Sportsman's Legacy

by William G. Tapply

  We’ve had a lot of adjustments to make. Well, I have. I’ve struggled to convince Burt that he should hunt with me, that if he runs out of sight and beyond the sound of his bell he’s not doing us any good. The classic grouse dog, I tell him, goes slow and hunts close, the way old Freebie and Waldo did, the way he himself did when he was five months old.

  He doesn’t buy it, and I remember that when Freebie and Waldo were in their prime, they liked to range pretty wide, too.

  I’ve considered -- and rejected -- investing in a shock collar. I know that if I use it properly I might be able to convince him to hunt closer. But I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s not so much that I don’t want to hurt him, although there is that. Mostly, I can’t bring myself to punish him for doing what’s been bred into him.

  So I yell and scream and cuss, which doesn’t seem to do him any harm and makes me feel better.

  When flights of woodcock have settled into our covers, Burt works like my version of a classic upland bird dog. He hunts methodically, moving from point to point, looking over his shoulder now and then to make sure I’m with him, and if I want him to poke into some part I think he’s missed, he doesn’t seem to mind, although he makes it clear that if there were birds where I wanted him to look, he would’ve found them without my help.

  He still refuses to retrieve a woodcock. He’ll find it, sometimes point it, and then he’ll stand guard over it until I pick it up. If it’s still alive, he’ll gently hold it down with a paw.

  The trouble is, in our New England grouse and woodcock covers, more often than not birds are scarce. Burt has no interest in barren cover, so he does what his genes tell him to do—he ranges wider and wider, searching for birdscent. He’s the dog, he’s got the nose, and his job is to find birds. I’m merely the man with the shotgun. My job is to shoot them.

  Burt doesn’t mind when I shoot and miss. But he hates it when, after all his work, I’m not in position to shoot.

  I can’t count the times when his bell has faded in the distance and I’ve been left standing there in the woods surrounded by silence. I listen. Not a sound.

  So I do what any amateur dog handler would do. I yell.

  Sometime later—a few minutes, maybe as much as fifteen minutes later—I hear the bird flush in the distance, and pretty soon Burt comes trotting in.

  We sit down and have a conversation.

  I tell him I wish to hell he’d hunt closer. Pointing birds a quarter of a mile away from me, I explain, doesn’t do us much good.

  He tells me that I’m a slow learner and it’s pretty discouraging. When will I start to trust him?

  I ask him how he’d like to have one of those electronic beeper devices attached to his collar.

  He says it would no doubt help me to find him when he’s on point, but that infernal Beep-Beep-Beep would be an abomination in a grouse cover, and on that subject, at least, we are in agreement.

  Last May Burt turned ten. He’s still in his prime. He can run like the wind and do it all day. He lives to find birds and point them for me.

  I’ve come to understand that my job is to try to keep up with him.

  Sometimes I dream of the day when Burt will slow down and hunt close, the way Freebie and Waldo did in their final seasons, when they were lame and deaf and on their last legs.

  But that reminds me of stories where the dogs die in the end. I don’t like those stories.

  TAP (SECOND FROM LEFT) AND FISHING BUDDIES, 1940S

  The penultimate occasion Bill and his dad went fishing. Yes, it says the last time. But it’s not quite that.

  ~vst

  A BIRTHDAY TROUT

  The last time my father and I fished together was on his 85th birthday. What had been, for most of my life, a fishing partnership that took us all over the northeast for everything that swam in fresh or salt water, had devolved to this: A once-a-year September canoe float on a serpentine woodland trout stream about a mile from his house in New Hampshire.

  He was pacing around in the front yard when I drove in. His little 13-foot Grumman canoe was already lashed on top of his wagon, and the gear was stowed in the back.

  I got out, gave him a hug, and said Happy Birthday.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  We parked at the iron bridge, as we always did. I hoisted the canoe onto my shoulders and toted it to the water. Dad carried the rod and the paddles and the canvas bag of gear.

  “You take the bow,” I said. “I’m going to paddle.”

