Sportsman's Legacy

by William G. Tapply

  We are trout predators, Dad said. We must be smarter and warier than the trout if we should hope to get one to bite.

  I loved the idea of being a trout predator. It seemed to make the trout at least my equal. I liked that I had to be as stealthy as a mink or a heron to catch one. You didn’t just roll-cast a worm out into the water and wait for a trout to come along and twitch at your line. You had to figure out where a trout might be hiding, and you had to stalk him without his knowing it. You had to drift your worm to him in such a way that he would mistake it for a natural bait and decide, despite all of his survival-tuned instincts, to eat it.

  This trout fishing did not involve sophisticated equipment or complex strategies or esoteric science. It was basic, but subtle, too. Fishing for native brook trout in this wild little brook, I understood, was a kind of hunting. It was, as worm dunking for panfish was not, real fishing. Wild brook trout were real fish.

  We hit the brook somewhere in the middle of the swamp and fished it back toward the car. I would start in and Dad would circle the alders and willows to a spot fifty feet or so downstream of me. He’d hang his handkerchief on a bush and begin there. When I fished my way down to the handkerchief, I’d take it, circle around Dad, and hang it where I resumed.

  We fished as slowly and precisely and stealthily as herons. We crouched on the boggy banks and hunkered behind bushes, thrusting out our rods to drop our baits so that they would drift deep and tight to the undercuts, and it took a half hour or more to cover the distance down to the handkerchief.

  Thus we leap-frogged each other, always within shouting distance, always fishing virgin water. It was at once solitary and companionable.

  As near as we could tell, no one else had ever fished there. We never found footprints or cigarette butts on the boggy banks, and this, as much as the trout that lived in it, gave our brook its special romance.

  We used small dry-fly hooks and light leaders. The currents moved slowly enough that we had no need to pinch on split shot. The worm, hooked just once behind its head, drifted free and wiggly when we swung it into the water. To catch a trout, the bait had to arrive precisely onto the trout’s platter, for I learned that while they readily ate what came directly to them, these skittish little fish would not venture far from their protective hideouts to feed. Those heedless ones that did had already made dinner for a mink or a kingfisher.

  They took so delicately that you had to stare hard at the place where your leader entered the water to detect it. It was a hesitation, perhaps a tiny twitch, no more. These trout did not pick up a worm and flee with it the way panfish did.

  Set the hook instantly, Dad said. Two reasons: first, trout had an uncanny instinct for detecting something unnatural and would drop it quickly; and, second, we wanted to hook them lightly in the lips in order to retain the option of returning them to the water.

  In fact, we imposed a kind of slot-limit on ourselves and hardly ever kept a trout from our brook. They ran so small that a six-incher earned our admiration and comment. The rare seven- or eight-incher was a meal and worth bringing home. Anything bigger was a trophy too rare and precious to kill.

  They were stained dark and coppery like the water where they lived. Their spots glittered like drops of fresh blood inside sky-blue haloes, and their fins were edged with ivory. A six-incher in my hand felt cold and muscular and wild. I believed then—and I still do—that a small native brook trout is nature’s most beautiful and elusive creation. Catching one initiates the lucky boy into exalted company. It makes him a mink or a heron—a hunter, a creature of Nature himself. No experience in my life, with the exception of watching the birth of my children, has been as transcendent to me as catching wild little trout from that wild little brook.

  Usually the lift of the rod brought them flipping and wiggling out of the water. But once I hooked one that bowed my fly rod, and when we were linked I felt his powerful panicky surge and saw the underwater flash of his broad golden side. Then he snapped my leader.

  To this day I don’t know if Dad believed me when I reported having hooked such a large trout. For days I mourned its loss. Landing that trout would have made me a hero. Instead, I believed I was a boy whose father suspected him of tall tales.

  Had I landed him, I would have been tempted to kill that trout and bring it home and show it off to my mother and my friends to prove to Dad what a gifted predator I had become. But I gradually came to realize that I preferred knowing that monster trout (it was probably a twelve-incher) continued to live in our brook. And Dad always claimed he believed me.

