by James Prosek
Judging by the large bars of exposed gravel I walked over, the water level of the river was low. Beyond the river was a broad expanse of reddish hills. The falling snow melted on my cap and against my face. My breath curled up before me in the cold air like cigarette smoke. Not far upstream from the ger camp were two Mongolian men fishing a good-sized pool.
The fishermen used long rods with big spinning reels and a hook with a maggot hanging below a bobber. They cast the whole rig to the head of the pool and let it drift to the end with the current as a natural insect might. At the end of the drift they swung their rigs to the head of the pool and made the drift again.
On the bank at their feet were thirty to forty fish, mostly arctic grayling and lenok, and in their large backpacks were several dozen more. I approached the fishermen’s kill like a scavenger. I had never seen a lenok and was extremely curious to have a closer look. Their sides were a mottled brick rose and they were covered with oblong black spots. Their tails were forked, their mouths more snoutish than the grayling beside them, though both were suited for bottom feeding, as their upper jaws extended over their lower. The grayling were equally beautiful, their sides covered with reddish and cerulean blue sides. Hints of buttercup yellow gleamed also, like flecks of gold in a stream bottom. The most magnificent feature of the grayling were the large sail-like dorsal fins spread like a jeweled fan. The fish flopped on the gravel until they lay dead and snow collected on their scales.
I waited there, watching, until the two fishermen reeled in their lines, filled their backpacks to overflowing, and left. Then I approached the water, rigged my fly rod, and took my time to tie on a small caddis larvae imitation. I let the pool rest a few moments and looked around in all directions. There was little to interrupt one’s vision all the way to the horizon.
I cast the fly up to the head of the pool in the same manner that the fishermen had. Even though the two fishermen had taken in excess of a hundred fish from the pool, I immediately started to catch fish—first a grayling and then a lenok—and was elated. My enthusiasm warmed me as I began to see the redness of the sun envelop the clouds and the reddish hills.
Back at camp I entered the darkness of the ger again. I warmed my hands on the dry heat from the stove. Pungent wood smoke and that from burning dung tickled my nostrils. Johannes looked up from sleep, his eyes glinting in the light that spilled in from where the stovepipe exited. I held two fish close enough to his face that he might smell them.
“Oh, you have caught a lenok,” he called, jumping out of the warm blankets and groping on the floor for his glasses. “Is it live? I must photograph it in the tank!”
“It was snowing this morning,” I said, “where were you?”
“It must be cold out, then.” Johannes found his camera and was about to walk outside when he realized he’d forgotten to put his pants on. We walked outside to observe the one grayling and one lenok I had kept. He photographed them as they lay dead in the low grass outside the ger.
“We need live ones,” Johannes said. “Can you catch more?”
“I’m pretty sure I can,” I said. “The river is full of them.”
A young woman who tended the ger camp prepared our breakfast, hunks of bread and dry hard cheese and a bowl of mutton and potato soup with noodles. The woman also cleaned and cooked the fish I had kept, which made Johannes happy. The grayling was sweet and fine textured, more savory than the lenok, whose flesh was somewhat grainy.
The snow had long stopped and now the sky opened up and a hot sun beamed. The air became warm and I took off most of the layers of clothes I had worn that morning. The sky was alive with cottony clouds dancing at the fringe of the racing front. All signs forecasted a perfect day.
After breakfast, I took Johannes upstream, past the pool where I had caught the fish that morning. Ida came with us part of the way and then returned to camp because her feet were hurting.
The farther we walked the greener and more lush the grasses became. Here and there was a stand of blooming irises, the grass around them clipped neatly to their bases by brown sheep grazing in the meadows.
A mile upstream of camp I began casting. It was not long before I hooked and landed a lenok, which Johannes put in a plastic bag of water so he could bring it to camp and photograph it alive in his tank.
“Hey, look over there,” Johannes said, pointing to the opposite bank of the river. A single boy stood watching us, and after a few moments he waded through a shallow riffle of the cold water to our side.
The boy followed us as we continued past a small pen of piebald goats. He was small and had trouble walking because his big black cowboy boots were twice his proper size. His hands were hidden in the sleeves of an oversized man’s jacket, which swung like an elephant’s trunk on either side of his hips. A red rag held this robe together around his waist and his short-cropped hair was mostly concealed by a fur cap, partially shadowing his parched and windswept cheeks.
The three of us came to a long pool, the kind an Atlantic salmon fisherman would recognize as perfect, a steady even riffle tailing out to a deep-throated hole. There were so many fish I began catching one on every cast. Johannes stood beside me for some time looking impatient.
“Okay,” he said, “you have caught enough? I have one of each for photographing and an extra for dinner. Shouldn’t we go back to the camp and check on Ida?”
