Harder Ground

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by Joseph Heywood


  One day the fishing partners were staring down at the Coffee Creek, watching some small fish finning in sun-drenched shallows. “Stupid trout,” Bucky proclaimed, after which he launched into an explanation of how smart fish, meaning the large ones, lived their lives in near-total darkness and did as they pleased, safe from predators. Bucky’s grandfather called these hell trout, the only ones worthy of a trout-man’s time and pure interest. The notion of a trout-woman was beyond his ability to disbelieve.

  Bucky was smart, but too undisciplined for college and after high school had enlisted in the Army and ended up in the Seventh Cavalry, Third Squadron, the so-called “Eyes and Ears” of the Third Armored Division that led Operation Iraqi Freedom. Bucky was among the first soldiers killed by an IED in the Al Rashid District of Baghdad. He was awarded the Purple Heart and a Silver Star posthumously and she had stood by the flag-draped coffin with his grandfather, listening to the high school band play “Garryowen,” ripping the hearts out of all present and all the old man could say was “Fucking waste of a good trout man.” That was 2004, her second year in the county. It seemed impossible to believe. There had been a moment at the funeral when she’d wished they had gotten married.

  Bailey parked her Chevy truck at her friend’s camp, got into her waders, slid on her vest and pack, and got into the water, not bothering to string up or select a fly until she could find feeding fish. Once she found them the catching was steady if not spectacular, which was to be expected in June. Evening was the better time to fish in this part of summer, and with a bright sun and blue sky, slow was to be expected, though she had to admit to some disappointment, because Jalani confided she called this stretch Heaven’s Sweetwater. Bluebird sky, June, the fish would come later.

  Late in the afternoon she stopped at a glissade beneath a dark brown pool at the bottom of a long riffle. She sat and listened to the current harrumphing and clearing its throat and somewhere in the cascade of sound thought she heard a distinctly sturdy splook—not a fish rising, but a substantial fish feeding without fear, a hell-trout gorging during the dead hours in the light, which happened so rarely it might be considered miraculous in some circles. It was almost like the fish had a character flaw, a genetic defect that made for dumb behavior.

  If it rose again. Big fish had the irritating habit of feeding one time on the surface and not again, at least in earshot of the angler.

  “Drat,” a voice yipped, its owner beyond view. Cross heard a reel clicking urgently, and a fish splashing in resistance.

  The CO made her way around the next bend and saw an old man netting a brook trout of dimensions that defied imagination—well over twenty inches, a good two feet in length, its back black and cold, its belly alive with the colors of wildfire. The man released the fish quickly, and plopped down mid-river on a flat rock. He took off his hat, pulled out a purple bandanna, and wiped his forehead.

  “Heavenly,” Bailey Cross said, announcing her presence.

  The man didn’t even glance at her. “Hellish is more to the point,” he carped quietly, staring out at the river.

  She looked up into the sky, saw nothing. “What did it take?” she asked. “There’s no hatch.”

  The man pointed across the river with his little bamboo rod. “See that naked stick out there, just bouncing in the water?”

  “The curved one?”

  He grunted and stood up. “Just watch.”

  Within seconds there was a tiny, almost imperceptible rise below the stick. The man peeled off line and pitched a reach cast across the river, his fly lighting without a sound two feet above the stick and passing dragless within an inch of it.

  Splook! The water exploded, and the bamboo rod bent as the man set the hook. The fish ran, but the little rod was stout and the man was soon releasing the trout at his leg. It was another large brookie, almost two feet long and thick-bodied, glistening like an emerald trapezius muscle.

  “Hellish,” the man said, as the released fish scurryied to a hole across the river. The old man sat down on the rock again. “A big fish can rise small, but a little fish can’t rise big,” he said.

  She had learned this from Bucky when she was a kid. “Heavenly,” she said again.

  “See for yourself,” the man said, making his way across a slippery stone bottom to the shallows and the bank.

  “I’ve never seen a brook trout that size,” Bailey Cross said. “Much less caught one.”

  “You will,” the man said. “This spot’s yours until you surrender it to the next angler.”

  She looked around. “There’s nobody on the river but us.”

  “All possessed trouters find this place sooner or later. You’ll have company, but the spot’s yours until you give it up. I expect you’ll even get offered a few bribes or threats to move on,” he added with an amused chuckle.

  “Was that the same fish?” she asked the man, trying to see what fly was on his line, but it was too small to see.

  “Can’t say,” the man said. “Everyone comes here thinking this is heaven, but it seems to me the purest of hells,” he concluded with palpable disgust.

  Cross was too amped to engage in further conversation and edged her way upstream to the sitting rock. She locked her eyes on the bouncing stick and saw from this angle it was shaped like a French curve. It was her experience that it was rare to find a large fish feeding on the surface except during major hatches, and virtually never in sunlight unless there was a good breeze and hoppers in the bank grasses, but as she stood and watched she saw another small sip and her heart began to race. She stood quietly, watching, and saw another sip. Having matched wits with an occasional large fish, she knew it would stay in its feeding lane if the fly wasn’t directly overhead. One inch off might be as bad as a galactic mile. She thought about the rise and tied on a yellow sally, a yellow stonefly.

