She let line fly from the basket, applying no pressure. She whispered, “Chinook!” And when the massive silver shape rose thrashing to the surface she cackled like an old mad sage. The salmon moved upstream slowly, inexorably; Eddy gave line freely, applying so little pressure that the cane tip was hardly bent. Soon after the first sounding the chinook appeared to calm, moving as though it sensed no threat. It swam to the center of the drift and held behind a boulder, immovable as the boulder itself. Eddy turned. “Come here, Gus.”
I had to obey.
“Untie the belly reel and put it on—quick! If the fish wants line, give it. Don’t let it go slack, but don’t fight the fish: just keep track of it. It’s working!” She cackled again. “Here… take the pole!”
I took it. She tied the lamb’s wool around my waist. Then she kissed me. “I have to go now… dreefee. I’ll be back tomorrow, sunset. My last wish is this: play the chinook!” She turned and darted away toward the cabin.
If the salmon had wanted an easy getaway, this was its chance. I watched every stone her bare feet chose, watched her every stride, watched till her faded jeans and cotton pullover and yellow hair vanished in the cedars and a lump the size of an orange rose in my throat. But the fish held: it seemed to have forgotten that it was hooked. So. There I stood by the Tamanawis, alone, at sunset, wearing a belly reel, holding a split-cane pole, linked to a leviathan by an almost invisible and strategically negligible leader, with an order: play the chinook! It was impossible. But it was Eddy’s wish—so I tried.
For some time the salmon stayed behind the boulder. I held rod and line lightly, waiting, feeling the slow tail-strokes of a massive fish. Having seen its bright sides I knew it was fresh from the ocean. And it was thick as an alder tree, and stronger than all the white water from here to its mountain spawning bed. With ten-pound test and a full day ahead I might have had some chance: I had three-pound, and the sun stood on the sea. But Eddy didn’t say “Catch it.” She said, “Play it!” She knew I’d never land it—but to try not to lose it… well, it was something to do while she was away. What would I have done in the cabin but pule in a wine glass, pining for her return? And what would it be like to play a fish as long as it could be played, knowing from the start that I’d never catch it? Maybe I was just moonstruck, but I was beginning to like the idea. “All right fish,” I said, “all right Gus. Take it slow. No tension in the head, or in the hands, or in the line.”
I looked at my hands in the last of the light, saw the red groundwater flowing under the pale skin, thought of Nick and his pierced palm, thought of the tiny flies I’d tied, thought of great or implausible things that human hands had accomplished—and the old inner glimmerings that sent me up the River Road began once again, this time, as I had dreamed or foreseen, with a fish among fish linked to me by a thread. When the chinook began to move, I was ready.
It didn’t wait to test me: it rounded the boulder on the far side and the nylon line raked the rock, but I jumped up on a log, stood on tiptoe, sent the rod-tip toward the sky—and the sharper angle freed the line. The fish moved out, surging up through H2O’s drift with calm, sure tail strokes. I eased my grip, slowed my breath, let the line run smoothly out between left thumb and forefinger. And as I set out after the salmon I realized what had begun: the pain of the hook forgotten, it had resumed its anadromous migration. It was journeying freely toward its spawning grounds, and because it sensed no tension in the too-light line, I, a landsman, could mark its course and follow!
It moved quickly, right up the center of the current. In the slow water at the tail of the next riffle I had to jog to keep close, but in the pool above it rested, giving me a chance to scramble over logs and catch up. The sun was gone now, but a gray light in the east promised the moonrise. The moon would be full—which meant the salmon would all be traveling—and there was a thin cover of cirrus to reflect its light, making the night almost day-bright, but blanketing it against the cutting cold of the night I’d spent on the way to the source. The chinook picked up its pace again. I payed out line and followed. Because of the concentration it took to maintain the tensionless tension I forgot my feet, but—as often happens when fishermen follow fish—they picked their own way over the logs and rocks, unerring. The river wasn’t high, and this was to my advantage: there was a wide stony shoulder to walk, clear of the stream-side brush. The fish thrust steadily up through a long array of glides and easy rapids, and I soon lost track of time. I was bent on keeping the line taut but tensionless: how long, how far, how smoothly we traveled—all this was up to the fish.
