Lines on the Water

by David Adams Richards

  “Nicely done,” I said.

  And I cast my line again.

  She took the trout off the hook, replaced the worm, and deployed her line in the same place, looking down into the water, with her arms tensed ready to haul another fish up. I smiled.

  “I think you’ll probably have to cast out further, my dear.” And I showed her how well, how expertly I could cast. Then I reeled my line in.

  “Oh—oh—oh,” Peg said, and she riffed another fish aboard. It was larger than the first one.

  “Nice too,” I said.

  Again she got ready and again she tensed up, her shoulders moving back and forth, ready for the fish to strike.

  “Oh—oh—oh,” she said. This fish though she couldn’t just riff in. It was too big. It ran and jumped and played upon the water, went under the boat, and then finally she hauled it over the side. It weighed about two and a half pounds.

  I left the boat later and walked up to the corner to fish in peace. I took my swivel, my eggs, my lures off and put them away. I tried to find the oldest hook I could find.

  Then I went back to the boat.

  Peg was still hauling in fish. She had a string of about eight or nine. They lay all about her feet, and at various parts of the rowboat.

  “How’s your luck been?” she asked innocently.

  I sat as close to her as I could, and let my line sink as close to her line as possible. So I wouldn’t foul her I kept pushing her rod slightly away, towards the back of the boat. But the unfortunate fish didn’t know what they were doing. Peg’s old rod bent again.

  To make matters worse she was munching on a molasses sandwich as she hauled this fish aboard, holding the sandwich in her teeth with her little jar of Red Rose tea beside her.

  After a while she said, “David, I’m tired of catching trout.”

  I insisted in gentlemanly graciousness that I carry the string of eleven trout up the road for her, waving them in the air as I passed people.

  Fourteen

  FISHING SEASON GAVE way to hunting again that year. Once you could smell the frost in the air, the wind spoiling through the old henhouse and down along the beach where the rocks were cold and the bay was black, it was time to put away the rod and take the rifle out.

  I have known great fishermen in my life. Most of them are also hunters. If a man or woman is to eat flesh, he or she is morally obligated at a certain time to kill that which they eat. This is what I believe to be true, even though it is perhaps as disgraced an opinion now as any opinion was. However it shouldn’t be, for there are still butchers and slaughterhouses aplenty.

  Tolstoy, making the same comment in War and Peace, spoke about the man or woman who would sentimentally decry hunting while cutting into a steak with gusto.

  It is a terrible fact that there is no thinking that can’t reduce and won’t reduce truth, if knowledge is not applied.

  I became for a while as passionately an advocate of hunting as I was of fishing. (Or maybe even more so, because it was the more beset upon tradition.) I suppose it is because both rest in my consciousness as being part of the same experience, of town or rural living, that the decision makers in the cities have tried to thwart. Mr. Simms wore a bush jacket and chewed plug. He had never travelled any further than Moncton, and that was when he went to the hospital near the very end of his life. He was as conscious of the world about him as few people are, and was as kind as anyone. Perhaps then my defence is for him.

  The urban ideals have crept upon us, much like an army, and instilled our lives with other reflections, from pop culture to McDonald’s, so that we have been occupied by the ideas of people who never having lived one day like us, feel nothing in holding us in contempt. The Miramichi and the Ozarks are often compared at a point of smug, vastly ignorant superiority.

  So certain people from the Miramichi (and the Ozarks) continually try to prove that they are the same as the urbans. That they too can fly in planes and go to see musicals such as The Phantom of the Opera. That they too loathe the rustics.

  So too many of the people I know from here, who have joined this common ground, have done so in a way, I suppose, to survive. And the old way—such as it was, of people I admired like Mr. Simms—is disappearing entirely not only from our landscape but our heritage. It is looked upon with embarrassment, made fun of in novels (which pretend to adore it), and is laughed at by the very children of those men.

  Of course time itself helps make ghosts of us all.

  In defending these disappearing principles, and showing the new ones to be no more worthy of benediction, by rurals who are sometimes ashamed of everything they think has to do with themselves, I have been called a provincial—among those who have adapted themselves to the new world. But I wear this, if I can say, like a badge of honour.

  Hunting and fishing were certainly as much a part of the world of my youth as hockey or marbles. And I realize this now more as time goes on—that is, that both have to be defended, not only regulated.

  I suppose some will think hunting wrong. But no more so than fishing. And I make the case that until we are all vegetarians by our own choice, both hunting and fishing in some sense are a philosophical duty. At least once in your life.

  I do not like how the world views its hunters, and by proxy its fishermen, and I do not like how the hunters and fishermen at times disrespect themselves and what the intended purpose of a hunt is.

  But I rarely listen to a fisherman who tells me about how disgusted he is with hunters. Then I say to them, give up your rod and reel, for you are fishing the king of all fish—a fish so majestic it is a wound in the heart at times to see die. Sometimes they will look at me as if I am a raving lunatic, and sometimes they won’t. Sometimes, of course, they fish with barbless hooks.