  I’ve caught a lot of wild trout since those April days with Dad—Snake River cutthroats, Montana rainbows, Labrador brookies—fish whose ancestry extends back before recorded history, whose progenitors inhabited those same waters long before a man with a spear hunted them. Many of them were not mere twelve-inchers but certifiable trophies. They came hard, and at great expense. Catching them demanded refined skills, specialized equipment, expertise, patience, and luck.

  They were trout, and therefore memorable.

  But no trout are more memorable for me than those first wild little brookies, and no single trout lives more clearly in my memory than that one monster twelve-incher that got away.

  Even after I became addicted to fly casting and we had widened our fishing circle to encompass all of New England, Dad and I continued to visit our little brook every April. We did it ceremonially, just once a year, on the afternoon of Patriot’s Day after the morning parade. We dug a can of worms (I continued to insist that we bring many more than we needed) and carried our fly rods through the woods to the place in the swamp that hid our private wild trout brook.

  The day we found the surveyor’s markers scattered through the swamp and along the margins of our brook was the last day we went there. I tore those orange stakes from the ground and heaved them into the woods, and Dad, uncharacteristically, did not chide me for my vandalism.

  He didn’t help me rip up the stakes, either, although I believed he would have if he thought it would help. He knew instantly what I had instinctively realized: Progress had found our brook, and Nature, even with our help, was no match for its implacable force.

  We fished the brook that April day, and the trout were as abundant as ever, although the monster did not bite. We caught no eight-inchers, but the little ones were coppery and wiggly and wild. We returned them all, even though we knew it was an act of quixotic futility. Our wild trout, we understood, were doomed.

  Today I live less than a mile from that brook. The forest has been cut down, the hills leveled, the swamp drained. Suburban roads meander where our brook once flowed, and houses and garages and backyard swingsets sit where ruffed grouse once drummed in April.

  Our brook flows straight and shallow through a concrete culvert. Its muddy banks bear the prints of children and dogs. Its water is dirt-stained and carries a faint septic odor, and the only thing that glitters in it is broken glass. Kids catch frogs and turtles from it, and wild mosquitoes reproduce themselves there as they have for eons.

  It holds no wild brook trout.

  TAP GEARED UP FOR SURFCASTING IN THE 1930S

  THE SURE THING

  When Dad retired from the advertising ratrace in 1967, he and Mum moved to the house on the hill in central New Hampshire where they still live. Lake Winnipesaukee nestles among the foothills half a mile away. From the sun porch, summer sailboats are visible and the afternoon sun glitters on the lake’s surface, and on a clear day Mount Washington’s white peak looms above the other Presidentials to the north.

  Nearby Wolfeboro, the old resort town that the railroad built on the lake, is a popular retirement community. Mum has found plenty of bridge competition, and Dad’s met some fisherman. Grandchildren descend on the house on Pond Road for Grandma’s good cooking and a canoe ride on the lake with Grampa.

  An excellent little sidehill partridge cover, a mix of poplar and alder, juniper and field edge, lies just over the stone wall behind
Dad’s vegetable garden. We hunted it the first year he lived there, but after that Dad decided he preferred to provide a sanctuary for the birds. Now we tromp through it unarmed, and although the poplars have grown taller, we will sometimes still bump a grouse from the thick edges. We sneak out to the fields toward dusk in March to spy on woodcock courtship dances and to hear them peent.

  Beaver Brook meanders through the alders and poplars at the foot of the hill on its way down to the lake. It’s stocked with brook trout, and carryovers live—and perhaps reproduce—in the swampy upstream reaches. We’ve caught fingerling landlocked salmon from Beaver Brook.

  Deer browse in Dad’s backyard. Woodchucks browse in his garden. Foxes slink through the yard. We’ve found coyote tracks in the snow and moose prints in the mud up the street.

