But this bridge spotting has gone on now for almost twenty years, and I can truthfully say I can actually see grilse or salmon below those bridges in those pools. It takes a while to be able to discern their shape, so blended are they, so part of their world they are.
I want my son to get a fish, and last year we went up to the Souwest with my friend, writer and guide, Wayne Curtis. However, though he didn’t catch one, hope springs eternal, and next year we will go again. We will spend days on the river, I tell my son, and we will fry fish over an open fire on the beach, and canoe too. We will do all the things that I wanted to do as a boy and never got a chance. But again I suppose life is like a spiral, and things have to be done, and traded, and bartered for. And one of those things is time. And I see myself, like my father before me, stuck in an office and travelling to Toronto, and there is always a moment when children break your heart, because they run into the room to tell you something so important to them, and you’re not there.
We pass Two Mile Pool, where I have never taken a fish from, and Peter gets out and throws a line. I see it arcing above him in perfect balance, and the fly jotting against the small ripples. Far up the hill is where we used to park our truck. The road now is all overgrown and swamped, and new roads cut through the silence. On this cool day the wind is beginning to move the trees up on the slopes, and I hear the chatter of a squirrel far away.
Peter hooks a little grilse.
Some give a Miramichi whoop when they hook a fish. I used to the first few years. I no longer do.
Peter never speaks. So you look at his line moving across the water, turn away for a moment, look again, and his rod is bowed, and he has switched hands.
“How did that take?”
Peter shakes his head.
“Not very well. Move the canoe up so I can come in there,” he says, but as soon as he does the line goes limp. He looks over and slaps his line.
“It’s gone,” he says. He brings his line in and searches for his bug, looks at it a moment, breaks it off with his teeth, and reties it. He smiles as he sees the little grilse flop in the water a few feet from him.
“Hurt fish won’t take,” he says.
Although that is normally true, it is not consistently the truth. Once on the Little Souwest I had a hit that must have hurt the fish, and simply as a reaction threw the fly right back at it, and it took hard again, and I managed to land it. Often on this river on a slow day, we will ask ourselves what in God’s name are we doing. But this day, though a slow day, never brings this to mind.
In his camp, at night, Peter will begin to talk about the rivers he is going to fish the next day. And very soon he is travelling all the rivers of the Miramichi system in his mind. He will go from Gin Point on the Big Sevogle to the Norwest, to the Little Souwest, in a matter of seconds, mentioning the pools he has to fish, as if he is a wizard of some renown. And the best thing one can do with him at these points is just nod and say “Sure.”
Now he is telling me another story interlaced and interwoven with another, to make it textured and respectable as a story of the woods should be.
He was hunting, and he had wounded a deer and lost his clip, and had to follow it for three miles, until he finally got another bullet into it.
“I felt sorry for that deer,” he said, “because I lost my clip.”
“That was up at Louis Lake,” I say remembering that story, and he says that yes it was. All those years ago.
It was a strange thing that Louis Lake, far up on the Plaster Rock, he tells me.
He and a friend went fishing one day, thinking that there was arctic char there. It was a late spring day, and the ice had been out of the river for a month, but when they got to the lake it was covered in ice. So they found another lake, smaller and further away, which was ice-free, and they unhooked their boat and got rigged out and fished for three hours without any luck.
Then packing up their boat and rigging and heading back home, they passed Louis Lake once more.
“All the ice was gone,” Peter said. “It was ice covered when we went in, and gone when we started out.”
So in some amazement they got the boat off the trailer, got their rods, and rowed out to the middle to fish.
“It was the strangest thing,” Peter said. “Looking down at the entire bottom, as far as we could see, was covered in a sheet of ice. All the ice in the lake had sunk in once gigantic piece, and killed the fish—who knows—but there was no arctic char there that day.”
Coming in here on this day we had a surprise. The fishery officers pulled us over, and lo and behold, to my eternal amazement, out of the truck came Henry, my old poaching friend.
