Sportsman's Legacy

by William G. Tapply

  After many interstate telephone conversations, long-range weather analyses, medical reports, and consultations with Mum’s tournament bridge schedule, we settle for a Thursday in June.

  I leave Massachusetts early. Portal to portal, it’s exactly ninety-eight miles, and it always takes precisely two hours. Every time I make the drive I tell myself that I should do it more often.

  Usually I meet Dad and Mum half-way, at the Dunkin Donuts in Manchester. Dad and I exchange shopping bags containing magazines, paperback books, and random clippings that we think might interest the other. Mum generally slips a tin of brownies into the bag designated for me. We usurp a table, eat a donut, drink coffee, and talk. Sometimes I bring one of the kids along. We do this every two or three weeks.

  But today we will fish, so I go the whole way.

  We hoist Dad’s little thirteen-foot Grumman atop his car and load our gear into the back—a fly rod, a box of flies, sandwiches, canteen, two paddles, a push pole, the requisite floating cushions. Over the years we have weeded out the extraneous. Both of us like traveling light and spare.

  The Pine River flows south to north from its origins in, of all places, Pine River Pond to its destination in Lake Ossipee. It’s about fifteen miles long, and in its entire course it intersects just two passable roads, the second a major highway at its outlet. When Dad and I first fished it, we followed a network of dirt roads to an abandoned sandpit where we could leave the car close to the river’s edge. But a few years ago somebody erected concrete posts and strung a padlocked chain across the entrance to the sandpit.

  Now an iron bridge provides the only access to the Pine. We park and unload the car with the practiced efficiency of a partnership that is nearly half a century old. Then we confront the first decision of the day: Upstream or down? It’s a question of minor importance. The water in either direction from the bridge is equally navigable by canoe and inaccessible by foot. We expect beauty today, and we do not expect to see any other fishermen.

  We will see many birds and animals. A moose would delight but not surprise us.

  We do not expect to see any mayflies, and we do not expect to catch many trout. As with all of our fishing trips, we hope we will, but will not be disappointed if we don’t. After all, we will have the river and each other’s companionship, and those are enough for both of us.

  We conduct our customary debate. Dad prevails and takes the stern. I am relegated to the bow. So I must fish, while he gets to paddle. On the Pine, the navigator generally accomplishes more than the fisherman. The paddler is always rewarded with the knowledge that he has done something both physical and skillful. I suspect that a man in his ninth decade especially relishes this affirmation, and I’m happy that Dad can experience it.

  The Pine cuts through a mature forest, predominantly pine, oak, and maple. It’s narrow and winding and studded with boulders. June-blooming wildflowers proliferate along its mud banks. In places we come to rocky riffles too shallow for the paddle, but Dad enjoys push-poling. It’s a skill he has mastered, and he likes to practice it. Aside from the occasional riffle, the streambed is everywhere sand and silt—too sterile for significant aquatic insect life. A few times we have found fish rising to Red Quill hatches on the Pine, and then we have caught many trout. Those occasions are memorable. But we don’t count on finding hatches or rising trout. We haven’t hit a hatch in so many years that I wonder if they happen here at all anymore.

  If the State of New Hampshire didn’t stock the Pine with hatchery brook trout, it would be sterile of all fish life save chubs and yellow perch and pencil-size pickerel. They don’t stock it heavily. We know the Pine will fill our limits of tranquility and companionship. Our expectations do not include trout.

  Our Pine River routine is well fixed. We follow the river course slowly upstream under the canopy of overarching trees looking for a maverick rising trout. Eventually we will arrive at an impasse—a tree fallen across the river, riffles too shallow even to drag the canoe over. Then we will turn downstream. The fisherman will roll-cast a floating fly (the stream is too narrow and the bankside vegetation too thick for normal fly casting), twitching it against the banks and around the boulders. Since we rarely find rising trout, we catch most of our fish by teasing them up on the downstream leg.