  She waited for the fish to rise again, then cast two feet in front of the stick, mended out the drag and told herself to let it ride past the fish’s likely station and only then lift it quietly and gently and cast again. With a sally you usually wanted to disturb the water, like the bug was trying to lift off, but this first time she wanted it just to flow quietly over the target. Given that she was mentally into the second cast she was unprepared for the crushing attack on the fly, but she set the hook and quickly got the fish onto the reel, as it surged upstream against the current, leaving her mouth agape, the surging fish cutting the water like a red-hot scalpel through butter.

  The head-pounding below the surface was violent and consistent. She’d handled big fish, but this was something different in terms of pure strength and she was sloppy in netting it, the fly coming loose and snagging the netting, bending the hook, making the fly unusable. She looked for another yellow sally, but discovered that was her last one. She picked out a green caddis and tied it on. She’d seen no splashy rises to caddis and none flutter-hopping in flight, but it often worked, and green was her lucky color, even when there was no identifiable hatch. Deep down she guessed she was seeing tiny, microcaddis, #22s or smaller, but the sally had worked just fine.

  A fish smacked her next cast like a starving hermit finding a venison roast over an unattended campfire. She set the hook, brought the fish to net, and released it.

  By the time she got into her fifth fish in less than an hour she was beginning to wonder if hell-trout had bred a super dumb-ass sub-strain, or if she had stumbled upon a pod of stupid big brookies. She began to use scissors to nip a groove in the creatures’ dorsal fins before releasing them to dart away.

  There were six more fish in the next hour, in all eleven brook trout, all around twenty-four inches in length and four or five pounds in weight, production line fish, all in one place. It was insane and spooky. As far as she knew she did not catch the same fish twice and she wracked her brain trying to fathom why large brookies would be schooled in accessible water in daylight, not just schooled b
ut apparently all packed beneath the dancing stick, which she was coming to imagine as a magic wand. Trout school in lakes, okay, but not in rivers, especially not in runty rivers like this one.

  After fish fourteen, Cross sat on the flat rock and noticed the surface had been polished and she wondered if this had been going on for decades or centuries, which was a stupid thought, but she was crawling around desperate. She thought, I mean, each fish is the trophy of a lifetime, every fish almost identical in length and weight. What were the odds on this? This was infinitely more rare than the odds on winning the state lottery.

  After the eighth fish she’d begun switching flies after every catch, but the results remained the same, the length of time, and savagery of the fights almost identical. It didn’t matter what she threw, or how well or how poorly. Catching giant brook trout here was a lock.

  By catch twelve she began to experiment with casts to see how far the trout would come to the fly. Number fourteen came six feet from its hide and took the fly with savage greed. Six feet! It was all very confusing, totally unlike any fishing experience she had ever experienced, or even imagined.

  “You about done?” a stentorian voice boomed from behind her. She turned to find a short man wearing a bright red Stormy Kromer hat. He had the physiognomy of a rodent.

  “You been at it for a while,” the man said. “I’ve heard it said some fish here so long their hearts give out.”

  Cross grunted and stood up.

  The stranger added, “Some just mighta been saved if they’d had the good sense to get out earlier and seek help.”

  Cross didn’t answer him. He was trying to wedge her out of the spot and she was not about to leave, not with his attitude and pushing. She had always enjoyed the solitude of trout fishing, and generally other anglers shared the same values, and if you came to a river and found yourself near someone, you’d get out and go around, usually several hundred yards to give them plenty of breathing and fishing room. Nobody had ever given her a list of river rules; she had found them out of respect and courtesy of others, and the golden rule. Not every trout-chaser followed them, but most did and trout rivers tended to be serene, orderly places where you could fish hard or daydream and not worry about interruptions.

  “A gentleman would step aside,” her kibitzer said.

  Cross said, “A gentleman wouldn’t be downstream of me running his pie hole.”

  “No call for that tone of voice,” he said.

  “And no call for you to be back there,” she repeated, made a false cast back at him and put a fly within a hair of his ear as a warning to give her some space.

  Clearly, his presence and her reaction flummoxed her and her next cast was a gross, amateur fat loop that splatted the fly on the water not five feet from her leg and thirty or more feet from the bouncing stick, and as she reached down to pick up the fly a brookie charged all the way downstream and ate it, almost out of her hand!

  “Guess that cast will put them down,” her visitor said, obviously not seeing her take the line and the fish not six inches from her knee and let it go.

  The next cast went under the stick. A trout struck, she made the set, and as soon as she had it set she kept the rod down and straight-lined the fish under the water.

  “Too bad,” Jerkwad said with a laugh. “This ain’t a woman’s game.”

  But he plodded around her, went up around seventy-five yards and sat there as she caught fish after fish and eventually he moved up into the woods. She was releasing fish number twenty-four when Mr. Obnoxious cursed her venomously and departed for good. It was getting dark and she considered making camp for the night, but if she left this spot would that constitute surrendering it? Could she even leave the sitting rock? Questions without answers. She sat on the flat rock, ate a sandwich and a Mounds bar for energy, and after awhile, stood up to cast again. This had to end, sooner or later. Had to.