He checked our licences and tags for the numbers, signed our licenses, with the time and date, and made a cursory look about our truck and under our canoe. He was now a fish warden, and looked very professional, and somewhat put out and suspicious of us. Finally I caught his eye and said hello.
“How are you boys doin’?” he asked, looking up under the truck, which must have been a place he had once put poached fish himself.
“How long have you been a fish warden?” I ask.
“Oh, a long time now.” He looks at me, as if in severe puzzlement that I would ask such a question.
He told me that old Mr. Simms had died. I hadn’t seen him in a number of years, and I was always going to go back and say hello.
“He died on the river,” he says, “His brother had to take him by wheelchair down to a pool. And he went to sleep there one afternoon last week. I don’t think his brother will last very much longer now—they were twins, you see.”
I was fishing on that day as well, on the main Souwest, and I think of this. Sometimes you will be startled by a death, because you had been thinking of that person that very day. Often it is like this. But I had not seen or thought of Mr. Simms in a while. And the last time I saw him, I believe, was the day I had taken him the fiddleheads.
Henry got into his truck and nodded to us, put it in gear and drove away, looking among the hills and torrents of our river system for lawbreakers who displeased him.
Paul, in A River Runs Through It, wanted to be the greatest fly-fisherman in the world. I know men who held on to the same dream. My friend, Rick Tretheway, wrote a poem called “Dreaming of Rivers,” where he is always going back to the rivers of his youth, of his home, which is always somewhere else from where he now lives. But it is never the same as in your dreams. In our dreams we always float like the airborne angels above it, float like the pollen carried on the feet of bees, see it as it relates to our subconscious, where all decisions can be made in a second, and all decisions seem right.
In reality it pays at best an irregular dividend. The river can sap our energy as much as bring life to us. And I am passing the place I stood my second year of fishing, where I went down swinging at the air, with both fists, roundhouses at the bugs, after I had lost a fish. I remember Peter laughing so hard he almost fell into the water.
“Throw your jab,” he was saying. “Step inside and hook that bug.”
Now, remembering how I lost that fish, I am telling Peter, not that story, but another one, about my dog Jeb Stuart and me on the Little Souwest one summer day, years ago, fishing with my old heavy Fenwick. Jeb got caught in the rapid near Harris Brook, as I crossed, and down he went. I thought he had drowned. I couldn’t see him for a minute or two and started to run along the shore trying to find him, ready to jump in and haul him out by the tail. But then I spotted him on the far side of the river, coming up along the bank. Before I got my old Fenwick together he had come across and was shaking himself off beside me as if he had performed a wonderful task I should be pleased with. Dogs, when they shake next to you, always seem to think a lot of themselves.
There is nothing like an old Fenwick today. The rod I use, a Loomis, has been given to me by the people of the Miramichi and I am proud of that fact. It is a supple rod, nine and a half feet long, and I have a nice reel now, which hold
s a good line. We are travelling the small short river again, in hope of the fish that will hold up in the pool, the fish that have travelled those thousands of miles to meet us, the progeny of fish we missed a few years before. And Peter is replete with stories and is telling me another one.
Peter tells his story about getting a truck stuck and it is as if I can see him and his friend working hour after hour to get the truck back up on the grade.
“I had to walk through to the highway,” Peter said, “and didn’t get back until late at night. So once we got the truck back up, I decided to stay in alone, and fish in the morning.” He took a sleeping bag and went down over the hill and stretched out. The flies woke him at dawn.
“How did you make out?”
“I didn’t see a fish,” he laughs. “And I haven’t had much luck on this river since—I have to try somewhere else. Fishing is getting harder on this river every year.”
So I tell him that sometimes when fishing was hard, the old folks would capture a mouse and put it on a shingle, and float the shingle down the river. The mouse would sit upon the shingle because it didn’t want to get wet, and then the fisherman would cast his line over the mouse and hook it. The mouse would jump off the shingle and start to swim for shore, and as often as not, a large salmon would break water below it, and swallow it.