  I have brought one of my graphite fly rods today. Dad grumbles that his fiberglass rods do the job. I’ve been trying to convince him that what fiberglass was to bamboo, graphite now is to fiberglass. He remains stubbornly skeptical. I have tied on a little deerhair beetle, another decision that meets with his disapproval. We have always used yellow Cooper Bugs. They work fine.

  We both believe that fly pattern makes no difference whatsoever on the Pine. Hatchery brookies here find no pellets, and not much of anything else, to eat. If they will take a weird yellow deerhair concoction like a Cooper Bug, they will take anything.

  So I sit up in the bow, watching for birds and moose and mayflies and rising trout, and Dad paddles from the stern. Our conversation is unhurried and meandering, like our progress up the stream. The June sunlight filters through the trees, here and there dappling the water and spotlighting a clump of rioting wildflowers on the bank. Redwig blackbirds chitter in the bushes.

  Nothing we see causes me to pick up my rod.

  The river is low. At the first riffle I have to take off my shoes and socks and drag us through.

  Just to clarify our purpose, I take a few random casts at likely trout hangouts, places where we have raised trout on past voyages.

  I raise a chub and call it a trout.

  Dad laughs.

  We discuss writing and fishing, family and mutual friends. We tell each other stories that we both already know, playing our game of “Remember When?” We fill each other in on our separate lives, too.

  At a party recently, I tell Dad, a woman accused me of being a “seething sadist” because I fished and hunted and glorified it in my writing. I felt defenseless under her assault. She forced me to admit that yes, my sport did sometimes—“Not that often,” I impotently insisted—result in the death of what she called “innocent wild creatures.” I told her that I did generally return the fish I caught. “Oh, sure,” she said, “after you’ve had all your cruel pleasure from torturing and frightening the poor things.”

  “But, Jeez,” I replied, “they’re fish!”

  “Sentient beings,” she intoned, confidant that she’d had the final word.

  “I didn’t know what to say,” I tell Dad.

  “You didn’t have to say anything,” he answers. “Hunting—and that includes fishing—is our heritage, our legacy. Our species has been doing it for something like three million years. Hunting required us to learn how to cooperate, divide labors, use tools, share—all the things you and I do we’re in the woods or on a river. These are good things. They make us human and they give us pleasure. You don’t need to defend hunting or apologize for it. It’s in our nature. It defines us.” He smiles at me. “Hunting’s in that woman’s nature, too. She was hunting you.”

  A big pine, uprooted during a winter storm, has fallen across the stream to mark our upstream terminus. We haul the canoe onto the mud and carry our lunches up onto a sun-splashed spot on the bank. We remind each other to watch for rising trout while we eat.

  Afterward we lie back on the grass. We listen to the music of the birds and the stream, and we gaze up through the laced tree branches to the sky, and it’s easy to wind back thirty or forty years to other times when Dad and I have been together in the woods beside a stream. It never really mattered where we were or whether we had caught many trout or found a lot of birds. Time and place were irrelevant as long as we shared them.

  Dad has been thinking the same thing. He says, “It’s always good to get out, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I say quietly. “It’s always good.”

  Finally, as I have known he would, he stands up. “Don’t want to let ourselves get all bogged-down and stiff-legged, now.”
r />   He wants to resume his seat in the stern.

  “You like paddling and watching me fish?” I say.

  “It’s what I like the best.”

  “Well, me, too. You want to deprive me of that pleasure?”

  He grins. “Sure.”

  But this time I prevail. We head downstream. Dad picks up my graphite rod, rolls out some line. Paddling and flycasting are two of his skills that have not rusted over the years.

  “How do you like the rod?” I say.

  “It’s okay,” he grumbles. “I don’t see that it’s any better than fiberglass.”

  He’s trying to promote a debate. I smile at his back and decline.

  He bites off the deerhair beetle and ties on a Cooper Bug. He probes the undercuts and boulders and runs, rollcasting the bug and twitching it back against the current.

  We’re nearly back to the iron bridge when something splashes at his fly. “Chub,” I proclaim.

