by Bill Heavey
When we crest the bluffs, the wind is blowing hard and dogs are boiling all over the place as they try to get to the cat, which is hidden in the rocks a few yards below us. It’s a long way down to Peck Canyon, the one we’ve just come from. It’s an even longer drop into Beehive, in front of us. There are some places where you could climb down into Beehive, others where you’d just fall. “Right here!” roars Kostelnik, who is standing below us on a ledge and pointing to a place directly below me and out of my sight. Smetana is with him, already down on one knee and shooting film. I hear the lion hiss but can’t see it. I start to make my way left and down to the narrow ledge where the two men are, but something makes me stop and size up the situation. It’s only 10 feet from me to their ledge, but there are no decent handholds between here and there. The dogs are scrambling all over the rock in a frenzy to get at the cat, and I know I’m too excited to be jumping around up here. Then I look down and realize that I can’t see the bottom; I’ve reached a sort of chute in the bluffs. One slip here and your life ends. I drop to all fours as a trembling brown dog scrambles over me as though I’m just another piece of rock. By sheer force of will, the dog manages to cling to the rocks on the path I’ve just decided I won’t be taking. It attains the ledge and immediately charges ahead for the lion. The mad barking of the dogs has somehow risen to an even more frenzied pitch. I reverse direction and head up a few feet, trying to find another way down. Back where I was a long minute ago, I’m still just above the lion but unable to see it. Again the cat hisses. It’s not loud. The lion knows the dogs are more nuisance than threat. But a lion won’t stay bayed forever. Sooner or later it will decide to take off.
I look over the edge again, on the off chance that the cat may have moved to where I can at least glimpse it. Just at that moment, I hear the men below both shouting at the same time. Then I watch, horrified, as two dogs fall off the ledge below me. They wriggle silently in the air, spinning their back legs for something, anything, to push against. The next moment they’re gone. “Two dogs gone,” I call to Kibler somewhere above me, trying to keep control over my voice. I hear Kostelnik shouting some more, and this time he’s cursing. The lion made her move moments before, bounding right between Kostelnik and Smetana and leaping from ledge to ledge, then vanishing over a ridge. Either she swatted the dogs over or they were jostled. But the toll is not yet complete. A third dog has also fallen to its death. Then Kibler, whom I’ve not seen all this time, though he has been just above me, yells that another dog went over, too, but apparently landed 30 feet down on a ledge. For the moment, that one is presumed alive. The dogs are still barking like crazy, but suddenly everything has changed. This is the dark side of that ancient music, the price that can be exacted at any time when men and dogs and wild game get mixed up together.
Kibler, Smetana, and I meet atop the rocks. “We’re not hunting lions anymore today,” Kibler says evenly. “We’re hunting dogs.” It takes us a while to get the remaining hounds leashed. All three of the lost—Tilly, Sally, and Spook—belong, by pure happenstance, to Kostelnik. Brownie, the one that fell onto the ledge below, is Kibler’s. Kostelnik has already gone, taking the long way down to the canyon floor to find the bodies of his dogs and retrieve their collars. Kibler and I gather the remaining five dogs—we took off with nine today—and take them down to where we’ve tied the mules. Kibler is all business. “I really need you to stay here and keep these dogs quiet,” he tells me, his face just inches from mine so I’ll understand exactly what he’s saying. “If they start barking, smack ’em. Hard. Use a stick if you have to. I’m afraid Brownie might do something stupid and fall if she hears them.” He retrieves the 30 feet of cotton rope he carries in his saddlebags, undoes one of the mules’ leads to add to it, and disappears at full speed back up the rocks. I sit with the mules and the straining dogs for 45 minutes, clamping a hand over their muzzles whenever they howl. I try to stop replaying the image of the dogs in free fall. I’m okay, I can think clearly, but I’m not all right.
Finally Kibler and Smetana come back with Brownie on a leash. Kibler is wearing a tight smile, a mixture of regret and joy, and shaking his head. “You’re looking at the luckiest dog in the world right now.” He tells how he put a loop in the end of the rope and dropped it down to the ledge. Miraculously, it caught on the one tiny bush down there. Miraculously, it landed with the loop open. When he called Brownie, she turned toward his voice and—miraculously—stuck her neck and one leg into the loop. He jerked the rope closed and hauled her to safety. Her rescue, like Kostelnik’s loss of three dogs in an instant, is a 1-in-1,000 shot. Yet both have come to pass in the same hour.