  “The hell you are,” he said. “You fish. I’m going to paddle.”

  “But it’s your birthday.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “That means I get to do what I want. I want to paddle.”

  We’d been carrying on this same argument for close to fifty years, and it always turned out the same.

  A canoe paddle was still a wand in my father’s gnarly hands. He pushed us upstream against the stream’s slow currents, pausing without comment when a deadfall or undercut bank or shaded hole came within casting range, telling me by how he aimed the canoe where he wanted me to drop my fly. After half a century on the water together, no words were needed.

  Pretty soon the rumble of traffic on the iron bridge faded and disappeared behind us. We were utterly alone on our stream in the woods, just the two of us in a canoe.

  I wasn’t getting any strikes. No surprise. Objectively, this wasn’t much of a trout stream. Hatches were rare and sparse and unpredictable, and sometimes when we did find insects hatching, no fish were eating them. We generally fished upstream with bushy attractor dry flies, then back down with trout-sized bucktails. In the spring, the state stocked it from the iron bridge with hatchery brookies, but the stream ran low and warm in the summer, and we guessed that most of the trout got caught, or migrated down to the pond, or just failed to survive. Fishing was usually pretty slow in the fall.

  We loved the stream anyway, because it was inaccessible except by canoe from that one iron bridge, and because the fishing wasn’t good enough to attract other anglers. In all the Septembers we’d floated it, we never saw another human being. We enjoyed the illusion that nobody but us fished here, that we were the only ones who even knew of its existence, that, as Dad liked to say, the hand of man had never set foot on its banks.

  We didn’t really come here to catch fish. We came to this stream on my father’s birthday . . . because we always did.

  It rose in swamps in western Maine, meandered through miles of sandy pine-and-hardwood forest, and eventually emptied into a nondescript New Hampshire pond. Here and there it narrowed and quickened then opened into a long glassy pool, but mostly it ran slow and deep between steep brushy banks.

  By the time Dad’s birthday rolled around in September, the maples and oaks that arched overhead were turning crimson and copper, and migrating yellow warblers and redwing blackbirds flitted in the bushes. We always flushed a wood duck or two. Sometimes the haunting call of a bittern came echoing from a nearby swamp. We saw herons and kingfishers and hawks, deer and beavers and minks, and once we rounded a bend and came face to face with a bull moose standing midstream with dripping weeds draped on his antlers.

  It was an awfully pretty stream in the fall, trout or no trout.

  Sometimes our secret stream surprised us. One September afternoon—it was the year Dad turned seventy-four—we found a big eddy pool pockmarked with the dimples of rising trout. We figured out that they were gorging on tiny blue-wing-olive spinners, size twenty-two or twenty-four.

  My father liked to quote Thoreau—“Simplify, simplify”—and as usual he had packed light for our ceremonial afternoon in the canoe. One paddle, one seven-and-a-half foot fiberglass rod, one spool of 3X tippet, one tube of Gink, one box of generic dry flies, and one box of bucktails.

  The smallest dry fly we had was a size sixteen. It looked like a porcupine when I cast it among those minuscule BWO spinners, and I guess that’s how the trout saw it, too, because they ignored it and just kept sipping.
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br />   I changed flies, changed positions, lengthened the tippet. Nothing worked. I couldn’t stand it.

  I told my father I wanted to paddle full-tilt back to the iron bridge. I’d climb into the car, race home, and grab a box of small dry flies. He could wait with the canoe.

  “We’ll be right back here in an hour,” I said. “If we had the right fly we’d be slaughtering them.”

  He just smiled. “Relax. Just look at them rise. Pretty sight, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is, but . . .”

  “Nice to know they’re here, huh?”

  “Be nicer if we could catch a few of them.”

  “We don’t need to catch them,” he said, “to enjoy them.”