When the salmon sidled toward my side of the river I had to crouch to keep from being seen. Sometimes it swam in shoals not two rod-lengths away. It entered such a shoal just as the moonbeams sank into the water and I saw it perfectly—a pulsing, silvery shape the size of a dog, hovering in an element as clear as misted air. The sight of it so fascinated me that I stumbled, the line tensed, the hook stung the salmon’s mouth—and the shallows exploded! The chinook plunged into the mainstream with strokes like the strides of a running elk. Any hidden notions I’d had of capturing it were destroyed: the power in its thrusts was awesome. I scrambled upstream as fast as I could, but the fish surged so far ahead that the belly reel nearly emptied, and then the current’s pull put tension in the line, driving the hook deeper. The chinook began to bulldog. I knew then that if tooth touched leader, the game was up. I gathered the lost line, caught up with the salmon, erased all the tension. The bulldogging stopped: the leader held. Eddy must have hooked it perfectly, at the very edge of the jaw.
After a long wait the fish resumed its migration at the early, regal pace. Watching the line cut the shimmering river, I followed.
The chinook moved up the Tamanawis with the ease of a cloud shadow gliding up a valley. After many pools it slid in behind another rock and held. I waited. The moon rose higher. When the fish didn’t move I found a rock myself, and sat. I zipped my coat, ate cheese and an apple, even smoked a pipe. It seemed the chinook waited for me. Perhaps we were making friends. Some night bird approached down the river corridor, gliding for long, silent spaces, then thrusting its wings just once, then gliding some more: it was swimming breaststroke through the air. When it neared me it wheeled into the trees with a hooing cry and I recognized a great horned owl. As if the cry were a sign, the salmon moved out.
As time and water passed I got better at the game. The moon brightened my rocky path, and it seemed that the deeper the fish and I journeyed into the night the less cautious I had to be. Only in the shallow rapids was there frenzy to the chinook’s pace; in riffle, pool, eddy, and glide it proceeded with stately calm. Perhaps its wound was numb now; perhaps its ancient instincts told it that night meant safety no matter what dark shapes might follow beyond the fringe of the water; or perhaps it was aware of me all along and simply grew used to me. Whatever the reason, I walked more and more boldly, no longer crouching, no longer tiptoeing over the stones. And much more often than not the salmon seemed to choose my side of the river—as if it preferred my company. I couldn’t get used to this: I know the fish could see me plainly, yet it swam at its unaltering pace along a close, parallel path. In places I had to wade to stay clear of overhanging brush or logjams, but in time even my splashing didn’t cause the chinook to shy. I really think the fish grew curious, wondering who on earth was walking beside it through the night.
As my walking and wading and attending to the line became less conscious, more free and easy, I found I could free my mind. My thoughts of Eddy were constant as the sound of the river, but beneath or beside them I found myself remembering Titus, talking about the ancient Taoists—and of an “Equilibrium” of which they spoke. He said this Equilibrium derived from a kind of inner balance: it transmitted itself from the soul to the mind, and from the mind to the body, and when a man possessed of it put his hand to an art or craft he was capable of unheard-of feats. The masters of Zen archery, the Sufi poets, the Taoist landscape painters, the ear
ly Celtic mariners—these people had this Equilibrium. The Fianna of pre-Christian Ireland, the master painters of Persian miniatures, the architects of the great mosques and gothic cathedrals—they possessed it as well. And just as I’d wondered whether I might ever possess it Titus said that in China there had been simple fishermen who, because of this Equilibrium, could catch enormous fish using cane-poles and a single strand of silk. “A line breaks,” Titus said, “at a stress point. But if the fisherman experiences no stress, and if he transmits this experience through his hands to his pole, to his line, to his hook, then there will be no stress point, therefore no point at which the strand can break.” By virtue of this principle, he said, these fishermen could hook the biggest fish that swam and still coax them at last into their waiting hands.…
I tried to invoke the peace I’d felt during the long days of rain watching, to find again that empty place inside me; I sensed that if I could constantly know such a peace, if I could be filled with such an emptiness, then I might come to possess this Equilibrium.…
Then I burst out laughing. The emptiness in me was gone—utterly gone.…
Because Eddy had come: she’d come and filled it, and overflowed it, and there was no better name for what shone there now than love. Eddy had come! and as I walked with the salmon that love overwhelmed me, and I laughed like a drunk in the night. I thought, Why shouldn’t love be my Equilibrium? Why shouldn’t love be the forceless force running from heart to hand, down the line to the hook, from the hook through the wound and into the fish? Couldn’t love create that holy balance? Wouldn’t love dissolve all stress? And from my depths came a wavelike rush of certainty: love could sustain the frailest of lines! As long as I loved I would not lose this salmon. It didn’t matter how big or strong it was: with love alone coursing down the line it would have no desire or need to escape!