  “Trout,” he says.

  He casts again. Another splash. He hooks it. “Chub,” I repeat.

  “Trout.”

  He’s right. He strips in, unhooks, and releases an eight-inch brookie.

  “Good fishin’, old timer,” I say.

  “Good guidin’, young feller,” he replies.

  THE YELLOWSTONE RIVER, MONTANA

  AND FURTHERMORE...1994—2009

  AND FURTHERMORE...1994—2009

  Bill completed Sportsman’s Legacy in 1993. Since that time, he wrote hundreds of articles, several sporting books and more than a dozen novels. A few of those articles begged inclusion in this revised edition.

  While everything Bill wrote had meaning for him, these held a special place in his heart.

  • The Phil ‘n’ Bill Show, endlessly amazing and amusing; Bill’s memories of Phil; Bill’s love letter to his wonderful Brittany, Burt; Bill’s penultimate fishing trip with his dad, H.G. “Tap” Tapply.; Tap’s Nearenuf fly; “Gone Fishin’—2”; and Bill’s final note to his readers and friends.

  Unless otherwise noted, all of the following pieces were written by Bill. Enjoy.

  ~ Vicki Stiefel Tapply, August 2011

  WILLIAM G. TAPPLY AND PHILIP R. CRAIG, 2004

  THE PHIL ‘N’ BILL SHOW

  One of Bill’s most meaningful relationships, particularly later in life, was with Philip R. Craig. Phil was a marvelous mystery writer, as well as a terrific fencer, sailor, cowboy, and angler.

  The duo collaborated on three mystery novels—First Light, Second Sight, Third Strike.

  They were quite a pair—Phil was erudite and highly expressive. His booming voice and broad-stroke gestures, not to mention is 6’4” height, made him larger than life. Bill, on the other hand, expressed himself quietly and in a knowing way that demanded attention. Both were passionate about fishing, Bill more drawn to fly fishing and Phil lured by the call of surfcasting. Yet somehow, each complemented the other.

  Together, they were great schemers. In fact, they told Phil’s wife, Shirley, and I that they intended to open Bill ‘n Phil’s Bait Shop. Who would run it? Why, Shirley and myself, of course, while the two men went off fishing each day.

  Shirl and I didn’t find that terribly equitable. In fact, we found it quite absurd. Obviously, we were the ones who would go off fishing, while Bill and Phil manned the shop!

  So herewith is a taste of the Phil ‘n Bill Show, as well as Bill’s poignant tribute to his dear friend, who died in 2007.

  ~vst

  THE PHIL ‘N’ BILL SHOW

  by Philip R. Craig & William G. Tapply

  Philip R. Craig: In 1989, when I got my first copy of my novel A Beautiful Place To Die, I found some kind words on the back cover written by somebody named William G. Tapply.

  William G. Tapply: When Scribner’s (then my publisher) sent me the bound galley of a book by some guy named Philip R. Craig, I thought, “Oh, jeez. Just what we need. Another damn book.” The publisher, of course, wanted me to write a laudatory blurb. Well, I figured I’d look at the first page and toss it aside. To my surprise -- and pleasure -- I just kept reading that book. The man could write and he could plot, and best of all, his main character did a lot of fishing. My kind of guy. So I wrote a blurb, and it ended up on the back cover of A Beautiful Place To Die. That made me happy. Then I sort of forgot about it.

  Phil: My wife and I immediately read a couple of Tapply’s books and found that we could also say kind words about them. Several weeks later, at a party at Kate’s Mystery Books in Cambridge, someone identified a tall guy across the room as Bill Tapply and I went over and thanked him for his generous remarks. He said I was welcome.

  Bill: I said more than that. I told Phil that I rarely wrote blurbs, and when I did, it was because I meant it. I wasn’t being generous. I was being honest. Actually, what I mainly remember about that first meeting at Kate’s was what a sweetheart Phil’s wife, Shirley, was.