“That’s pretty hard on a mouse,” Peter says.
Peter then told me he once hooked a duck in the water, and our friend, Doug Underhill, hooked a squirrel.
“I would never eat a fish I saw swallow a mouse,” Peter said.
Another thing the old folks did on a hard day, I tell Peter, is that they would go up to the top of a pool and shovel some dirt into it. The dirt mixing with the flow of water would turn to silt, the fish would be fooled into thinking the water was rising and would start to take.
These stories were told me by Mr. Simms when I was twelve years old. When I was the little Christ child, who was supposed to become a fisher of men, and preach in the temple.
Peter asks me if I believe these stories, and I tell him I didn’t know, but that something quite like these stories probably happened at one time or another. And of our friends at Allison run, who kick and scramble above the fish every year, to get them to take.
Then the talk trails off, as the trip becomes harder and more monotonous.
We haven’t spoken in a long while and we are below Teacup Pool. The water is low and brown, so we are in and out of the canoe half a dozen times on a single stretch. My sneakers are water-soaked, and my jeans are soaked up to my thighs, and by now the canoe also needs to be bailed out. I am bruised by the rocks and from jumping in and out, and bitten by two hundred bugs.
“Do you remember the time on the Depo stretch when you lost your sneakers?” Peter asked.
Both the laces of my sneakers broke, and I had retied them a number of times. It was the third day of our fishing trip and we were walking way down to the pools, hoping to get some trout because it had been hard going with the salmon. Although, I must say, I had hooked a grilse earlier that morning, but I was looking back over my shoulder at the time and lost it. And I was looking back over my shoulder because Peter was telling me he knew for a fact that there were no fish in the pool, and I was telling him I had just seen one roll. When it took I wasn’t ready and hauled the damn fly from its mouth.
“Oh God—you were right,” Peter had said bending over with laughter.
So, I had lost my laces to my sneakers that day. The only thing we had left to tie my sneakers with was a bit of chain from Peter’s compass. That didn’t hold and I ended up walking barefoot back to the truck, over rocks and stumps, while Peter managed to make it down to a pool and hook a grilse. It reminded me again of my very first time fishing, at four years old, when I walked home with my socks in my pockets.
Today we will haul the canoe down to Three Minute Pool and fish it, and make it to White Birch by evening. Then we will sit out under the stars, and tomorrow we will make it down to the narrows where my truck is parked.
We pull up at Three Minute Pool and rest. I sit on a boulder in the sun and look at the water, dark and swift flowing against the cliff, and the trees’ shade and shadow upon it. It has been almost twenty years since I first saw this pool.
“What are you using?” I ask Peter.
He doesn’t answer. He steps out at the top of the pool, and the second cast he has a nice grilse. The grilse runs into the middle and sulks, butting his rod. Peter looks at me and starts to back in, but holds his ground as the grilse runs and jumps.
There is always a moment when I look away when a fish is having the life played from it.
The grilse turns along the ledge, and then cuts to its right, as if it wants to go over the rapids at the top of the pool. Then it turns back towards the centre but finds itself in shallow water, digging with all its strength to try to get back into the pool. It jumps again, and comes down in a rainbow just out from me, and Peter is to my right, and backs in and lands it.
He looks about.
“You know I have no picture of this pool, and I hardly have a picture of me on this river. Some day in winter, when I’m old, I’ll try to remember what it all looked like. I’ll have to come in here some day and get a picture.”
I suppose I can say this, that the men I have been fortunate enough to know on the Miramichi generally do what they say they are going to do. There is no greater or finer gift in human nature than this. The men I admire the most are those who are most direct and unassuming about this. So then you should never tell a Miramichier you are going to kill him, because often as not he’ll take you at your word.
I get some blades of grass and wet them to place over the grilse, and we move out.