As the moon climbed the sky so the fish and I climbed the river, without struggle, almost without effort. I’d already sensed that the chinook had come to trust me, and soon after I saw that so, it seemed, did the animals and birds. A second owl, breaststroking down the corridor like the first, did not wheel away but coasted over in silence, its bewildering eyes glaring as it passed over my rod-tip. In an eddying backwash a pair of raccoons hunted crawdads: they mounted a rock as I strolled past, and bossed me in soft, clicking bandito voices—but when I held out the last of the goat cheese they let me come near and place it on the rock between them. The first deer I saw were yearlings, so I took their lack of caution to be inexperience—but later a four-point blacktail buck let me near enough to roll him an apple, watched while I passed, then bent his neck to eat it. Still later a beaver paddled by and neither slapped its tail nor plunged under. And when I crossed a gravel bar where seven mergansers slept they untucked heads from wings at the sound of my feet, but neither swam nor flew as my line passed right over them. And with each of these encounters the love deepened, and the certainty grew. It had always been my way to approach the river like a wanded magician out to work deception. But this night, thanks to Eddy, thanks to love, I came as a blind man led by a seeing-eye salmon—and it showed me a world I’d believed was destroyed, a world where a man could still walk unfeared among the animals and birds he calls “wild.”
Moved and shamed by the animals’ trust, feeling hour after hour the faithful pulse of the salmon’s tail beating like the river’s silver heart, I felt the fisherman in me being unmade. The angler/fish, hunter/quarry paradigm began melting away like blood in water. There could be no question, with so light a line, of ever bringing this great fish to bay. There could be no betrayal, no treachery, no struggle and death. There was only a chinook on its primordial journey, and an undone fisherman following, being led deeper into the night.
The salmon’s pace remained steady and untiring. My fatigue grew, my thoughts slowed, my feet would sometimes stumble. But my hands kept pulsing the heart’s secret down the line, through the water, to the fish.
As I looked out of myself, unthinking, the night grew more and more extraordinary, yet more and more familiar: I felt as though I were returning to some forgotten, ancient home. The river shimmered and glowed and shattered the moon, flowing from east to west like the horizontal bar of a cross; the line, too, shone pale in the light, reaching vertically from sky to water. The cirrus cover thinned away into a high mist, and a huge and pale spherical rainbow encompassed and journeyed with the moon. The moist sky with its few faint stars seemed to flow like a boundless river, and the Tamanawis with its glittering bands of moonshine seemed like a ribbon of Milky-Wayed sky. I felt overturned and overwhelmed, and walked in a slow hush, awed by all I’d seen and was seeing, yet I sensed that still greater secrets were impending.
Now and then in the deeper pools other salmon would roll close to mine. In a glassy glide above one such pool I saw that my fish had drawn companions—an escort of scurrying jacks, darting crisscross in its wake. I knew then that my guide was a female, laden with eggs; and I knew that if by some miracle I should coax her into my grasp, I could never harm her. She swam on and on, seeming even statelier now compared to the veering, nervous jacks. In one violent rapid I know the line dragged and she felt the sting of the hook. But after so long an association it seemed not to disturb her: she swam on with the calm, sure strokes of one who knows she carries the hope of her people. She swam fearlessly, though she swam toward her death.
