by Henry Hughes
“You must be so bored here,” she said.
“I like it here,” I told her. She had a pretty brown face with some acne scars and shiny black hair to her shoulders.
“I’m sick of this place,” she said. Ben’s brother dropped a big Ziploc bag of deer jerky on the table. He said he shot the deer last fall, and when I asked him about it, he came alive with describing the mule deer buck and how it walked right up to him out of a draw.
“Nice job,” I said. “This is good.”
“Take the bag,” he said. Sandy pulled out a big twist of jerky and bit into it. “Yum.”
High and happy, we bumped and dipped down Tribal Highway 5 along the river, past endless rises of buffalo grass studded with scrubby cedar and juniper, turning north to Fort Thompson and Big Ben Dam. “This is my goddamn dam,” Ben laughed. “So watch your step.” From the back seat, using phrases learned in sociology class, I asked Ben about “the Native American community.”
“Indian,” he said.
“Indian?”
“Maybe you’re native American, man. We’re Indians. Indians. It’s life on the rez, man. We scalped the last New Yorker who came here.”
Ben Whitehorse was having some more fun with me, but I was interested in his life and asked more questions.
“Indians been fucked over for a long time, so we know how to do it,” he said. “I’m just doing my thing. Live and let live, you know? Get a little business started and help my folks out. Maybe marry some big-titted Norwegian gal.”
“That’s cool, Ben.”
“Fucking cool, Use,” Abe said from the front seat, smiling and handing me a hunk of jerky. We parked below the dam and waited a while for Birch, then decided to head down to the water, climbing over big pink rocks that armored the banks. It was hard going over the rocks with poles and tackle and two sixes of beer; painful missteps killed my buzz. Abe said he was just gonna watch, but Ben rigged a rod for him and was teaching him to cast. I felt the need for a little space and climbed downriver a couple hundred feet, watched the high-shouldered pelicans swim and dip, and started throwing my crippled shad crank bait.
Before us was the Missouri River that once watered endless tall grasses, buffalo herds, and the Sioux high on their mustangs. The Missouri of Lewis and Clark, cattle ranching, depressed Indian reservations, eroding soil, riprap, five dams, and many cities. It was just getting dark, and there were lights and engine sounds from a few boats mixed with the steady hum of the dam’s generators. People seemed to be partying around a fire on the Crow Creek Reservation across the river. The south bank where we fished was deserted. The river smelled flatter than the saltwater around Long Island, but the sound of gulls and lapping waves were familiar. Cast and cast, that’s what you do, reeling fast, then slow, wondering if the next moment will connect you to a walleye. I stared at the darkening river, rubbed a bruise on my knee, and remembered my father giving me arrowheads that he found at construction sites. Long Island once had many flourishing tribes—Setauket, Shinnecock, Montauk—great fishing people wiped out in the early waves of European settlement. By the end of the nineteenth century, the plains Indians were also broken down. With land, water, and so many traditions lost, it was good to see the Sioux of Lower Brule still hunting and fishing.
After an hour of steadily increasing wind, I heard Ben Whitehorse whooping up a storm, and I scrambled over the rocks to see what was going on.
“It’s big, Use. Like whale, man,” Abe was standing and gesturing with his cigarette. Ben was fast to a fish. Birch showed up, honing in on our gusting voices and providing the only working flashlight. Something came into the beam. Was it a beaver? Its smooth black body spanned more than a yard, and it seemed to have the tail of a shark and the bill of a goose. “What the hell is that?”
“Spoonbill catfish,” Ben yelled.
“Sure is,” Birch confirmed. “Big paddlefish.”