  The house on Pond Road sits amidst our old grouse covers—the Owl Cover, the A-Frame, the Gun-on-the-Roof, and all the others that stretch southward until they merge with Burt Spiller’s string of covers around Rochester. Knight’s and Gilman’s ponds hold largemouths and pickerel. The Pine River is stocked with trout.

  Cardinals and grosbeaks, finches and titmice, and dozens of other species flock to Dad’s homemade birdfeeders which, after years of Dad’s tinkering and refining, are now almost squirrel-proof. The chickadees eat directly from his hand.

  In the summer the hummingbirds buzz in the lilacs outside the kitchen window. A tame chipmunk named Charlie lives under the deck. He creeps up into Dad’s lap to nibble donut crumbs.

  Dad figures he’s retired to heaven.

  Toward the end of May my phone rings. “They’re on the beds,” Dad announces.

  “How’s Thursday?”

  He checks with Mum to be sure they don’t have a bridge tournament or house guests scheduled (most of the house guests seem to come in May, when the Winnipesaukee small-mouths are on their spawning beds), then says, “Come early. Stay late.”

  For the first decade or so after Mum and Dad moved to Pond Road, Lake Winnipesaukee gave us what might have been the best smallmouth bass fishing in New England. It’s a big, deep, cold-water lake, better known for its salmon and lake trout, and in those years few people fished it for bass.

  The best time came toward the end of May, when the water had warmed enough to bring the spawn-minded smallmouths into the shallows, and before the hordes of summer vacationers arrived with their speedboats and water skis. We paddled the boulder-strewn shorelines in Dad’s seventeen-foot Grumman. The fly caster in the bow probed the docks and dropoffs and points and coves with debarbed streamers or deerhair bugs. We looked for the sandy platters that marked the spawning beds guarded by the aggressive males. The paddler in the stern trolled a streamer and caught fewer fish. But he was more likely to hook one of the larger females.

  On a good afternoon we caught bass until our arms ached. We kept count, because Mum demanded specific reports. On a typical three-hour outing we’d boat and release around fifty small mouths. In those first several years, they averaged a couple of pounds, and we could generally count on nailing a four-pound female or two every time out.

  I loved baseball, but my favorite sport as a kid, “three-strikes-and-out,” was a fishing game. Dad and I played it on the Charles River on summer evenings after he came home from work.

  The historic old Charles, where we fished it upriver from the dam by the Waltham Watch Factory, sprawled like a lake, with no discernable current or channel. The thickly wooded banks dropped steeply into the water, providing largemouths with shade, cover, depth, and all the frogs and baitfish and dragonflies and terrestrial insects they could eat. Lily pads clogged the coves, brush and tree limbs overhung the shorelines, and here and there big uprooted oaks lay in the water.

  Bass-bug targets were everywhere.

  The “three strikes” game assured equal fishing for the two of us and provided a powerful incentive for the paddler to position the canoe to the best advantage of the fisherman. The man with the fly rod cast to shoreline targets until he either landed a bass or missed three recognizable bass strikes. The occasional big bluegill or crappie that managed to get the bug into its mouth was a bonus fish that didn’t count against us.

  It was a team game, not a competitive one, although Dad and I took every opportunity to accuse each other of botching casts and missing strikes intentionally in order to keep the rod. Good guiding, I understood, earned me a quicker turn in the bow, and it didn’t take me long to learn the satisfaction that comes from teamwork.

  We found late-afternoon shade along the southern shoreline directly across from where we launched the canoe. We knew all the hotspots. A willow tree drooped its branches over the water, and a hard sidearm cast could bounce a deer-hair bug behind them into the shadows. A big bass always lived there. A little farther along lay a half-submerged fallen tree where on some days we might swap rods two or three times without moving.

  For several years we clipped a pectoral fin on each bass we caught. We were amazed how many bass we might take from the same place without catching one that had been fin-clipped.

