The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  But wait a minute. If they came up the St. Lawrence, why haven’t these giant fish-eating vacuum cleaners turned up in other, more easterly tributaries? If they had, we’d already be hearing anguished screams from anglers throughout the drainage, from the Allagash in Maine to the Manistee and Boardman in Michigan. Trout Unlimited would be up in arms. Scare banners on the covers of Fly Rod & Reel and Fly Fisherman. This story would rank with “whirling disease” as a goad to nationwide flyfishing paranoia.

  Scratch #1.

  Theory #2 (a weak one): Molly Bellefont said the Cincinnati Zoo was raising giant Asian salamanders in captivity. Maybe a few had escaped and . . . But no, Cincy is on the Ohio River. Following that drainage there’s no way that bull newts could have reached Lake Superior and thus the Firesteel. They’d more likely have invaded the cold water streams of Appalachia, ancestral home of their smaller cousins the hellbenders. Scratch #2.

  Theory #3: Somebody put that creature there. God knows there are enough wackos in today’s America to do it. Look at the jokers who plant computer viruses on the internet. And you can go back in history to find them too. Take Eugene Schieffelin, the well-meaning nineteenth-century Shakespeare enthusiast who tried to populate New York’s Central Park with all the birds mentioned by the Bard, and unwittingly released Sturnus vulgaris, the English starling, on a wide-eyed New World. He should have left well enough alone. Anglers are some of the worst meddlers in this respect (or lack of it). At the end of a day on the water, thoughtless bait fishermen empty their minnow buckets into otherwise ecologically balanced lakes, populating them forevermore with shiners and creek chubs that in the course of a few years overwhelm the resident dace and minnows. Worse still are the northern pike freaks who transport their favorite fish, often in aerated tanks, to pristine trout lakes, hoping thereby to add zip to waters where they’re too lazy or inept to catch brook trout or browns on a fly. Result: murder. Northerns spawn in the spring, browns in the fall. Baby northerns grow fast, they have big appetites and sharp teeth, and they chow down on newly hatched alevins like they were so much popcorn. In a year or two or three, no more trout.

  But if someone had dumped a herd of Asian bull newts in the upper Firesteel, what would be his or her motive?

  It had to be profit. But how? There was no big Asian population in the vicinity to make newt meat a sure-fire winner in the fish markets. What about brook trout, though, big ones like those that used to thrive in the spring pools? It’s illegal to sell wild fish in the United States, and farm-bred species—usually rainbows—taste like the Purina trout chow they were raised on. Someone could have wanted to net, electroshock, or rotenone all the wild brookies in the swamp, sell them for quick bucks to swank, high-toned restaurants in Chicago, Milwaukee, or the Twin Cities, and cover their greedy butts by laying the blame to an invasion of giant salamanders.

  Too far fetched . . .

  “What are you pondering, Hairball? Time’s a-wastin and the river calls.”

  Ben had been striking camp and loading the canoe while I sat beside the river with a last cup of coffee cooling in my hand. Jake was lying beside the canoe, staring into the nearby popples—doggy dreams of vaulting partridge and woodcock, no doubt. Molly and the baby game cop were long gone, headed up to the swamp to hunt out the bull newt and his buddies. They had the tools to do it right—diving gear, a bang-stick, and electroshock equipment if it came to that. Ned had made it clear that we weren’t welcome on the expedition. This was state business, no taxpayers allowed.

  “You’re right,” I said. “We’ve wasted two thirds of the morning. There are fish to catch, and miles to go before we sleep.” I was just as glad to be shed of that game cop. If he’d found my pill cache, he’d have run us in for sure, for dopers if nothing else. I had amphetamines in my ditty bag along with some wicked downers, not to mention a bottle of “Navy gin”—codeine and cherry-flavored terpin hydrate—in case either of us got a sore throat along the way, plus a few ampules of morphine for broken bones or gunshot wounds. I’d come prepared for anything.