Here was another fish I had long read about but had never seen or touched. After three runs the exhausted creature, firmly snagged at the base of its rostrum, splashed beside the rocks. Abe held the light, and Birch reached down and grabbed its bill. The fish was easily four feet long, and we carried it under a light in the parking lot. Dark, small eyed, and flabby finned, it had smooth skin like a catfish and a large toothless mouth used for scooping plankton that it strained through gill rakers. “Ram-jet feeding,” Professor Tatina would explain back at school. The paddlefish’s amazing snout is loaded with electroreceptors for detecting schools of plankton that it swims through openmouthed. Responding to breeding cues triggered by the faster spring water, paddlefish congregate at the dam’s tailrace each May. I imagined this fish finning like a right whale in the dark current until Ben’s barbed hook struck home. “They’re good eating,” Ben said. “All but the red meat—I throw that stinking shit to the dogs.”
We hadn’t caught any walleye, but a strong wind was building, and this was enough for tonight. “Let’s hit the bar in Reliance,” Ben suggested, lifting the heavy fish into his already full trunk, setting it on top of a barbecue grill he never got around to assembling and some highway cones and raincoats. “Okay, Reliance. Let’s go,” I said. Birch followed in his car, and we sailed out, feeling quite pleased with our mighty catch, lighting and passing the pipe, smoke rolling out of the widows—the rusty, dented, taped, and twined old cars plowing through the prairie night. Ten minutes down the road, we heard screeching tires and a horn. Looking back, we saw Birch stopped on the shoulder. There were no other cars, so Ben backed up. Birch was standing over something on the pavement. It was the paddlefish, his snout and head ironed by the Opel’s bald tire.
“That’s some crazy roadkill, Birch,” Ben said and laughed.
“Your fucking trunk started opening wider and wider, then shit, that fish jumped right out.”
“My father used to get fresh rabbits this way,” Ben laughed some more.
“Hell yeah, my old man brought home a pheasant he hit with his pickup,” Birch added. “But never any fish.”
We all started laughing, really laughing, and Abe told us about a bus that once hit a buffalo and the town celebrated with a feast. Not wanting to be outdone, I told the men about a raccoon Herbie picked off Route 112 with a prime pelt worth thirty dollars.
“Should’ve ate ’im, man,” Ben said.
We wrapped the fish in some plastic from Ben’s trunk, and I set it beside me on the backseat, patting it often.
I stayed up late in the dorm lounge watching a movie from the early sixties starring Rock Hudson as a tackle salesman and fishing pro who’s never been fishing. A beautiful woman has to teach him to fish. The movie was terrible, but the opening song, “The favorite sport of a man is girls,” and the photomontage of pointy-breasted women in sports attire stayed with me. There were parties where a girl from class and I would start talking, kissing, and if things felt right, we’d find a room or a bush or the backseat of a car. I had a lot to learn, and I paid attention.
One night after a few hours of steamy dancing, I hooked up with a girl and we had a wild time in the backseat of a friend’s Chrysler. I noticed that the currents were saltier than usual, in fact, the aromas and flavors were downright fishy. Almost exactly like peeled shrimp at a summer picnic. People joke about this, but I was fascinated by the connection, the oceans within, some deep channel back to our marine origins. After a one-night stand or a couple random hook-ups in my first years of college, I found myself playfully objectifying sex in the language of fishing. “Got my limit last night,” I grinned at Woody toweling off in the dorm bathroom.
“Oh yeah? Rod action any good?” he smiled.
“Not bad. But not quite a trophy for the wall.”
Crude, sure, but such jokes allowed us to discuss those aspects of sex that swam below love.
Literature, I soon learned, took such crudities and turned them into art. A number of old poems compared courtship and seduction to fishing, but it was the women who were doing the casting, like Sha
kespeare's Cleopatra:
Give me mine angle; we’ll to th’ river. There,
My music playing far off, I will betray
Tawny-finned fishes. My bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up
I’ll think them every one an Antony,
And say, “Aha! You’re caught.”
Later in the seventeenth century, Edmund Waller talks of “Ladies Angling”:
At once victorious with their lines and eyes,
They make the fishes and the men their prize.
And in “The Bait,” John Donne describes “sleave-silk flies” that “Bewitch poor fishes’ wand’ring eyes,” but a comely woman:
… need’st no such deceit
For thou thyself art thine own bait;
That fish that is not catched thereby,
Alas, is wiser than I.
Wise or unwise, I was drawn to as many baited hooks as I myself did cast.