In a wide, leaf-strewn eddy my fish again drew near me and I looked for the trailing jacks: I was thinking I watched her shadow when the dark patch suddenly eased ahead—it was another big chinook. When they continued to swim in tandem I realized she’d found her mate. The buck, too, grew used to my presence, though he was not so tolerant of splashing; I tried to keep more to the shore. But often they would come close to me, letting me watch them journey together, breathing the wind woven into the water as I breathed the ether entwined in the air. Animals and night birds called out to one another, marking our passage. The haloed moon crossed the sky. The salmon led me up the river while men were sleeping. And the newly bestirred love coursed through me as steadily and easily as the light line cut through the water.
Far, far later, in the hour before dawn, the two salmon came to rest behind a fallen tree in waist-deep water. The moon and rainbow slipped toward the sea. I knew that the night journey was ending: the two chinooks would stay here till first light, then move on to the next deep pool to wait out the day. My companion hovered by her mate with such tranquility: I wanted our parting to be as tranquil.
I began to wade in toward her. Both of them saw me, yet made no move. Inch by inch I crept toward them, hardly stirring the water, feeling my legs had turned to water, making no sound. When I was exactly a rod-length away I laid my pole down on the river and took the line in my hands. I waded on until the hooked salmon hovered at my knees. I was too tired for dumb amazement, but her tameness and the throb of her hovering stirred me like music heard in sleep. Moving nothing but my fingers, I drew in the line. When it came taut my fish tensed, but stayed where she was. I waited for the pink and blue bands of the moon’s rainbow to sink past the tip of the tallest fir, then again I drew in line: I pulled it toward me in increments, praying that she wouldn’t fear. Still she stayed. Then slowly, so slowly, I leaned down toward her;
my fingers touched the water: she saw them crease the river surface, but still she held. I bent lower—trying to enter the river with the imperceptible motion of sinking moons or suns. I kept my hands together as I inched in the line; the water numbed them, yet more than ever they pulsed with strange certainty, pulsed in obedience to secret law. My arms sank silently; my sleeves filled with water; I felt the blood-knot; I began to inch in the invisible leader. The buck grew skittish and moved away, circled, brushed against my salmon, circled again: but only she had felt the hook and watched the line all through the night. She stayed.
I drew in line till only inches separated my hand from her. I held the line with my right hand, but with my left I reac
hed still lower. Now my hair touched the water, my beard, my face. I drew a long breath and bent still lower.…
My face entered the river; I felt my ears fill; the water poured in at the neck of my coat and ran freezing down my chest. I opened my eyes: she was blurred to me now, but still my salmon hadn’t moved. I slipped my numbed left hand down. I touched her moonlit silver side—
and still she held, unmoving. I rested my cold hand upon her gleaming side. She suffered my touch, and stayed.
My breath ran out. I had to draw away. Water poured from me to the river, and still my salmon stayed. So at last, with the slightest tug, I let the line be broken at the blood-knot. Bearing the hook, trailing the wisp of unseen leader, the chinook eased slowly away.
I wiped the water from my face. I lifted the pole off the face of the water. I walked toward the River Road and home.
I found myself on a rise about seven miles upstream from my cabin. The road was empty. I walked a long way, watching the moon expand and redden and sink. For a while as I walked I tried to think about what had happened, but I was too tired, too wet and cold.
The sky began to grow light in the east behind me. I just walked and watched. Mist clung to the river as sunlight crept over the Coast Range. The road was white with frost: it shone like a strip of moon surface in the early light, running from east to west like the horizontal bar of a cross. The entire valley hovered, still, before me. Somewhere a raven called.…
And then I felt it—a sharp pain in the heart, like a hook being set. I whirled around: sunlight struck me full in the face. My eyes closed.
And then I saw it—the vertical bar—a line so subtle it must be made of nothing nameable. And it ran from my heart of earth and blood, through my head, to the sky; ran like a beam of watery light; ran from the changing, flowing forms of the world to a realm that light alone could enter. But my pain grew sharper: mad with joy, I sank to my knees on the white road,
The River Why Page 35