  We shoved off with me in the bow, Ben paddling stern. He’d already rigged the rods—a no. 8 muddler cinched fast to my tippet, a bushy black Woolly Bugger on his. It was a day of strong light and sharp shadow, with the swamp maples going scarlet and the popples butterfly yellow. We ran down the shoreward edge of the flowage, casting up tight to the skinny shade along the undercut banks whenever we had a chance. In the glide below the riffle I’d serenaded beneath last night’s moonlight, Ben raised the first trout of the journey—a chunky little brown of about ten inches that leapt once, flashing gold-flanked in the sun, then screeched a few staccato feet of line from Ben’s drag before he brought it alongside and released it.

  “I can hardly bear to kill them anymore,” he confessed.

  “We’re going to need some trout for lunch though, aren’t we? Or supper anyway.”

  “Let’s worry about that later. I made us some sandwiches for lunch.”

  There was a sharp, fast right-hander coming up, full of tall white boulders and bouncing haystacks. Most of my trout fishing over the past fifty years had been with float guides on western rivers—the Rogue, the Green, the Madison. The guides do all the work on those trips and you just sit up there in the bow of the raft, like a maharajah on a swimming elephant, scoping the banks for good lies.

  Now as we entered the rapids I felt a twinge of panic—could I still handle it?—but then we were busy with the paddles. It all came back. I hadn’t lost my balance in a canoe, nor an eye for the vees either.

  When we emerged into the glide below the whitewater, I picked up my rod and cast again to the bank, mending the line upstream in midflight. On the third throw I hooked up—another brown, but bigger than Ben’s by the feel of him. He didn’t break water except on the take, and as I brought him in, I wondered about my friend’s newfound reluctance to take piscine life. I released most of the fish I caught, except when the dinner bell was clanging just down the road, but I’d never felt squeamish about killing them. Maybe his change of heart could be traced back to Korea, but I wasn’t about to ask him. He’d tell me when he was ready.

  As I brought the fish alongside, I could feel Ben’s eyes on my back. I popped the barbless hook from the brown trout’s jaw and turned him free. What the hell, there were more where he’d come from.

  The old abandoned logging camps we’d seen on our last trip had by now decayed back into the ground they’d sprung from, leaving no trace of their existence; the scruffy second-growth stands of tamarack, jackpine, and popple had been succeeded by spruce, fir, and even an occasional family group of white pines: Ma and Pa and their tall, strong sons and daughters. Nature heals itself in a hurry, given half a chance. Would that mankind could do the same.

  We passed the spot where Doc and Curly’s shack once stood. The forest had reclaimed it. A stand of aspens rose from its ruins. Yellow leaves wigwagged in a high, cool breeze. A lone raven perched on a lightning-killed snag, nodding to us as we passed. Yes, winter’s on its way.

  If you live for half a century, as Kate and I had, in a lotus land with no distinct seasons, you forget the taste of fall. Autumn is bittersweet, like ice-cold applejack. It carries the summer just past, never to come again in exactly the same combination, those days that blaze like tigers, those nights of cold fiery stars. Winter is right around the corner: you can feel it crouching there with its claws of frost and its teeth of sleet, its blinding, wind-driven snows. Chilblains, despair. In some ways, at least in the higher latitudes, the year is like a woman. Her summer is fast and easy; her winter makes demands. Autumn teeters between them. It’s the best time of year for fishing, the game birds have grown to full size and speed, the deer are fat with summer’s glut and the sweetening fruits of beech and corn and apple. When you gut them out, your hands come away as yellow with grease as they’re red with blood. Autumn is the killing season. Even the trees tell us so with their colors.

  We came to a long easy run of pocket wat
er, shallow enough to wade. It was almost high noon. “Hey, Benjamin, let’s pull over to the bank and have our lunch. I’m getting a bit peckish and I’d like to work this water with a dry fly, on foot so to speak.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Why not? We’ve got plenty of time in hand and no particular destination in mind anyway.”

  We wheeled into the bank and hauled the canoe out of the water. Ben had made me two sardine sandwiches on Wonder Bread, with jam and plenty of peanut butter. Thoughtful of him but I’d lost my taste for the combination. I ate it anyway, with an apple for dessert, slipped the crusts to Jake when Ben wasn’t looking, then tied a 6X tippet to my four-weight Sage and waded out wet.

