Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  Visibility in the lake was good, maybe ten meters, but Johannes and I saw few fish. I was happy to float on the surface staring at the bottom to quiet my own hangover, watching the geometric patterns the light made on the wavelets of sand. When we came out of the water we sat on the hot beach to dry off. I looked at Johannes beside me and saw him shaking his head.

  “What?” I said, but I thought I knew.

  “I think we should have given the fisherman some money.”

  “I was thinking the same thing, I bet he doesn’t get any.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit’s right,” I said, looking off across the vast lake; you could not see the other side.

  “Not much we can do,” he said.

  Later that afternoon, on our return to Bishkek, we arrived at Issyk Ata, the last river we would fish in Kyrgyzstan before departing for Mongolia. Several boys were standing on a bridge fishing for trout. The current was very fast and they needed a lot of lead weight on their lines to keep the bait near the bottom. They had a forked stick with several dead trout strung on it.

  “These are genetically pure Salmo oxianus,” Johannes said, lifting one of the fish, “but they are not native to this river, they were introduced by the Russians in the seventies from tributaries of the Kyzyl-Su, where we have been in the southwest.”

  Isa had a friend who lived in an apartment building by the river in the village of Issyk Ata and arranged lodging for us there, in a top-floor room. Another boarder, a man from the Ukraine, spoke some German.

  “Where can we get a cold kleines Bier?” Johannes asked him.

  “I’ll show you,” he said.

  On our way to the bar across the river, Johannes asked the man if he would talk to the boys we’d seen about selling us some of their catch. The trout they had caught were bigger than the ones we had caught in the southwest, and Johannes wanted one to take back to Austria and stuff for the wall of his library. One boy sold us two, freshly caught and beautiful. He pulled them off the forked willow stick on which they had been strung and wrapped them in a pair of large ferns, carefully, like a Parisian florist might wrap a dozen tulips.

  “Our work is done here,” Johannes said. “I am satisfied that we have specimens, we don’t need to catch them ourselves.” I disagreed; I wanted to fish the river, but I didn’t argue because the river was too swift for fly-fishing.

  We drank several beers, cheerfully, with the Ukrainian man and then returned to the apartment for some dinner.

  “We have caught and seen the trout of the Amu Darya River,” Johannes said over a plate of vegetarian lagman. “It is the easternmost native brown trout.” He was a little drunk and preaching. “Beyond here there are only other species of salmonid fish: taimen, char, and lenok; and grayling of course, I am very interested in the grayling.”

  When I painted a watercolor of the trout that night, unwrapped and lying on their bed of ferns, the act seemed to complete and satisfy an urge to collect and record. “Issyk Ata River,” I wrote beside the sketch. “Headwaters of the Syr Darya River. Introduced here in the early seventies from tributaries of the Kyzyl-Su in the Amu Darya drainage.”

  I started a new line and wrote the month. August.

  The next morning I was granted the opportunity to fish a bit myself. “We have plenty of time,” I argued with Johannes, who was eager to return to Bishkek.

  He accompanied me upstream anyway, up and away from the village, where I thought fewer people fished. As I had anticipated, though, the river was too swift to fish with the equipment I had.

  We returned to the capital city, Bishkek, that afternoon. At dinner Johannes repeated how much he regretted not paying Kolya some money directly. Ida talked scornfully about il mafioso. We had become fond of the fisherman in our two days with him.

  “He was a Schwarzfischer,” Johannes said.

  We tipped our glasses and Johannes pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. What we did not know was that Kolya had been hurt badly the night we left Tamga. I received a letter from Vadim when I returned home, telling me so. That he had gotten in a bad car accident the last night we drank together; they had been drunk and went off the road.

  MONGOLIA, SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAYLING

  The 41st parallel crosses China through an arid land known as the Gobi Desert. Johannes, who had been to northwest China in search of a fish called a taimen, confirmed reports that the Chinese had eaten most of their fluvial biomass. In other words, there were few fish left. North of the Gobi Desert the land was equally arid and forbidding, but prospects for fishing seemed to improve.