  Everything one kills somehow alters that species forever, alters it in the most irreparable way—genetically. But to not kill for most humans is to not live. That’s the exceptional dilemma of all people who have entertained both sides.

  I often think of this when I think of the desire to fish compared to the actuality of life and death. And often now people let their fish go, or mistake what the purpose of fishing means for the fish.

  I would never question anyone about not killing something. In this I agree with Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century writer who, letting the housefly go, said: “There is room still in the world for me and you.”

  Still we are in a predicament with this, and in a moral quandary always. The dilemma rests upon a point in men’s integrity. That which they do has to be acceptable to themselves. That is why it becomes a point for great debate and self-examination. The examination must rest upon the criteria of whether or not this is justified as an act in itself.

  Fishing trout years ago with my wife Peggy, on a fertile little brook called McBean, that ran into the Nashwaak River, I was able to pick up some nice trout. The brook was productive, and we camped out in a tent in a field near the stream.

  The day we were packing to leave we met a man who had fished behind us that morning, and had taken twenty fish the size of which my wife and I had released. I never forgave him for that because it seemed so bulling and silly. But for himself he felt he had had a grand morning, and was proud of his small shrivelled catch.

  Once when I took a fish just at dark, on a small stretch of the Souwest, I killed it, by snapping back its head, and in this way cutting its throat. A person looked at me and said, “Can’t you kill it in a more humane way?”

  “You can kill it with a rock,” I answered. “But this is at least as quick if not quicker—and so, as humane.”

  I mentioned this the next week when we were fishing trout to another acquaintance. We had taken many nice trout on small white-and-brown number 10 flies all day and were camped on the Bay du Vin in the evening. The smoke from the fire drifted off to our south, the air was still, and the smell of trout frying in butter and flour mingled with the smell of poplars and the long shadows.

  “Ima
gine—feeling sorry for a fish,” my acquaintance said abruptly, missing the crux of my argument. This is not what I meant. I certainly have felt sorry for fish.

  I have in my lifetime killed enough to have made some observances.

  What I am saying is that all of these questions are questions which can only be answered by individual experience and observation, by individuals themselves. It is something that will never be regulated.

  I suppose the difference comes not in the act, but in the reason for the act. The reason is everything. That is why any sport fishing or game hunting is at times so hard to defend.

  For instance, I know men who guide other men to bear baits. The men wait in the trees with their camouflaged vests and scarves while their guides wait with them—dressed usually in woollen bush jackets as guides here are. The bear comes into the bait and the sport fires an arrow at the thing’s heart. The bear, arrow in it, runs off to claw at it in the bushes. Later when its breathing is rough and uneven, the guide, with his .308, will go in and finish the thing off. That to me, is play-acting of the worst kind.

  But in a sense, if you wish to get technical, we all play-act not only in fishing or hunting, but in our entire lives.

  I have not bought a poached salmon in my life. Though I know many who do poach them up on the pools at night—some of the very pools I have gone fishing in during the day. I have sat and drank with poachers, and their arguments are often the same. It is their right to do so, because the law favours others—rich sportsmen or native Indians. Also there is the idea that they do not hurt the river more than anyone else. That to me is a particularly self-seeking rationalization. But still, their excuse is not without foundation, that they were the ones left out of the draw.

  Of course there were always poachers like my friend Henry. But for the sake of discussion, let’s give it a starting point. Let’s say that it goes as far back as the Black Law of 1723. This was when the middle class was starting to rise, and being very protective about their little piece of the pie. A law was passed to protect them from poachers who in the previous centuries would be able to take a deer or two, or a fish or two, from the master’s land or ponds without commotion. It changed with the arrival of the liberalized gentry, who did not see this with such favour. So men poaching (the Black Law was so called because these men would camouflage themselves in black faces) were not only fined and jailed, but hanged as well.

  And those who poached challenged this law very bravely, with their lives, because to them some fundamental principle of fair play was at stake: All the game should not be for gentlemen when my child is starving at home.

  Though there is now less starvation and almost no gentlemen, the contest between these two groups is still an ongoing one. I see it on every river I fish, and every time an animal falls from a poacher’s rifle. The rules are still the same as well, as too is the deceit and the accusations of one group or the other.

  It is only the animals that suffer. The animals become a commodity, or a political flashpoint. And once something becomes a commodity, or a political weapon, there is no end of nefarious backbiting and greed involved.

  To me there is nothing worse than seeing a fish fight a jig hook. It is a three-pronged barb a person will put on the end of their line and toss into a pool where fish are lying, and then jig the barb upwards to catch the fish under the belly or along the back. You can tell when a fish is on a jig because of how crazily they run in the water. It demeans fishing in a way few other things do.

  Laws do not work if a white poacher believes in his mind that Indians have a certain favouritism because of who they are.

  Certainly the fish, the salmon, becomes the fodder. Like most other political weapons, the real reason why it is used becomes in the end obscured and demeaned.

  The Miramichi can become a war zone in the summer. A war zone over the great fish who have no idea of the part they play. Sometimes the war is just a few skirmishes with disgruntled fishermen. On other times it is an all-out confrontation between whites and Indians, the federal Fishery Department, and the RCMP.