  He’d tell anyone who’d listen about what happened on his eightieth birthday when I talked him into giving me the paddle so he could take the bow and fish. We were drifting downstream. I had my eye on a likely-looking run up ahead, trying to anticipate where he’d want to cast, to give him a good shot at it, to be as good a guide as he was, and I didn’t see the stub that lurked just under the surface.

  We were moving pretty fast, and when I plowed into it straight-on, my father catapaulted headfirst over the bow.

  I was preparing my wisecracks for when he popped up sputtering and cursing. I knew he’d never let me live it down.

  But a minute passed, and he didn’t come popping up to the surface. An eighty-year-old man on heart medication, and I’d dunked him in a frigid September trout stream.

  I forgot about the wisecracks and tried to figure out how I’d explain it to my mother.

  I turned for the bank so I could beach the canoe and dive for my father’s body when he popped up behind me and laughed. When he went into the water, he said, he just took a deep breath and swam back under the canoe. “Fooled you, huh?” he said.

  “You scared the pants off me,” I said. “I thought you were a goner. That wasn’t funny.”

  “I thought it was. The water’s pretty cold, though.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “My own fault,” he said. “I never shouldn’t’ve let you paddle.”

  We’d been moving upstream for about an hour when we came to an uprooted pine that had fallen across the water. Back when my father was younger, he’d have insisted we drag over it or carry around it and keep going. In those days, he never wanted to turn around. But today when I suggested this was as good a place as any to head back, he nodded.

  “My turn to paddle,” I said.

  “Last time you paddled, you nearly drowned me.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “You keep fishin’,” he said. “Catch something.”

  “These fish are too smart for me. Show me how.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Fish water you’ve already covered. Take your leavings.”

  Another one of our comfortable old arguments.

  I had to help him out of the canoe. He staggered and held onto my arm as I helped him settle into the bow seat.

  I steered us downstream, and he picked up the rod, tied on a little bucktail, and began flicking it against the banks. Watching my father from behind, the fluid, effortless way he cast, repeatedly dropping his fly about an inch from the bank, it was easy to remember him as a young man. He couldn’t do a lot of things anymore. But he could still paddle a canoe and cast a fly.

  The iron bridge was around the next bend when something boiled behind his bucktail.

  I dug in with the paddle, and he cast again. Another swirl, and his rod bowed, and a few minutes later he was cradling a fat fifeen-inch male brook trout in his hand. Its spots were as scarlet as the streamside sumac, and its belly and pectoral fins glowed coppery like the oaks and maples over our heads.

  It was the biggest trout we’d ever caught here.

  “Big stud wants to spawn,” Dad said as he unhooked the fish and slid it back into the stream. “Let’s wish him luck.” He bit off the fly, reeled in, and took down the rod. “Good way to end it, huh?”

  Crippling arthritis plus an accumulation of other miseries kept my father out of canoes after that September afternoon. We celebrated the last six birthdays of his life in his living room, usually watching a ball game with the TV muted so we could talk fishing. When we recalled our last birthday float, we agreed: It had been a very good way to end it.

  BILL, MARTHA, MURIEL, AND TAP, 1960

  LEFT—H.G. TAPPLY; ABOVE—W.G. TAPPLY. NOTE THE SIMILAR SHIRTS!

  PHOTO COURTESY OF AMERICAN ANGLER MAGAZINE

  TAP’S NEARENUF

  From 1950 to 1985, my father, Tap Tapply, filled two pages in each issue of Field & Stream with useful information for outdoorsmen. Besides the 50-word “Tap’s Tips”—six every month—for which his name became famous, Dad also wrote the 500-word “Sportsman’s Notebook” articles—one a month—that explained more complicated things.

  I’ve done the math. Dad wrote more than 2,500 individual Tips and 420 Notebooks. That adds up to about 100 new and useful ideas every year and more than a third of a million words—not a single one wasted—in 35 years.

  What most people didn’t realize, but what I, his son, understood, is that for every Tip-worthy idea that Tap selected to write about, he discarded three as impractical or wrongheaded or dumb. He field-tested everything exhaustively, and I got to go along and “help” him.