“You can,” I retorted. “I’m going to stay awhile. We’re always running around sampling all these rivers at your frantic pace. I’ve got this one all to myself now, there’s plenty of fish, and I’m not leaving.” I realized I was just short of stomping my foot like a reluctant child. Both Johannes and the boy were staring at me. “It’s a perfect day,” I said calmly.
“Okay then,” Johannes said. “I’ll go back.”
I and the strangely dressed boy continued across the barren land, stopping as I fished pools that looked promising. The boy picked up a long slender stem from a scrublike bush to mimick my casting, then he chased some grazing horses with it. Several times when I hooked a fish I handed the rod to the boy and he reeled it in. Occasionally he would rest nearby like a fragile prince, lying flat on the ground beneath the incessant wind.
After a while I said to the boy, “That looks like the end of it.” The river had become wider and flatter and there were no longer any deep pools holding fish.
He began to sing.
I sang also and the boy seemed amused. Then I whistled and he wrinkled his brow to show that he was annoyed. He indicated he wished to challenge me to a race, so we began running. As we ran, we came closer and closer to the spot where we had met. I stopped running when it looked like he might trip from his oversize boots.
“I’m out of breath,” I said to the boy, panting. He began to walk away from me.
When we were some distance apart and he was just an object kicking dust, I looked back and saw him waving. I had no idea where he was going.
Back in the ger, Ida was reading a book, a fire was burning in the woodstove. She didn’t say much to me, nor did Johannes.
At dinner we spoke a lot, but mostly about how good the fish tasted. We ate plates of fried grayling; the flesh was golden orange, sweet and delicious. For dessert we were given some yogurt with wild berries.
The next day Gambatar drove us over the open and roadless land. He proved a helpful and amiable travel companion. My only complaint was that he played the same tape of Boney M songs over and over on the radio. Shortly, I knew the lyrics to all of them: “Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen. Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine.”
At another section of the Orhon Gol, we came upon some men fishing with hand lines baited with whole dead lemmings.
“I’d like to see the fish that eats that,” Johannes said.
“Maybe we should dive in the pool and see what’s down there. It should be taimen.”
“I think we’ll wait until they leave,” Johannes said, but the fishermen stayed longer than we
did.
Two days later we fished some rivers flowing to the Gobi Desert that could have been inhabited by Littledale’s elusive long-toothed grayling. The most promising of these watersheds was Ongijn Gol, a cold and clear stream, fertile with aquatic insects and a suitable habitat for grayling. But our efforts produced only a few diminutive loach, which Johannes caught in a hand net.
Ida seemed more weary than usual of our fish concerns and incessant obsession with the long-toothed grayling. Her stout and corpulent body was taxed riding over very rough terrain. She held her lower back with both hands, her face sweating and her mascara running. I noticed after a while that tears were streaming down her face and she leaned over to me, as we were sitting beside each other in the backseat, and spoke in my ear.
“I am deeply sad,” she said to me. “Johannes is not an easy man to be with.”
I put my hand on Ida’s shoulder. There was enough noise from the engine that Johannes could not hear us.
“What can I do, Ida?” I said. “I wish I could do something. He is a crazy man, but what you hate about him makes him interesting to me.”
“There is no question he is interesting,” Ida said defensively. “Johannes is very smart, you know. He is incredible with languages, he’s just not an easy man.”
Johannes, Gambatar, and I spent the early evening in front of a hotel in the village of Arvajheer, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, while Ida rested her back in the room we’d checked into. My radar detected the voice of an American.
He wore a turtleneck that read Denver Broncos on the collar. Johannes and I heard every word of what he was saying to the small Mongolian man with whom he spoke. After a time, he spotted us as Westerners and bought us a drink. He was from the International Republican Institute, visiting local officials and consulting them on how to run a proper democracy. It seemed the locals of Arvajheer liked him. They were throwing him a party.
“What’s the primary occupation of Mongolians?” I asked him over our drinks.
“Herders, they’re nomads,” he said. “There’s no economy.”
“That seems all right,” I said.
“You can’t have a democracy without capitalism,” he said.
“What about tourism?” I asked.
“There’s stuff to see but no infrastructure. The roads suck, I’m sure you’ve seen—you can’t get anywhere if you don’t have a chopper. Have you taken any of the domestic flights?”
“We are tomorrow,” Johannes said. “We’re flying to the western Altai, to the town of Hovd.”
“God bless you,” he said, laughing. “Keep in mind when you’re boarding that they dropped seven out of eleven planes in the past three weeks, four emergency landings and three crash landings. The parts are made in New Jersey, assembled in China, and Miat Airlines flies them, that’s a bad recipe. God bless you,” he said again. “It’s okay, they’re being extra careful this week, there’s a lot of foreign dignitaries in town.”