Kostelnik finally returns with three collars in hand and slumps heavily against a rock. He is a big guy, a weight lifter and lifelong outdoorsman who works as a firefighter in Phoenix when he’s not guiding. He doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want his sandwich, doesn’t want to be consoled. “They were the heart of my pack, some of my best dogs” is all he’ll say. “You couldn’t have bought those dogs off me for $10,000.” There is a force field of grief around him, and nothing to do but mount up and start the long ride back to camp.
After the Fall
During dinner we make small talk about everything but the elephant standing in the corner, the lost dogs. I’ve endured enough losses in my life to learn that silence is the worst remedy for grief. Suddenly, my eyes are wet, and everyone’s busy not looking at me. “Jesus, Wally, they weren’t even my dogs and I’m all broke up about them,” I say. “It must be worse for you.” He clamps a big hand on my shoulder for a second, then goes back to scraping a frying pan clean. But at least the elephant is gone now. The grief has been spoken. A little while later, he starts talking about Sally, who was his best dog, a superb striker, a dog that never walked over a track and would push it harder than any other dog he ever saw. Kibler recalls Annie, the dog he lost to heatstroke a few years back. “I’ve been raising dogs for more than 40 years now, and you never get over the ones that die before their time.”
The next day we pack up. Kostelnik loads his mules and dogs into his truck. Then he goes to perform his last chore, fetching the three chains and water bowls that no longer belong to any dog. Our good-byes are formal. His suffering still hangs about him like a parka.
As I’m driving out, Kibler, walking to his truck, smiles and gives me a wink. It is a throwaway gesture that somehow contains a lifetime’s worth of experience and wisdom. It’s as if he’s acknowledging that, sure, we had some hard luck. But you can’t give up because of that. Despair is a bigger liar than hope will ever be. Broken hearts are made whole again in time. The gesture stays with me for a long drive and two plane rides, until I’m finally home.
A week later, Kibler calls me. “I wanted to let you know Wally’s okay. He took it hard, but he’s hunting again. He found out the sun still comes up and the world still turns, so he figured he’d better get his pack back in shape. There’s still a lot of lions to be caught down here.”
We make small talk for a while. Then we get down to business. I ask when exactly would be the best time next year for me to come back. “I was hoping you’d say that,” he says.
Fresh Mongolian Prairie Dog Bait
I came to Mongolia to fly-fish for taimen, the legendary salmonlike fish that lives in its big rivers. When fly-fishing didn’t work, I tried spinning with lures. When spinning with lures got no bites, I tried half a dead lenok (another kind of fish). When the lenok was a bust, I went to the can’t-miss bait: a prairie dog. And now, in the last hours of the last day, the dead prairie dog at the end of my line was mocking me.
After five hours of continuous casts into the Delger River without so much as a nibble, the dog was both absurdly stiff and unbearably heavy, the twin effects of rigor mortis and being waterlogged. And even though it had been dead for almost 24 hours, it somehow stuck its stiff, black tongue out at me.
Sure, I’m dead, it seemed to say, but you are one sorry-ass fisherman. You couldn’t ca
tch a taimen if you were both in the same bathtub.
“Shut up,” I replied. “I may catch one yet.” I took another step downriver and cast once more into the water and started another retrieve. I was so far gone by this point that it didn’t even strike me as strange that I was conversing with my bait. Because the dog had a point. I had traveled halfway around the world on the trip of a lifetime, fished my brains out for six days, and been skunked.
The Journey from Moron
Looking back, there were signs—like the name of the Mongolian town from which I embarked on a six-day hunt for big taimen: Moron. But I was too pumped to be suspicious. After reading about taimen for years, I was finally going after one of the least known gamefish on earth. And after 48 hours on airplanes, I had finally made it to Mongolia, one of the most isolated and unspoiled countries on the planet.