  We had to do a lot of fishing and hunting to test 100 ideas a year. Lucky me.

  Sometime in the 1950s, with the trout season upon us, Dad gave teenaged me a box of dry flies. “I need your help,” he said.

  I opened the box. Except for their sizes, which ranged from 12 to 18, all the flies were identical. I arched my eyebrows at him.

  “Here’s the idea,” he said, in pretty much the same words he used a few years later when he felt comfortable writing about it. “If I’m right, this should be the only dry fly we’ll ever need. With this range of sizes, and relieved of the worry about what pattern we should tie on, we can concentrate on the important matter of fishing the fly properly. We’ve just got to figure out if I’m right.”

  I picked up one of the flies and held it in the palm of my hand. It had split wood-duck flank-feather wings, a mixed ginger-and-grizzly hackle, a peacockquill body, and a pair of stripped grizzly quills, splayed wide, for tails. It reminded me a little bit of many dry-fly patterns we used, but it was identical to none of them.

  “What do you call it?” I said.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. It doesn’t have a name. It’s a mongrel. I’ve tried to blend the elements of our common Eastern mayfly hatches—Quill Gordon, Red Quill, Hendrickson, March Brown, Gray Fox, Light Cahill, Pale Evening Dun. It doesn’t really imitate any of them, as you can see. But if I’m right, we should find that it’s near enough.”

  And that’s what he eventually called it: the Nearenuf.

  Several of Dad’s trout-fishing friends agreed to participate in his experiment in exchange for a season’s supply of Taptied flies. For two full seasons of dry-fly fishing, all of us used only the Nearenuf, regardless of what was hatching.

  At the end of the second season, Dad insisted on candid reports from all participants. None of us felt that he had been handicapped in the slightest. No one thought that he’d caught fewer trout during the Nearenuf experiment than in previous years when he’d attempted to match the hatches. We all agreed that we’d spent more time stalking trout, making accurate casts, and achieving drag-free floats, and that we’d wasted less time poking our noses into our fly boxes.

  As Dad wrote, “If you use the Nearenuf, your only problem will be to match the size of the hatching flies, a much simpler matter than trying first to identify whatever those things are that are dancing over the water, and then to match them in both pattern and size, which generally involves much fumble-fingered tying on and snipping off of flies the fish don’t seem to want.”

  Dad never claimed that the Nearenuf was a magic fly. That wasn’t his point. He didn’t believe in magic fli
es. He believed that presentation was more important than imitation, and he admitted that for all he knew, an Adams or a Quill Gordon, if fished properly, would catch as many trout as a Nearenuf during any mayfly hatch.

  There are many times when trout are not eating mayfly duns. On those occasions, a small pair of sharp scissors and a single Nearenuf of the right size can still take the place of several boxes of flies. Here’s how:

  If you find trout feeding on lowriding duns in flat, slow water, you can improve a Nearenuf by clipping a V out of the bottom of the hackle.

  If the fish are eating emergers in the film, cut the bottom hackle flat and trim the wings.

  If they’re sipping spinners, clip the hackle flat on the bottom, cut off the wings, and clip a V out of the top of the hackle.

  If they’re gobbling nymphs in or near the surface film, cut the hackle and wings to a nub. Spit on the fly to make it sink.

  If they’re targeting cripples, cut the bottom of the hackle at an angle and amputate one wing.

  With a little creative barbering, Tap’s Nearenuf comes awfully close to fulfilling the promise implied by the title of the article Dad eventually wrote about it: “One Fly for Every Hatch.”

  I don’t know anybody who fishes with just one fly. I certainly don’t. Dad’s point was that concentrating on variables other than fly pattern will handicap you less than you might expect, if it handicaps you at all. I think he was right.

  If you want to substitute other materials for those listed here to create a better general match of your local insects, feel free. You will not violate the principle of the Nearenuf. But my father’s mongrel pattern has fooled a lot of trout over the past half a century.

  HOOK: Standard dry-fly hook, sizes 12 through 18.