  I learned fly casting by bass-bugging on the Charles. I figured out how to drive a bug under overhangs by letting my backcast straighten behind me and then throwing a firm narrow loop. I learned to read the targets and cast accurately. Bass, I understood, didn’t like to move far to eat. If I dropped a bug two feet from a tree trunk or stump or the edge of the weeds, I got no strike. When I could land it three inches away, I’d let it sit and quiver for as long as I could stand it—which in those days wasn’t very long. I’d give it a twitch…pause…then a harder jerk that would make the bug gurgle softly…let the ring dissipate…wait…and no matter how intensely I anticipated it, I was always startled when the water imploded and the bug disappeared into the maw of a bass that had finally been tempted beyond resistance.

  I found it just as exciting when Dad cast the bug as when I did.

  MURIEL “MUM” TAPPLY, MARTHA, AND BILL

  When I dropped my backcast and slapped the water behind me, Dad gleefully splashed me with his paddle. That was as close as he ever came to giving me a fly-casting lesson. I always waited for him to hit the water with his backcast so I could return the favor—which I surely would have—but he never did. When I overshot into the bushes, and he had to paddle in so I could get unhooked, I would apologize for ruining a good spot. He’d feign disgust and grumble, “You’d make one terrific squirrel fisherman,” but then he’d quickly say, “Hey, it’s like golf—never up, never in. It’s better to be long than short.”

  Dad never seemed to be either long or short, and I suppose I spent more time with the rod than he did. But we always caught an equal number of bass. The rules of our game pretty much guaranteed it.

  As a boy, I loved playing three-strikes-and-out for Charles River largemouths more, even, than baseball. I loved the way the swallows and bats came out at dusk and the bullfrogs grumped and the bluegills spatted and the water grew black and glassy and mysterious. Dad and I respected the silence of it. Once the sun sank behind the hills, we talked little, and then in whispers, and when a big bass inhaled a bug, the ka-chug! seemed to echo across the water. I can still hear it.

  When I was young, my family took summer vacations in the Machias Lakes region of northeastern Maine, a full day’s drive from our home in eastern Massachusetts, as guests of our friends George and Marian Smith. I remember Uncle George as a bear of a man who chewed cigar stubs and whose intriguing gold incisor flashed when he grinned, which was most of the time. He had an endless supply of stories, which he told with an exaggerated Down East twang and more colorful language than my mother liked. He operated a string of sporting camps and guided salmon fisherman and deer hunters.

  When he saw Mum and Dad and my sister and me loaded into one of his big lake canoes, Uncle George would shake his head and say, “How can a man fish with a wife and a hayrick full of small children?”

  Sysladobsis Lake and Upper Dobsis and all the other interconnected lakes in t
he area had once been prime landlocked salmon water, and Dad had enjoyed marvelous fishing there. By the time we began visiting them as a family, however, the white perch and smallmouth bass had established themselves and the salmon fishing had deteriorated.

  Family fishing was leisurely. Mum and Martha trolled and sunbathed. Dad and I cast streamers to the rocky shoreline for bass and big Dardevle spoons into the shallow weedy coves for pickerel. Whenever we came upon a school of perch we tied on small streamers and did our best to fill the canoe with them. Butter-fried white perch fillets were delicious—although I think Dad secretly hoped to clean the salmon competitors out of the lake.

  Once we dug some worms, anchored over a dropoff, and the four of us held a rod and dozed in the canoe. Mum, no slouch of a fisher-person, suddenly sat upright. “I’ve got a bite!” she screamed. An instant later Martha’s rod dipped. “Me, too!” she squealed.

  They set their hooks simultaneously and both of them were tied to a large fish that took turns taking line from them. When they finally got their fish close to the canoe, Dad began laughing. He netted a single salmon of at least four pounds with two hooks in its mouth.

  One summer we spent our vacation in Uncle George’s cabin on Upper Dobsis. We had to drive over several rutted miles of abandoned logging road to get to the lake. The canoe was hidden in the bushes. We loaded it with our week’s supplies, then paddled it across the lake to the one-room log cabin. A hand pump brought lake water to the sink. Kerosene lamps hung from wooden pegs. A one-hole outhouse stood out back.

  After supper the first night, Dad said to me, “Let’s go fishin’.”