The fish that had prompted me to take leave of my senses is an evil-tempered, prehistoric critter that lives only in certain big, cold, fast rivers in Mongolia and Siberia, most of which flow into the Arctic Ocean. Hucho hucho taimen is a spotted fish that grows to great size (fish measuring more than 4 feet and 50 pounds are not uncommon).
Because taimen (pronounced TIE-men) live in such remote areas, they are little studied, and sport fishing for them is a recent development. The current all-tackle record, a 92-½-pounder caught in Siberia in 1993, is likely nowhere near the maximum size. There is, for instance, a report of a 231-pound commercially caught fish back in 1943. It is an ancient species, the ancestor of modern salmon and trout, equipped with an oversize mouth lined with rows of small, sharp teeth. And it is belligerence personified, cannibalizing its smaller brethren and happily murdering pike, salmon, grayling, small birds … and prairie dogs.
I’d read online that Mongolian nomads hook a dog, float it downstream on a shingle of wood, and then give the string a quick jerk. In a typical take, the taimen leaps clear of the water before attacking its prey, stuns it with a blow from its powerful tail, and then comes back around to finish the job.
The idea of catching a sociopathic aquatic vertebrate like that on a gentlemanly 9-weight fly rod appealed to me. It would be like putting on a top hat and tails and going 10 rounds with The Rock in a phone booth.
I booked a trip with guide Andrew Parkinson through WadersOn.com, a worldwide fishing resource based in the United States. And now I was bouncing over the Mongolian steppe in a van with him and three other anglers: Greg and Bruce (two Aussies on a six-week fishing trip to Mongolia, Alaska, and the Kamchatka Peninsula), and Steven, a Canadian working in Beijing. Even in my jet lag–diminished state, I was struck by the landscape. But it wasn’t so much what was there as what was not.
There were no signs, no fences, no concrete—and, just to keep things simple, no road. Only endless rolling grasslands over which our driver raced. Mongolia, sandwiched strategically between Russia and China, is a huge place, three times the size of France with a population of just 2.75 million, of whom 43 percent are nomadic. Herds of sheep, goats, shaggy yaks, and tough little horses dotted the land.
We passed ancient piles of stones, the altars of invaders who had come and gone as long as 4,000 years ago. Prairie dogs and big marmots streaked for the safety of their dens as they caught sight of the van. Overhead flew ravens and rare white-naped cranes, which number just 5,000 worldwide.
“Just hope Ganchuluun doesn’t see a wolf,” Parkinson said of our driver. “If a Mongolian in a car or on a horse sees a wolf, he goes a bit mad. And he won’t stop until the car is broken, the horse can’t run anymore, or the wolf is dead. Mongolians absolutely hate wolves.”
We stopped to view deer stones, upright grave markers from the Bronze Age. They all faced south and were covered with stylized images of elk-like deer antlers. On one Parkinson pointed out what he thought was a fishhook. Every few miles we came across gers, the traditional round, felt houses that nomadic herders have been picking up and moving every few months for centuries, forever in search of new grass.
A Log with Fins
We finally got to camp, a series of gers along the banks of the Delger River, late that afternoon. Over dinner, Parkinson told us about the biggest taimen he’d caught. He and a friend had been prospecting a new river when they spotted a log in the shallow water at the head of an island. Logs being scarce in Mongolia, they inspected this one more closely and determined that it had fins. The friend tried to reach it with his fly rod and failed. Parkinson had a spinning rod and cast a mouse lure in front of the fish.
It made the classic taimen attack, leaping clear and clubbing the fish with its tail. Unfortunately, it snapped the 20-pound-test line in the process. Parkinson next tied on a Rapala, and this time the line held. He fought the fish for over an hour as it leapt and raced seven times up and down a side channel of the river. His shoulder and arm went numb during the fight, and his friend massaged them whenever the fish went down to sulk.
At last they fought the fish into shallow water. Because it was too big for their net, they beached it. Parkinson’s friend was an experienced angler, but he’d never tangled with a taimen, and Parkinson had to talk him into approaching. They measured it at 53 inches. It broke their handheld scales, which maxed out at 50 pounds. That was when Parkinson decided to chuck his job as a farming consultant back in England and move to Mongolia.
Let the Games Begin
The next day we started fishing. Taimen like big pools and long riffles, Parkinson told us, but since they could be picky, it was necessary to methodically cover every foot of water. We’d be fishing big gurglers, foam-and-bucktail flies that made an appropriately desperate-sounding plonk when popped.