The Holiday Inn’s Shipwreck Lounge in Mitchell, South Dakota, was a good place to hook up. There were older women eager to talk with college students, and I was taken home a couple times. In one instance, the woman’s separated husband came to the house at seven in the morning to retrieve some tools. “Shit,” she said and ordered me to “Stay.” I waited like an anxious dog in the bedroom until he left, and she returned to free me. Having coffee together downstairs in her kitchen, I saw a number of photos of the man still taped to the fridge. In one photo he was holding a huge walleye. “Damn,” I shook my head, “Where did he get that?”
In my junior year of college I started dating Janet, a perky, petite blonde who loved sex but also loved to think, talk, read, and even fish a bit. She was from Montana, and we launched a 1986 spring break trip into a blizzard. State police closed the interstate, directing cars into the town of Wall, where we bedded on the floor of a church and quietly consecrated the Lord’s blessing of sensual affection when the lights went out. The next morning brought some stares from the congregation, more tire-spinning roads through western South Dakota and Wyoming, over the border into Montana where we slept in our car at a gas station in Garyowen. Just to the north was the Little Bighorn Battlefield. At first light, running the heater, Janet and I talked about Custer and his men, the terror they must have felt when they knew the battle was quickly turning against them. I imagined a man my age, twenty, clutching an arrow piercing his side. We talked about the Indians celebrating their well-deserved victory, the cries and singing, the women coming onto the field to cut the cocks and balls off the dead soldiers.
Janet’s father met us outside Lewistown. Spending time with the father of a girl you’re bedding can feel a little weird at first. But he introduced me to good trout water and liked the way I fished, coaching here and there, only admonishing if I did something stupid like leave my rod unattended on a rock ledge while I went to the car for beer. We fish-walked rivers, casting spinners and catching gorgeous rainbows. Janet joined us in Lewistown to fish Big Spring Creek. She was a good stream walker and spinnerette, making precise casts behind boulders and under logs, catching a nice brown trout that I killed with a rock and carried on a willow branch pushed through its gills. We also plunked spillways with trout eggs that Janet’s father had saved from earlier catches. He wrapped dime-size clusters of eggs in small squares of stocking hose that stayed firmly on the hook while oozing the irresistible smell of spawn. Trout, like many fish, love to eat their own eggs. Janet and I hooked one- and two-pound cannibal rainbows, swinging them up and over the concrete. Retiring for drinks and lunch at the river-straddled Montana Bar, I stared down through the Plexiglas floor window at trout hovering safely in green light.
Janet’s family had a camper that she and I used for another trip to the Black Hills and Lake Pactola with Woody and his girlfriend, Xanti. Woody and I poached a couple ducks with his Sears and Roebuck .22 and then unfolded chairs on the cold, rocky shore, plunking corn nibblets for trout. Like the old Montana poet, Dick Hugo, we set our poles on forked sticks, eased our bundled-up backs into folding chairs, drank blackberry brandy, smoked a few cigarettes, and waited for the rods to dance. When it warmed up a bit, the women joined us. We caught four or five nice trout, cleaned them by the lake, played cards in the camper, and started cooking. Woody breasted out the ducks and cut the meat into small chunks that we salted and fried in butter and garlic. Xanti baked the trout in foil with butter, mushrooms, and roasted almonds that Woody shoplifted from a mini-mart. The food was great, and as we finished, I leaned back, patted my belly, and forecasted, “More nice ones tomorrow.” Janet looked at me in surprise. “We fished all day,” she said. “I was freezing out there.”
“We didn’t fish all day. We fished a few hours,” I retorted. I knew Janet found this kind of fishing boring—she was an active woman, and I admired that—but I had never been to a trout-filled mountain lake and was hoping to spend the next day working lures in deeper water. Woody and Xanti felt the tension and stepped out for a smoke.
“I didn’t just come here to fish,” she said.
“Well, what do you want to do?”
“Go for a hike, maybe some shopping in Rapid City.”
“Shopping, are you kidding? With all this around us?”