  “You don’t have to do that, Hairball,” Ben called after me. “I brought along some hip boots that should fit you.”

  “I’ve got waders of my own in the duffel,” I said. I wanted to feel the river. You lose that with dry feet.

  The bottom was gravel, shifting and growling beneath my sneakers, and the water bitter cold. There were baetis emerging over in the shadows of the western bank, tiny things, about a no. 16 or 18 I guessed. I could see the duns drifting with the current, waiting for their slate-colored wings to dry. Then they flew off to the bankside brush.

  I tied on a blue quill emerger and looked for the bulges of feeding trout. They were everywhere. I threw to one that was feeding from the lee of a submerged yellow rock, just nipping his head out now and then to take a shedding nymph, his mouth flashing pale as he ate. I could see by the rosy flash of his gill plates that he was a rainbow, laid out the fly about ten feet upstream of him, and let it sink to his lie.

  Bump—he took it.

  Tauten the line . . . now set it.

  He sprang from the water like a bee-stung pup, shaking his head and throwing a quick comma of spray, then turned downstream.

  I raised the rod tip and let him take line from under my forefinger. Then he was into the drag—no sweeter sound in the world. He jumped twice more, three times, far downstream of me, turned, and bored straight back again.

  I stripped in slack like a speedcrazed spaz but it wasn’t quick enough. There was still enough slack in it for him to throw the fly on his next leap, just opposite me, not five feet away. He was a nice fish, eighteen inches at least. I watched him flicker away, disappear like a whisper into a deep shadowed hold, up tight to the western bank.

  My heart was pounding. I took a deep breath and shuddered. Adrenaline: it can kill you. But who was more spooked, me or the rainbow?

  His run had put down all the fish in the near vicinity, so I reeled in, eased over to the east bank, and waded a hundred yards upstream.

  The trout ahead of me were feeding on top now, quick slashing little rises. The hatch was at its peak. I clipped off the emerger and tied on a dun. My legs had gone numb from the cold and it hurt when my toes bumped the rocks. I waded out into midcurrent and threw a low, flat, easy loop to a riser working along the far bank. The first drift was too short. I waited until the fly was well below him, picked it up, and threw a bit more line. This float was right in the slot. He took it with no hesitation, jumped once, twice, then ran upstream in a hell of a hurry. The tippet ripped the water. I let the rod wear him down, brought him in, and held him there, close to my leg in the waist-deep water (sixteen or eighteen inches, almost as big as the one that threw the hook). His gills were pumping and I could see his eyes roll up to meet mine. I reached down with the pliers, slow so as not to spook him, and twitched the hook free without touching him.

  He held there in the lee of my legs for a moment or two—unbelieving—then flirted away so fast that I didn’t see him go. Blink of an eye. Just a cold quick roseate blur . . .

  I looked back toward the canoe. Ben and Jake stood on the bank, watching me. He smiled and nodded.

  “Get your rod,” I yelled over to him. “They’re all on the take.”

  “No,” he shouted. “It’s more fun seeing you fuck up.”

  Trout get more selective as a hatch progresses. It’s an age-old practice of theirs, one you can count on. Far up near the head of the run I saw a big fish feeding. A twenty incher, judging by the breadth of his dark green back and his big square tail. Maybe better. I slogged up toward him, fighting the current and sloping into a crouch as I came within casting range. He was rising in a slow, steady rhythm. Time it—rise, two, three, four, five, six—rise, two, three, four . . .

  I laid out the blue quill to fall a foot ahead of his rise form. The current—stronger up here at the head of the run, gnarly and braided—snatched it away in an instant, and the line dragged. But I’d mistimed my throw and he didn’t notice the gaucherie.

  I moved a few steps to the left to gain a more forgiving angle. On the next cast, I wiggled the rod from side to side, throwing a fat “S” of slack into the leader. No drag this time. The fly drifted down over him and I saw him rise to it. But instead of my blue quill, he sipped a natural that bobbed right beside it.

