Trout Eyes
Page 17
We loved the stream anyway, because it was inaccessible except by canoe from that one iron bridge, and because the fishing wasn’t good enough to attract many other anglers. In all the years we’d floated it, we’d never seen another human being there.
We didn’t really come here to catch fish. We came to this stream on my father’s birthday . . . because we always did.
It rose in swamps in western Maine, meandered through miles of old hardwood forest, and eventually emptied into a New Hampshire lake. By the time Dad’s birthday rolled around in September, the maples and oaks that canopied overhead were turning crimson and copper.
It was an awfully pretty stream in the fall, trout or no trout.
We’d been moving upstream for about an hour when we came to an uprooted pine that had fallen across the water. Back when my father was younger, he’d have insisted we drag over it or carry around it and keep going. In those days, he never wanted to turn around. But today when I suggested that this was as good a place as any to swap ends and head back, he nodded.
“My turn to paddle,” I said.
“You keep fishin’,” he said. “Catch something.”
“These fish are too smart for me. Show me how.”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Fish water you’ve already covered. Take your leavings.”
Another one of our comfortable old arguments.
I had to help him out of the canoe. He staggered and held onto my arm as I helped him settle into the bow seat. He didn’t grumble about his arthritic knees and hands, which meant they were really bothering him.
I steered us downstream, and he picked up the rod, tied on a little bucktail, and began flicking it against the banks. Watching my father from behind, the fluid, effortless way he cast, repeatedly dropping his fly about an inch from the bank, it was easy to remember him as a young man. He couldn’t do a lot of things anymore. But he could still paddle and cast a fly.
The iron bridge was around the next bend when something boiled behind his fly.
I dug in with the paddle, and he cast again. Another swirl, and his rod bowed, and a few minutes later he was cradling a fat 14-inch male brook trout in his hand. Its spots were as scarlet as the streamside sumac, and its belly and pectoral fins glowed coppery like the oaks and maples over our heads.
It was maybe the biggest trout we’d ever caught here.
“Big stud wants to spawn,” Dad said as he unhooked the fish and slid it back into the stream. “Let’s wish him luck.” He bit off the fly, reeled in, and took down the rod. “Good way to end it, huh?”
* * *
Raging arthritis, and then more serious miseries, kept my father out of canoes after that September afternoon. We celebrated the last six birthdays of his life in his living room, usually watching a ball game with the TV muted so we could talk fishing.
When we recalled our last birthday float, we agreed: It had indeed been a pretty good way to end it.