All of us piled into the back of an old Zil 31, a six-wheeled army truck that Parkinson said had “fallen out of the back of a Russian army depot” about the time the Soviets pulled out of Mongolia around 1990. We dropped the two Aussies and Edward, a friend of Parkinson’s who had come over from England to guide on the trip, downstream. Steven and I got off with Parkinson a couple of miles upstream. During the next eight hours, we experienced a sampling of Mongolian summer: 50-degree swings in temperature accompanied by sun, rain, snow, hail, and winds that rotated through all four points of the compass.
The river was 100 to 150 yards across, but the current in most places was so strong that I found it impossible to wade past my knees. Even though the wind made for tough casting, I managed to work a long pool 30 feet out. The drill was to cast across, strip methodically, let the fly sit for a moment as it dangled at the end of its drift, move a step downstream, and repeat. Steven and I did that for three hours without so much as a rise. Then it was time for lunch.
When the truck rumbled up, Greg and Bruce were already in back, smiling. Each had landed and released a taimen. The bigger, Greg’s, had gone 30 inches. “Just amazing, mate,” he told me. “Hit it not 4 feet from me at the end of the retrieve and scared me to death. Vicious fish. Took me 15 minutes to land it, and 30 inches is a small one.” He reported the teeth to be sharp and numerous and was glad he’d had Parkinson’s biteproof fish-handling glove to remove the fly.
Hold the Dog
At lunch in the ger where we took our meals; Parkinson and some of the English-speaking locals he hires gave us a lesson in ger etiquette. Upon entering through the ridiculously low door, you move to your left, clockwise, so as not to impede the universal flow of energy.
You never step on the threshold, touch other people’s hats, or use a knife to cut in the direction of any other person. If you spill any beverage, it is customary to immediately shake the hand of the person nearest you. It is considered rude to pass directly in front of an older person, point your feet at the stove, or put water or garbage on a fire, which the Mongolians consider to be sacred.
When approaching a traditional nomad’s ger, the correct greeting is “Nokhoi khor,” which literally means “hold the dog.” A dog in this country is expected to earn its keep, which involves biting the legs off any unknown human. Nyamaa, a beautiful
woman who helped around camp and spoke some English, further informed us that women, especially those who are pregnant, do not eat fish. Fish are the only animal that makes no noise, and the fear is that a woman who eats them may give birth to a deaf child.
Witchcraft?
That afternoon, Greg and Bruce both caught and released small (25-inch) taimen. “I don’t understand it,” Greg said happily over a cold can of Chingis beer. “I’m the worst caster in the lot. I think it’s my lucky Filson hat.” I smiled. I wanted that hat—I wanted anything that might help me nail a taimen.
The morning of the second day I spent fishing some beautiful water, a bend in a small gorge with very fishy-looking pools. Nyamaa was walking some distance behind to keep an eye on me. The Delger, like most rivers in Mongolia, has few particularly dangerous rapids, but on the other hand it’s big water, powerful in places, and cold. If you filled your waders, you could get into trouble a lot faster than you could get out.
I had worked a long section and then walked back up to fish it again. Seated on a rock a little above me, Nyamaa watched in silence. As I passed her, I turned from the river for a moment and teasingly asked, “So what did you do with all the fish?” as if she’d somehow spirited them away. At that instant, as my fly lay motionless at the end of its drift, a taimen hit the lure like a baseball bat and disappeared. Frantic, I cast repeatedly, trying to draw another strike. No dice. I looked at Nyamaa, who was smiling enigmatically. Her poise at that moment was unnerving, almost as though she had known the fish would pick that moment to strike.
My intention all along had been to take the high road, fly-fishing only. By the third day, however, I had begun to slide. I accepted Parkinson’s offer of a spinning rod and a large, articulated black-and-silver Rapala rigged with two single barbless hooks. This way I could cover more water and fully expected another baseball-bat strike at any moment. Wading out as deep as I dared toward a bend where a glacier came into the river on the far side, I let fly. As the lure wobbled seductively in a foamy pool, another taimen came up and exploded. It did everything but actually bite the lure.