  But it went on all night, no stars, no moon, no light, just cast, set, net, release while mosquitoes pocked her exposed skin and left welts that itched devilishly, and at some point during the night, she stopped counting and indeed lost count of the number of giant trout she had caught and released.

  As the sun rose she looked into a mirror of skinny flat water and saw her face was swollen and red.

  She told herself that in totally unexpected situations it could be difficult to extract oneself, but in the morning sun and rising temperature she knew she had experienced more than her fill and with no other people in sight, she shouldered her pack and gear and walked upstream until she saw a path upward and used it to climb out, carefully carrying her rod tip behind to keep from breaking it.

  There was light on top and the old man who had given her the hole the day before. She smelled fresh coffee before seeing him. His camp consisted of a pup tent and not much else. His waders hung from a tree by their suspenders and she saw that the waders were as much patches as original rubber material. His rod was leaning against a bush. He poured coffee into a mug, held it out to her, and smiled.

  “You lasted a long while,” he said.

  “I don’t understand it,” she said.

  “What’s to understand, and why would one want to? It just is. That’s what matters, the moment, right?”

  “All the fish were identical,” Cross said. “Every one of them, and each a different fish. I think fish biologists would say it isn’t possible to have so many big fish clumped together, except in a hatchery.”

  “Gets boring,” her host said. “Everything the same, no variety, no chance for failure, its perfection beyond imagination and skill and you can’t do anything wrong. That’s the hell of it.”

  Bailey Cross sat down cross-legged with the man. The coffee was strong and hot and she tried to think about what he said, but she was soon asleep and awoke to find herself alone.

  “It was boring,” she said out loud. Without the possibility of failure there could be no sense of accomplishment.

  She hiked down to her truck and called Monty on the cell phone.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “No problem,” he said. “Catch any?”

  “I caught them all,” she said.

  Monty laughed. “You didn’t catch me.”

  “I’m not home yet,” she said.

  He said, “I think you’re closer than before you left.”

  Flier’s Club

  Gillian Lunela Hartdog had felt increased amusement for her contacts with the general public as her career piled years on years. It was to the point where she could hardly wait to get in the truck every day and she missed it on her pass days, her days off. People were nuts and lead-pipe stupid, their antics wilder and more bewildering every year.

  Not that she didn’t sometimes overdose on people. She did at times. But she knew that when her tolerance was reaching saturation she could always drive up to the top of Brockway Mountain and breathe in the sunrise, take nature’s new energy into her own soul and this would fix her for weeks to come.

  Sunset was pretty, but represented an ending, a leaving. It was a time of negative energy and she imagined it drew off the day’s sins and transgressions. But everyone liked sunsets and the public drove to the top of the mountain in droves to drink and gawk. Fewer people were early risers, and sunrises on Brockway were uncrowded and peaceful and serene as mornings ought to be, like the first smoke of the day and the first coffee. Morning was for thought and loin-girding or battle.

  It was weird, she knew, but in her own mind she and those like her were green knights, Mother Nature’s and the State of Michigan’s good guys and gals in the bush.

  Very first thing in the morning she used her Smartbook to check the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website. NOAA Weather reports there tended to be more reliable than elsewhere, especially the stuff from cutesy and giddy TV chicks with the brain power of bricks. Not that weather predictions i
n the Keweenaw were ever easy in the common sense of the word. A rocky finger off the Upper Peninsula, the area seemed to catch shit from every frontal assault coming down from Canada, or up from the south.

  This morning’s forecast looked good. The two girls, Ellie and Kay-Kay, were in high school now, driving a beater Jeep and on their own getting themselves off to Calumet High School. The two were involved in everything, always busy and frantic, always on the dead run, but they had good grades and their menstrual meltdowns happened, but rarely, thank God. They were pleasant to be around and how could a mother ask for more?

  Some of the girls’ friends, different story. Many of them seemed to be drowning in some group psychosis of angst. Don’t think about that crap today, Hartdog told herself. Today was for a pleasant patrol up to High Rock Bay at the far end of the Keweenaw peninsula, and a loop around the Mandan Road.

  Her exact plan was to greet the day on top of Brockway Mountain, suck up maximum karmic energy, and get on with the day from there. A great part of this job was that she got to help people every day, even fools. She had learned early in her career, twenty-three years ago, that the job wasn’t so much about writing tickets, but more about educating and assisting people and she was good at it, always calm in the face of chaos and disorder, a trait which had earned her the nickname of “Cool Hand Lu” from her DNR partners and colleagues. Even her husband Blick called her that, and sometimes her daughters would tell each other, “Better bounce that off Cool Hand.”

  “Babe,” Blick said sleepily from the bed.

  “See you at four, here,” she said. “Make wood today.”

  “With you I could,” he mumbled playfully.

  “Knock it off, I’ve got work in the deep woods.”

 

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