  Mongolia interested Johannes and me because of the diversity of its salmonid species (the scientific family that includes trout, formally, Salmonidae). There were three basic types of salmonid fishes in Mongolia: a voracious predator called a taimen, which reportedly grew to over sixty kilos; a reddish-colored and black-spotted fish with an overbite called a lenok; and several species of grayling. The grayling was a fish known in the Western world as a delicate feeder with a small mouth that rose readily to the dry fly. One of these Mongolian grayling, by contrast, was said to be a formidable predator with big, almost fanglike teeth.

  The mysterious long-toothed grayling was discovered by an English naturalist, George C. Littledale, on an excursion to Outer Mongolia in the summer of 1897. He collected a specimen of an unusual grayling-like fish purportedly from streams on the south side of the Altai Mountains, those that drain into, and dessicate in, the Gobi Desert.

  Though in poor condition (Littledale had dried and salted it), the specimen he brought back to England received attention from renowned ichthyologists. It was thought by the French naturalist George Boulanger to have been the missing link between trout and grayling. He thought it peculiar enough to name it a new genus and species, Phylogephyra altaica. After the initial excitement waned, some disagreement arose as to the taxonomical uniqueness of the long-toothed grayling.

  The Russian ichthyologist Leo Berg in his compendium of Russian fishes made the fish a synonym of the species breverostris, another toothy Mongolian grayling, but this without having ever seen it. Dr. Robert Behnke, who examined the specimen for his graduate thesis in the 1960s, expressed his opinion that the specimen was indeed distinct from breverostris. “It had larger teeth,” he wrote me in a letter. Behnke granted it status as a separate species under the genus for grayling, Thymallus altaica, though he added it would help to have a fresh specimen to know for sure.

  Dr. Behnke challenged Johannes and me to find the long-toothed grayling, which had not been seen or heard of by Western scientists for over a hundred years.

  The information Johannes and I had on the long-toothed grayling, though sparse and secondhand, was all we needed in planning our trip to the earth’s least-populated country (Mongolia has 2.5 million people, 2 people per square mile, and is 40 percent nomadic). I imagined the headline that would appear in the New York Times when we had successfully captured the fish:

  MEN END SEARCH FOR LOST GRAYLING

  Ulan Bator, Mongolia—The expedition team of Johannes Schöffmann and James Prosek made a remarkable discovery while fishing an unnamed creek on the south slope of the Altai Mountains of Outer Mongolia. At 10 A.M. on Sunday Mr. Prosek pulled a sleek silvery fish from a deep pool of the creek by the use of his fly-fishing rod. It was a grayling, a cold-water fish of the genus Thymallus—named so because they often smell like the herb thyme—but it was no ordinary fish.

  “When we held it we saw it had long fanglike teeth on the upper maxillary,” said Mr. Schöffmann, a native of Sankt Veit, Austria. Mr. Schöffmann is a passionate amateur ichthyologist who devotes his spare time to trout fishing. “After three weeks of looking we were afraid the long-toothed grayling was just a myth, but then we found this small spring-fed stream.” Continued on Page C7

  Johannes had made a contact in Mongolia through a friend in Sankt Veit. We met him at the airport in Ulan Bator. His name was Bat-Orshikh and he was president of the Union of
Mongolian Journalists.

  Bat-Orshikh personally escorted us from the airport into Mongolia’s capital. He was an elegant man, even in the face of endless dust. He wore white gloves while driving his old BMW and spoke with his chin high even though it was the position in which one ingested the maximum amount of airborne dung. He seemed devoted to us, prepared to contribute his skills for the success of our mission.

  “I am happy you have showed an interest in my country,” he said while driving.

  Even more than Bishkek, the city of Ulan Bator seemed imminent to return to dust. The large gray buildings were like cement-and-steel tents, erected on a windy plain, only to be pulled up and erected elsewhere. Bat-Orshikh waited while we settled in our hotel, the Zaluuchuud. The tiles in the lobby were unevenly placed, most of them loose and cracked.

  We shared a meal in the hotel with our host and he ordered us each a glass of arhi, the Mongolian wheat vodka. We toasted and drank them down. Ida immediately requested another.

  “I’ll leave you here,” Bat-Orshikh said, “I’m sure you will want to rest. I will come back tomorrow morning. I have made an appointment for you to meet Ajuriun Duemaa, Mongolia’s only official fisheries scientist. I cannot answer your questions about fish, but Dr. Duemaa may be able to.”