  Twice more this happened, and I still hadn’t put the big boy down. This luck couldn’t last much longer, though. Time for a change. I replaced the blue quill with a pale morning dun. He paid it no heed. I switched to a blue-winged olive in an even smaller size. It was no go. In desperation now, I went to the old reliable—a no. 16 Adams.

  All it did was put him down for good.

  I waded back down to the canoe, chilled and dead beat. My teeth were chattering.

  “Had enough?” Ben asked.

  “It’s never enough. I just got too cold is all.”

  “Figured as much. There’s a pot of coffee waiting for you—just perked and piping hot.”

  We sat on the bank and watched the trout sipping mayflies as we sipped our coffee. Jake frisked the nearby thickets for patridge. We heard one roar away. The dog came trotting back, looking expectantly toward the gun cases. “Tomorrow, boy,” Ben said. “It’s too nice a day for killing.”

  The air was thick with new-flown duns. Caddises squirreled among them, big and clumsy as bombers compared to the tiny mayflies. Birds were working the hatch now too, bank swallows darting in to snap bugs in midair, with redwing blackbirds, iridescent grackles, cedar waxwings, and garlands of goldfinches scouring the brush to pick off the new arrivals. The grackles, with their angry yellow eyes, were loud and rude. A scarlet tanager flashed past like a meteor.

  “There’s nothing to beat it,” Ben said. “Everything comes to the river in September. I could watch it forever.”

  “Let’s pitch camp right here,” I said. “We can grab a few zees, as they used to say, and there’s bound to be a spinner fall toward sundown.”

  “What the hell, Hairball, why not? We’ve got no pressing engagements.”

  But nap time proved a nightmare. I dreamed of the bull newt. He rose to inspect my offerings but rejected them all. Not till I tied on a severed human hand could I get him to take. Yet whose hand was it?

  7

  A WHITE-GLOVED HOWDY

  Iwoke with a foul taste in my mouth—stale coffee—and that sluggish feeling a bad dream leaves in its wake. A Dexedrine cleared out the cobwebs. Ben saw me swallow it.

  “I take a lot of pills too,” he said. “Vasodilators and calcium blockers every day for high blood pressure, along with a piss pill. It runs in the family. My old man had it. What’s your problem?”

  “Prostate,” I told him. “The old fart’s malady. They say that every man who doesn’t die of something else first will end up with it. Fortunately it’s a slow-growing malignancy,” I lied. “I’ll probably croak from something else before it gets into my bones or lungs or colon, but it’s inconvenient as hell.”

  “You’ve got. . . cancer?”

  I nodded.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me? Shouldn’t you be in the hospital? I thought you looked a bit fragile but figured it for jet lag. You shouldn’t be paddling . . . ”

  “Lay off me, Ben. I feel just fine. If it hadn’t been for the PSA test and the biopsy, I wouldn’t even know
I had it. Look, you just saw me wading wet in a fast cold current, fishing upstream for half an hour . . . ”

  “It was more like an hour and half,” he said. He shrugged and nodded. “Okay, I guess I overreacted. But that’s a scary word.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The spinners were already working over the water, dancing up and down, glinting like flecks of bronze in the softening afternoon light, weaving their webs of airborne sexual magic. They mate in midair, then the females dive down like tiny kamikazes to drop their eggs in the current. Afterward they die, drifting downstream like so many miniature Ophelias. I’d like to think that they sing sweet crazy pastorales as they float to their collective doom, insect lyrics inaudible to human ears, way above the range of the saxophone or else I’d try it. Maybe I’d try it anyway. How else to explain the sadness of an autumn afternoon?

  But trout aren’t sentimentalists. They feed on these moribund damsels like the opportunists they are—that Nature has bred them to be. Already a few were working the spinner fall. Small trout leaped high to snag low flyers, others slashed the surface in quick little takes, slurping down whole rafts of the spent, clear-winged, rust-bodied victims. It was still too bright for the big trout to feed. But the sun was about to disappear behind the spruce and cedar of the western skyline.

  We walked down the bank to the far end of the run. This time I wore waders. The cold of the afternoon’s expedition seemed to have chilled me to the marrow. Too much California, I told myself. Too many trips to the Baja. You live in a bland climate, your blood’s getting thin . . .