“Well, a hike then.”
Janet was, of course, making a reasonable request. For most normal people, six hours of fishing in thirty-degree weather was enough. We negotiated that I could have a morning of angling while she read. In the afternoon we would go for a hike near an old gold mine.
Early next morning, Woody and I fished-walked to the other side of the lake. With stinging fingers and freezing rod tips, we caught a few more rainbows. Back at the camper for lunch, we ate grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and then set out on a hike through the spruce and ponderosa pine that proved perfect for getting the blood flowing, seeing the land, and bringing us together. This feels good, we agreed, warm in our strides. As we turned back, it started to snow. The women looked beautiful with crystals shining on their wool caps and in wisps of blonde hair. Three mule deer held dark against the whitening brush, and there were tracks of what might have been a cougar—big round prints as wide as my hand.
That night in the camper after another fish dinner, full, tired, and comfortably drunk, Woody and Xanti climbed in the bunk over the cab, and Janet and I got under the covers on the narrow foldout below. We started kissing and were moving into each other when I heard Woody and Xanti above.
“Do you hear that?” I whispered in Janet’s ear.
“Yeah.”
“Well, they’ll hear us.”
“It’s okay,” she said.
College life opened up many possibilities and made clear some limitations. Although I enjoyed my biology classes, dewy dreams of becoming a naturalist like John James Audubon, John Muir, or Aldo Leopold evaporated over the increasing heat of data crunching, statistical analysis, and the glowing promise of computers. I wanted to be in the field sketching and writing notes about spawning bass and migrating osprey. I wanted to describe the colors, sounds, and movements of animals in ways that would dazzle and excite readers. I wanted to use metaphor. “Then you want to be a writer,” Professor Ditta advised. So I steered from biology to English, wrote poems and essays, worked on the school paper, edited the literary magazine, and put together The Birch and Henry Show.
Inspired by Late Night with David Letterman, Birch and I interviewed and roasted local personalities, featured live music, pet tricks, and our own parodic skits of campus life. In 1986 we hosted George McGovern, alumnus and former Dakota Wesleyan professor. McGovern grew up in the small town of Avon, South Dakota, and became a straight-talking populist plainsman. He had a progressive vision and a loyal following, but he lost big in the 1972 presidential election to Nixon. Cranking Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil,” we introduced McGovern—he was quick, funny, generous, and willing to roll with our irreverent interrogations. I asked him later if he liked to fish. “Yes,” he sa
id. “But the fish don’t much like me.”
Unlike McGovern, Birch had never ventured far out of South Dakota, so I invited him to Long Island for a few weeks of summer fun. A handsome dark tower with understated humor and gentle, polite manners, Birch was a huge hit with my family and friends. “Why can’t you be more like Birch?” Aunt Lil said when he helped her clear the table and fold towels.
One calm morning in June, Eugene and I took Birch fishing aboard the China Cat. Port Jefferson Harbor and the Long Island Sound lay like glass, and we cruised smoothly to our favorite spots off Old Field Point, telling Birch about the time we almost lost the ship. “That’s crazy, man,” he said. Birch had never been on salt water, and after a swig of rum from Eugene’s flask and big smiles from two shapely women on the deck of a passing sailboat, he said, “I feel like a pirate.” We caught some small porgies and a blackfish pup, but bottom fishing on the north shore wasn’t what it used to be, and we decided to make the nine mile run out to Middle Grounds, a tiny island between Port Jefferson and Bridgeport, Connecticut. The bird-splashed island holds little more than an old boarded-up lighthouse electronically sounding and flashing for Stratford Shoal. Calm water allowed us to dock, step out, and walk around. Probably like many before us, we tried the doors and boarded-up windows, yearning for a peek inside. Surely these ghosts have seen whaling ships, frigates, and rumrunners crossing Long Island Sound. There must have been terrible storms and dreadful wrecks. Did they marvel over the canvasback ducks, sea turtles, and dolphins we never see anymore? A herring gull snuck out of a cracked vent, but we could only touch the rough stone and imagine.