  “What about a car?” Johannes said.

  “I have arranged a van for you to take you to your first destination. It will be ready tomorrow afternoon.”

  Johannes, Ida, and I walked around town. We could not read any signs, not even Johannes, who could read the Cyrillic alphabet, as Mongolia had its own letters and sounds. Spoken Mongolian seemed very difficult to pronounce. If you likened French to a barking frog, Mongolian was like a burping yak. We ate dinner at a restaurant called Oscar, hung with photos of Academy Award–winning actors. It was a kind of saloon for expatriates, who were here to aid in economic development, or look for oil. The food was quite good, though almost every dish had lamb in it, which did not suit Johannes. “I don’t like the look, I don’t like the taste, I don’t like the smell,” he said.

  The next morning Bat-Orshikh took us in his BMW to visit the scientist. The day was bright and clear, the shadows cast by the buildings and poplar trees stark.

  Dr. Ajuriun Duemaa, whose gender I could not glean from the name, worked in one of Ulan Bator’s decrepit buildings up three flights of a nearly pitch-dark stairwell. It was only when I saw Duemaa’s deeply wrinkled face that I realized she was an old woman. Hunched over books and papers wearing a white lab coat on her slim frail body, she wore her long white hair in a ponytail and there was something oddly girlish in her.

  We told her, through Bat-Orshikh, that we had come to Mongolia to look for grayling on the southern slope of the Altai Mountains. Her eyes bulged in disbelief. We pulled out a map and lay it on a table. With her long pencil-thin fingers and crackling voice, she foiled our hopes of seeing the long-toothed grayling.

  “I have forty-five years’ experience as a fisheries scientist,” she started. “There are only warm-water fishes, cyprinids, in south-slope Altai rivers,” she said. “The rivers cannot support grayling, they are a cold-water fish. Where did you get your information on this fish?”

  “From Dr. Behnke at Colorado State and a specimen in the British Museum. The fish is labeled as coming from the south slope of the Altai. It must exist.”

  “I know this Behnke, I think,” Duemaa said. “I met him at a conference in Magadan [eastern Siberia]. I tell you there are no grayling in rivers of the southern Altai.”

  “I bet she’s never left this office,” Johannes whispered to me. The woman made us uncomfortable.

  “Be careful, she may cast a spell on you,” Ida whispered to me as we were bent over looking at the map.

  “Are you sure?” Johannes asked Dr. Duemaa. He told her the story about Littledale’s discovery over a hundred years before.

  “I’m sure, it is not possible,” she said. “Your Englishman must be mistaken.”

  Bat-Orshikh turned toward us and shrugged, thinking we were disappointed with the doctor’s answer.

  “Maybe she’s right,” Johannes said, showing a half smile. There was a long silence. I left the subject of the long-toothed grayling closed. I was interested in catching other fish with my fly rod, arctic grayling, lenok, and a giant landlocked troutlike fish, the taimen.

  “What are the best rivers for fishing for taimen?” I asked Duemaa.

  “The taimen is a red book fish. It is illegal to fish taimen,” she said. “They are very scarce and almost impossible to catch.” I knew this to be an untruth, because Pierre Affre had traveled to Mongolia two years before and caught over a dozen taimen on his fly rod, the biggest of which was close to two meters. Perhaps then there was a chance we would find Thymallus altaica.

  We returned to the Zaluuchuud hotel for a late lunch with Bat-Orshikh. The fare was a small heap of rice with a dollop of ketchup, a side of sinewy mutton, and cold Mongolian beer called Chinggis Khan. The waitress sat in the kitchen listening to American pop music while we drank the Mongolian wheat vodka, arhi, until late afternoon when our driver, whose name was Gambatar, arrived. Gambatar sat with us in the dining room and we laid out the map on the pink tablecloths, discussing our itinerary, Bat-Orshikh acting as a translator. The next morning Johannes, Ida, and I would head into the countryside with Gambatar, southeast of Ulan Bator toward the fringe of the Gobi Desert.