  Phil: Months later at a Bouchercon conference I was having a beer when Bill walked by the bar. I hailed him and we talked. We discovered that we had books and fishing in common.

  Bill: That was in Omaha. We were both there alone, and we gravitated to each other. I learned that Phil was a devout surf caster, and I confessed that I was a fanatic fly fisherman. We decided we liked each other anyway. We sat together in the plane on the way home and talked about Hemingway the whole way.

  Phil: Over the next few years we became friends. As inside jokes, we began to refer fleetingly to one another’s characters in our books.

  Bill: I don’t know which of us did that first. Phil, I think. It was fun. If one of his characters needed a lawyer, Phil’s narrator, J.W. Jackson, would suggest he call Brady Coyne, my narrator. If Brady wanted to do some saltwater fishing, he’d call J.W. Neither of our characters actually did anything in the other guy’s books. But they lived in the same fictional world. It got me to thinking...

  Phil: One evening over supper a couple of years ago Bill said, “Hey, maybe we should write a book together. I think it might be fun.” I thought so too.

  Bill: As I remember it, the idea evolved over several years. Phil and I often ended up on panels together at bookstores and in libraries as we tried to publicize our respective books. We had fun doing that. We made a good team—at least, we thought so. We called ourselves (in private) The Phil ‘n’ Bill Show. Phil has the same off-kilter sense of humor I do, and we share the same politics and the same taste in literature, not to mention our love of fishing and the sea. I remember now and then somebody in an audience would wonder if we planned to collaborate on a book. The idea sort of grew on us. It was during one of those long summer weekends when Vicki and I descended upon Phil and Shirl’s house on the Vineyard for some fishing and clamming and beaching when we began to consider the idea more seriously.

  Phil: In about half an hour we’d agreed about the principal elements of what turned out to be First Light, which Scribner will publish in January 2002.

  Bill: It really didn’t take much longer than that. Well, our conversation was undoubtedly fueled by Phil’s incomparable martinis and the relaxed atmosphere of the Vineyard in the summer and Shirl’s and Vicki’s kibitzing. I think what got our imaginations going was the idea of my visiting Phil in the fall and fishing with him in the famous Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. If we could do it, so could Brady and J.W. All we needed was a mystery for our two guys to solve.

  Phil: So that’s what we did. We decided that J.W. would invite Brady down for a week of Derby fishing on the Vineyard, where, between sessions on the beach, Brady would also spend some time helping a dying client tidy up her estate. The client’s 200 acres of prime Vineyard oceanfront land was the subject of intense interest both to her two grown—and rather obnoxious—children and to two powerful organizations: a nature conservation group and an organization that built golf courses.

  Bill: In retrospect, this sounds pretty easy. In fact, I recall that we batted around a lot of ideas. We knew it would be logical for
Brady and J.W. to fish together. Phil and I had been mentioning it in our books for years, so the Derby was a natural. But finding the kind of plot that would logically draw both guys into a mystery and give each of them separate things to do took a lot of trial and error. Lots of error, as I remember it, both before we started actually writing, and also as we went along. So we started with the idea that a dying old lady’s priceless Vineyard property would be a logical focus for competition and a good source of conflict.

  Phil: Meanwhile, because I like to have two stories going on in my books, we had J.W. reluctantly agree to sacrifice some of his fishing time to help a husband try to trace the whereabouts of his missing wife. That gave both Brady and J.W. plenty to do in their spare time and created several possibilities for future evil doings, even though we weren’t sure yet just what they’d be.

  Bill: We did know that J.W.’s case and Brady’s mission would eventually come together in our story. Otherwise, all we really knew for sure was that Brady and J.W. would do some fishing. We came up with our title—First Light—very early on. We visualized a climactic scene happening just at the crack of dawn. It’s a magical, spooky time on a deserted Vineyard beach, and, of course, the best time of day to be fishing.

  Phil: One of the first things we agreed to was that we’d write the chapters alternately, each in the first-person voice of our own narrator--

  Bill: -- sort of like we’re doing here in this article--