  But so many of the poachers I know believe rightly or wrongly (and all of them have a case) that the laws were made by and for the king’s men, and not for them. So I return to the Black Law of 1723. They believe they are the ones left out of the equation. And so too were their fathers and grandfathers and his father before him. And if we look closely at this, it usually has some validity. To a poacher, the salmon or moose becomes a political weapon in a battle with other human beings, who have no other political weapons left to use. In all cases it is the salmon that suffer. Any other view is hauling the wool over our own eyes.

  The sports fisherman or woman must know they play a part in this, and sometimes there is resentment towards them, because they are looked upon with a special favour. The government wishes to attract them to the river with the ideas of pristine wilderness and abundant game. And many of the places on the river are out of reach, for one reason or another, to the average person living on it.

  Society is usually unfair and the warden becomes seen as the arbitrator of unfairness, a parcelled-out unfairness, that deems certain people more acceptable in certain areas on the water than others. The law will always favour some more than others.

  So a few fish are taken, or a few too many fish, or a few deer or moose out of season. These things always have a tendency to escalate. And then it becomes a game within a game of which poacher can outwit the other.

  Also I should mention that I have seen the grandeur of some of the camps that others have never gotten to, and have listened at times to the ribald idiocy of wealthy or privileged people, who could fish in pools which those I have loved could never come near to. Then you think of the British commoner and what he must think of the blood sporting of the nobility.

  One camp I stayed in had flourished in the age of the king’s men, in the age of princes and princelings who had grown up on the fox hunt and had brought their trophies over to Canada as a testament to their privilege. The heads of water buffalo and the skins of lions, the hand of a gorilla as an ashtray and the foot of an elephant for a garbage can.

  There was no way we could fish near those pools that their successors did, unless we were invited in for half an afternoon. When one time a friend of mine and I were invited there, he was like a child.

  “My God,” he said. “The water—have you ever seen such beauty in the water.”

  “I want to show you where the fish are,” the guide said. My friend looked over the water, squinting his eyes.

  “Oh, I know where the fish are,” he said. And went out and hooked two that morning.

  The people who had been there just before we arrived had flown in their private jet to New York for brunch. My friend had yet to be in a plane.

  Such are the monumental gaps in the fishing life that the New Brunswick infomercials about conservation never seem to get.

  That year, the year I fished on the Bartibog with Peg, I went hunting along the Fundy coast. I came across, at different times, two small graveyards of Irish immigrants who had died during the hard winters of the 1850s.

  They were buried and their communities disappeared, and they were left for eternity to themselves. One day I came across Mary and Jacob Kelly, lying alone in the middle of nowhere, having died in 1858.

  One night, just at dark, after waiting on deer in the snow well beyond the road towards the craggy shore of Fundy Bay, I made my way back to the truck, and came across Mary McGregor’s family. Her children and she were there, under a granite stone, and a pair of angel’s wings covered with moss. I stopped to look at the writing and heard the far-off rattle of a buck.

  I made my way back out to the truck in the dark, and the next morning went in early. Just at dawn I walked down to the shore where the deer had been moving. The bay was frothy and cold, the swells calm and deceptive. It is a huge bay, terrible for its cold and rich in sea life. Hardly a fisherman from the shore of Fundy who goes to fish knows
how to swim, although they walk back and forth on eight-inch gunnels from bow to stern. What would be the point in knowing how to swim when the temperature of the water would take you under in two or three minutes?

  I made my way through the woods and sat down to wait. The day, except for a visit from an occasional moose bird and the chatter of a squirrel, was lonely and quiet.

  At quarter to five that night a huge deer stepped out of the thicket of spruce just below me.

  I was to lose that deer not by a poor shot but because the wardens decided I didn’t have the proper tags. I don’t think I’ve ever been more infuriated with authority in my life.

  Although they gave the deer back later—took the hide off and cut the meat for me, because it was their mistake—it ruined the deer season, and what I had gone through to get it. It was the first and only time I thought seriously of poaching a deer. I got up one morning at five o’clock and drove along the back road between Sussex and Saint Martin. There, just at daybreak, I saw a little four-point buck standing in the ditch in front of my headlights.

  Well, I couldn’t do it. I put the clip away and went home.

  Although I was not going to hunt again the next year, the second last week of the season I took my rifle and drove north. Spurred by the idea that I would have a good hunt, and that I would get a buck, and that there would be no mix-up in my credentials. I hunted for two days and on the third the snow started to fall.

  That third day I saw one deer but couldn’t get a shot at it. I don’t know if it was a small buck or a doe. But going in towards the beaver dam I saw the scrape of a very large buck, which I couldn’t have missed by more than fifteen minutes.

  I waited until dark but the snowstorm was getting very bad, and I drove out to my father’s house. I started to pack, to leave for Saint John the next morning. Then I thought that I would give it one more chance. It would be the last chance I would have to hunt.

  So I set the clock and got into bed.