  We returned to Oscar restaurant for dinner and drank plenty of cold Chinggis Khan. They had a good salad of fresh lettuce and cucumber, which was very refreshing. They closed at midnight and we went to sleep in the Zaluuchuud.

  At two in the morning I woke up in my room, my mouth dry. Despite the temptation, I told myself not to drink the water from the tap. Outside my room the hallway had become noisy with the voices of men and women, heavy footsteps, doors slamming, and bedsprings creeking.

  Our driver, Gambatar, pulled up to the Zaluuchuud in a van the next morning. We loaded our bags in his van and started on the road to Huzirt south of Ulan Bator.

  We planned to start by fishing a river called the Orhon Gol, which wound its way north through Mongolia to Lake Baikal in Russian Siberia. Orhon Gol was not a place where we might catch the long-toothed grayling (the Altai Mountains were in western Mongolia and we were still in the east), but we had a good chance of catching arctic grayling, taimen, and lenok there.

  The bumpy two-lane road to Huzirt took us through Karakorum, the town that the feared conqueror Genghis Khan had made the center of his empire in A.D. 1220. We stopped on the roadside and Gambatar prepared an early lunch of dried mutton rehydrated in a soup, Mongolia’s mainstay. He had only enough firewood to bring the soup to a boil. Again, Johannes refused to eat it. Gambatar, however, gobbled up several plates.

  “I don’t like the smell of mutton,” Johannes reminded us.

  Gambatar smiled and ran his hand over his tired persimmon-shaped face and rosy windswept cheeks. The hair on the back of his head stood up where he’d slept on it. Ida had some hard sausage she’d brought from Austria and handed it to Johannes.

  “You must catch us some fish to eat,” Johannes said to me. “This sausage will run out and I’m not sure I will be able to catch fish by diving in these rivers.”

  “If you are relying on James to catch your food,” Ida joked, “you may starve.” Gambatar did not understand, but he continued to smile.

  After several more hours of driving, Gambatar stopped the van by a massive rock outcrop in an otherwise flat and vast land. I sat in the gravel smoking a cigarette with Johannes, staring into the vastness, and then turned my face to the ground and terrorized small bugs with my spit. There was a pleasant aroma of dry grasses carried by the desert heat. I reached down to pick some powdery green leaves of a shrub that was very much like sagebrush.

  At this spot by the unusual massive rocks, we saw our first camel of the trip.

  “It’s a true Bactrian camel,” Johannes said. “You see, it has two humps.�
�

  It stood, all feet planted on the dry earth, bracing itself in a stiff wind, its head eight feet above the ground.

  Gambatar summoned us to collect ourselves with a wave of his hand. We traveled southeast on no visible road. I slept on and off, and Ida read. When we came to the river some hours later, Gambatar negotiated our stay in a ger camp on its banks.

  We had seen plenty of gers in Kyrgyzstan, where they were called by the Russian name yurt, but this was the first time I had been inside one. The ger was a large circular tent lined with felt supported by a collapsible wooden frame and covered by canvas. It was dim inside, with four beds forming a square at the periphery, a woodstove in the center. At the opposite end from the door was a small shrine decorated with photos of the family that the ger belonged to.

  We put our things inside. The small door, which I had to duck to get through, was ornately carved and brightly painted. On the table was a plate of dried cheese, salt tea, and fermented milk. Though the ger was insulated with felt and wool, you could hear the breeze blowing through the poplar trees in the grove by the river, and the gurgling currents of the Orhon Gol.

  A PERFECT DAY

  The next morning I was awakened by Gambatar, breaking sticks and crumpling paper to feed the woodstove. It was cold enough that I could see my breath. He lit the stove and warmth from the fire quickly spread through the ger. The heat reddened my face, the only part of me not wrapped in thick wool blankets.

  When my eyes adjusted to the light spilling in through the open door I noticed that it was snowing outside. I must be dreaming, I thought.

  I put on my shoes and lumbered outside to see. A wet snow was indeed falling, accumulating lightly on the ground. It was still early and dark enough that you could see Venus near the horizon. I went back into the ger and unpacked my waders and fishing gear. I put on warm clothes and the waders and stuffed my fishing tackle in a small backpack. Johannes and Ida were still asleep when I left to go fishing.