to me. He went on talking as if I had time to listen to him and land a big fish. He said, “I’m going to wade back again and fish the rest of the hole.” Sometimes I said, “Yes,” and when the fish went out of the water, speech failed me, and when the fish made a long run I said at the end of it, “You’ll have to say that over again.”
Finally, we understood each other. He was going to wade the river again and fish the other side. We both should fish fairly fast, because Father probably was already waiting for us. Paul threw his cigarette in the water and was gone without seeing whether I landed the fish.
Not only was I on the wrong side of the river to fish with drowned stone flies, but Paul was a good enough roll caster to have already fished most of my side from his own. But I caught two more. They also started as little circles that looked like little fish feeding on the surface but were broken arches of big rainbows under water. After I caught these two, I quit. They made ten, and the last three were the finest fish I ever caught. They weren’t the biggest or most spectacular fish I ever caught, but they were three fish I caught because my brother waded across the river to give me the fly that would catch them and because they were the last fish I ever caught fishing with him.
After cleaning my fish, I set these three apart with a layer of grass and wild mint.
Then I lifted the heavy basket, shook myself into the shoulder strap until it didn’t cut any more, and thought, “I’m through for the day. I’ll go down and sit on the bank by my father and talk.” Then I added, “If he doesn’t feel like talking, I’ll just sit.”
I could see the sun ahead. The coming burst of light made it look from the shadows that I and a river inside the earth were about to appear on earth. Although I could as yet see only the sunlight and not anything in it, I knew my father was sitting somewhere on the bank. I knew partly because he and I shared many of the same impulses, even to quitting at about the same time. I was sure without as yet being able to see into what was in front of me that he was sitting somewhere in the sunshine reading the New Testament in Greek. I knew this both from instinct and experience.
Old age had brought him moments of complete peace. Even when we went duck hunting and the roar of the early morning shooting was over, he would sit in the blind wrapped in an old army blanket with his Greek New Testament in one hand and his shotgun in the other. When a stray duck happened by, he would drop the book and raise the gun, and, after the shooting was over, he would raise the book again, occasionally interrupting his reading to thank his dog for retrieving the duck.
The voices of the subterranean river in the shadows were different from the voices of the sunlit river ahead. In the shadows against the cliff the river was deep and engaged in profundities, circling back on itself now and then to say things over to be sure it had understood itself. But the river ahead came out into the sunny world like a chatterbox, doing its best to be friendly. It bowed to one shore and then to the other so nothing would feel neglected.
By now I could see inside the sunshine and had located my father. He was sitting high on the bank. He wore no hat. Inside the sunlight, his faded red hair was once again ablaze and again in glory. He was reading, although evidently only by sentences because he often looked away from the book. He did not close the book until some time after he saw me.
I scrambled up the bank and asked him, “How many did you get?” He said, “I got all I want.” I said, “But how many did you get?” He said, “I got four or five.” I asked, “Are they any good?” He said, “They are beautiful.”
He was about the only man I ever knew who used the word “beautiful” as a natural form of speech, and I guess I picked up the habit from hanging around him when I was little.
“How many did you catch?” he asked. “I also caught all I want,” I told him. He omitted asking me just how many that was, but he did ask me, “Are they any good?” “They are beautiful,” I told him, and sat down beside him.
“What have you been reading?” I asked. “A book,” he said. It was on the ground on the other side of him. So I would not have to bother to look over his knees to see it, he said, “A good book.”
Then he told me, “In the part I was reading it says the Word was in the beginning, and that’s right. I used to think water was first, but if you listen carefully you will hear that the words are underneath the water.”
“That’s because you are a preacher first and then a fisherman,” I told him. “If you ask Paul, he will tell you that the words are formed out of water.”
“No,” my father said, “you are not listening carefully. The water runs over the words. Paul will tell you the same thing. Where is Paul anyway?”
I told him he had gone back to fish the first hole over again. “But he promised to be here soon,” I assured him. “He’ll be here when he catches his limit,” he said. “He’ll be here soon,” I reassured him, partly because I could already see him in the subterranean shadows.
My father went back to reading and I tried to check what we had said by listening. Paul was fishing fast, picking up one here and there and wasting no time in walking them to shore. When he got directly across from us, he held up a finger on each hand and my father said, “He needs two more for his limit.”
I looked to see where the book was left open and knew just enough Greek to recognize *** as the Word. I guessed from it and the argument that I was looking at the first verse of John. While I was looking, Father said, “He has one on.”
It was hard to believe, because he was fishing in front of us on the other side of the hole that Father had just fished. Father slowly rose, found a good-sized rock and held it behind his back. Paul landed the fish, and waded out again for number twenty and his limit. Just as he was making the first cast, Father threw the rock. He was old enough so that he threw awkwardly and afterward had to rub his shoulder, but the rock landed in the river about where Paul’s fly landed and at about the same time, so you can see where my brother learned to throw rocks into his partner’s fishing water when he couldn’t bear to see his partner catch any more fish.
Paul was startled for only a moment. Then he spotted Father on the bank rubbing his shoulder, and Paul laughed, shook his fist at him, backed to shore and went downstream until he was out of rock range. From there he waded into the water and began to cast again, but now he was far en
ough away so we couldn’t see his line or loops. He was a man with a wand in a river, and whatever happened we had to guess from what the man and the wand and the river did.
As he waded out, his big right arm swung back and forth. Each circle of his arm inflated his chest. Each circle was faster and higher and longer until his arm became defiant and his chest breasted the sky. On shore we were sure, although we could see no line, that the air above him was singing with loops of line that never touched the water but got bigger and bigger each time they passed and sang. And we knew what was in his mind from the lengthening defiance of his arm. He was not going to let his fly touch any water close to shore where the small and middle-sized fish were. We knew from his arm and chest that all parts of him were saying, “No small one for the last one.” Everything was going into one big cast for one last big fish.
From our angle high on the bank, my father and I could see where in the distance the wand was going to let the fly first touch water. In the middle of the river was a rock iceberg, just its tip exposed above water and underneath it a rock house. It met all the residential requirements for big fish—powerful water carrying food to the front and back doors, and rest and shade behind them.
My father said, “There has to be a big one out there.”
I said, “A little one couldn’t live out there.”
My father said, “The big one wouldn’t let it.”
My father could tell by the width of Paul’s chest that he was going to let the next loop sail. It couldn’t get any wider. “I wanted to fish out there,” he said, “but I couldn’t cast that far.”
Paul’s body pivoted as if he were going to drive a golf ball three hundred yards, and his arm went high into the great arc and the tip of his wand bent like a spring, and then everything sprang and sang.
Suddenly, there was an end of action. The man was immobile. There was no bend, no power in the wand. It pointed at ten o’clock and ten o’clock pointed at the rock. For a moment the man looked like a teacher with a pointer illustrating something about a rock to a rock. Only water moved. Somewhere above the top of the rock house a fly was swept in water so powerful only a big fish could be there to see it.
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories Page 12