It is late afternoon and there is only a little ways—five or six more turns—to White Birch. I look across the river and see myself walking up along the bank, up to my shoulders in grass, twenty years before. Peter, thinking this, says, “We must have been in awful good shape back then.”
“And awful crazy.”
We walked from White Birch all the way up to Two Mile Pool or beyond, and then would start back—and did this every day.
“And now we can afford the luxury of a canoe,” Peter laughs.
The one thing about the Coleman canoe I own, it never minds how many rocks it goes over. And if you are on the south branch of the Sevogle River, you’d have to be blind not to hit a rock.
White Birch comes in view, and is calm and familiar in the evening air. The bugs are bad; the bugs are always bad so there is no use in mentioning it too much. We pull the canoe up on the beach, and begin to set up the tent. We light a small fire that is still transparent in the evening, and the smoke dissipates in the cooling air. I am shivering in my soaking jeans.
“Are we having that fish?” Peter says.
“No, no—you keep it.”
Peter shrugs and starts to get it ready to cook.
I look through my fly box. There are some wonderful flies in it now. Undertakers, Squirrel Tails and Hairy Marys and bugs and Black Ghosts and more bugs—all will take fish. And I look and see the yellowish feather and black body and black hackle of my uncle Richard Adams favourite fly. The Black Dose. Something attracts me to it. And I try to remember where this fly came from and though, like most fishermen, I can remember pretty well where I got every fly (since to my shame I don’t and can’t tie my own), I could not remember this fly. But it looks right, and when I pick it up and hold it between my thumb and forefinger, it feels right as well.
I put it on. I begin to move my way down the pool, watching in the falling sunlight the fly disappearing under the surface, and when picked up looking entirely black, but when it made its arc, looking splendidly regal.
Suddenly, quite soon after I begin to fish, my line tightens, so automatically that it startles me, and in the twilight I have a salmon on.
“That’s one,” Peter said.
And we wait.
Down it goes
, this majestic fish, and sulks and Peter watches from the beach, and then as if trying to make some assessment of me, it moves slowly upriver, pulling the line from my reel.
I reel until again I can feel the pressure. It was no grilse.
There is a moment when fighting a grilse a man or women will think they are in a fight—and I don’t deny that they are. But this was a salmon, and the pressure on my rod, and on my arm, was seven times as great.
“David—come in, come in,” Peter says, who could never stop his instruction or his teaching.
“It don’t matter,” I say, “because it’s going to run.”
And just then the salmon goes, and takes me with it, down almost out of the pool, zigging crazily from one side of the pool to the other, and then just as suddenly turning and coming back towards the rock, and jumping high in the air. Then it goes down and stays there. At this point I can feel the butt on my line.
The salmon was butting its head against the bottom, just beyond the rock, to loosen the fly’s grip in its mouth. And then it comes up and jumps again.
“Well, they’re still here,” Peter says.
And down it goes again, this time out of the pool, and I run with it along the shore.
I have it hooked now about ten minutes.
The water is reddish and splendid in the darkening air, and I have no Polaroids on, and can’t tell where exactly my fish is. Then it runs again. And my arm is aching. I’m not prepared and it almost straightens my rod out. Sensing it might have a chance at this it jumps high, a great fish, and comes down with the line sagging, and then tightening.
“Its got the leader tangled about its head,” I say, noticing it moving sideways and butting its head once more. Then it runs again.
Now it is down, almost to the bend, and my backing, in a pocket between two rocks, and again it has taken to butting its head, to loosen my fly, and again an osprey flies high overhead, and again it is darkening.
I manage to wait on it, and reel my line in slowly, and follow it down.
Peter comes down with the net that was in the canoe most of the summer and hardly used, because so often we beach our fish. Now the salmon is taking small runs and stopping. My line moves over the water as if it is a slender magnet attached to some great being, going here and there, searching for a way out of something it does not understand.
Lines on the Water Page 15