Ida never showed up for dinner—she must have fallen asleep in the hotel room—so Johannes and I and Gambatar forgot to eat as well. Gambatar went to sleep in the van and Johannes and I continued to drink until two in the morning. Then we returned to our room with its two beds. I slept on the floor between them.
I was about to fall asleep when I heard Ida, first whimpering, then sobbing. Johannes did not cross the room to console her; he pretended he was asleep. I decided to leave the room.
I sat in the hallway listening. Ida began to scream at Johannes in German. He did not reply. About ten minutes later she came out of the room and found me sitting on the floor in the dark hall. She had brought her cigarettes and wanted me to share the time with her.
“Ven conmigo,” she said, still crying.
I gave her my hand and led her down the marble stairs, chipped and decrepit, until we were outside.
“Johannes has a girlfriend,” she said. “He doesn’t like me because I’m fat. He likes thin women.”
“Oh, Ida,” I said, “you’re beautiful. What do you need Johannes for? You have your children.”
“We have been married twenty-two years but Hannes doesn’t care about anything except trout. He gets worse every year. It’s a craziness.”
Ida wet my shoulder with her tears. “He works when I sleep. And the rest of the time he spends in the bar.”
Somewhere in the night dogs were barking; it seemed there were hundreds. The sky was clear but I could see lightning beyond the far hills.
Ida was still sobbing when Johannes came down from the room and sat with us there, on the steps outside the cement building. He lit a cigarette but did not speak. He was on the other side of Ida from me.
“Did you see it?” he said after a time.
“What?” I said.
“The shooting star.”
“No,” I said.
Ida was silent.
THE ALTAI
The next afternoon, back in Ulan Bator, we boarded a domestic flight to Hovd, a village at the foot of the Altai Mountains. As with other planes we had taken within poor countries, there was no system to seating and the flight was severely overbooked. An old woman half my size pushed me at the midriff to get by, others just sat in the aisle. Unless you had money to rent a helicopter, though, there was no other way to get across the country in a reasonable amount of time.
Bat-Orshikh, our journalist liaison, arranged for a woman to meet us at the airport in Hovd. That woman, named Singsee, and a man named Bolt, helped us find our bags when we arrived, and then escorted us to a hotel in town.
Singsee took our passports, which was disconcerting, but she said she must as they were to be held by the local police as long as we were in the Altai region. Later we found ourselves deep in negotiations with the hotel manager for the price of a room.
“Thirty dollars for a room with two cots and no running water is way too high,” Johannes said. It was not that we couldn’t afford it, it was simply that they were charging too much for what we were getting.
“There’s nothing I hate more than the feeling of being cheated,” Ida said. Johannes negotiated them down to fifteen.
Our destination was a river that connected two huge lakes called Khar Us Nuur, the Black Water Lakes. Between Hovd and the lakes was open land scarred only by a few indentations from jeep tracks.
Our driver was drunk when he picked us up at the hotel.
“I can smell alcohol on his breath,” Johannes said to me as we were about to depart.
Singsee stood beside us. “And now,” she said, “it’s showtime,” which was her way of telling Westerners that we had to pay for the jeep in advance.
“These are awful people,” I said to Johannes.
There was no danger in our driver being drunk, though, and no danger of going off the roads, because there were none. What bothered us more was the condition of the car.
“The tires are as bald as Johannes’s head,” Ida observed. When Bolt, the man who’d met us at the airport, climbed in the jeep with us, we had no energy left to resist.
A boy in a cowboy hat standing outside the hotel noted our disappointment.
“I could take you in the mountains to look for snow leopard,” he said. “I have a good vehicle.”
“We’re not interested in snow leopards,” Johannes said.
The boy reached down to pick a piece of dry grass and put it in his mouth.
Twenty kilometers outside of Hovd we got our first flat tire. The driver put on the spare. Thirty more kilometers over dry earth we had our second flat. Both blown tires had gashes in them three inches long.
I observed then the true meaning of resourcefulness and ingenuity. The driver cut a piece of rubber from one of the tires with his pocketknife and put the patch on the inside of the other tire to cover the hole. Then he took a new inner tube, put it inside the tire, and filled it with air, and the air pressure held the patch in place. I cringed when I saw that the new inner tube was also patched, but his quick fix worked.
“The ultimate problem,” Johannes said, “is that we don’t have enough time and they have too much.”
Along the way to the Black Water Lakes the driver and Bolt stopped at several gers in the desert to visit friends. We knew for certain now that we were on their time. From Hovd we went to Buyant, Myangol, Dörgön, and eventually we made it to the Chonokharaykh River between the lakes.
Beside the river was a group of gers where we were offered warm milk and hard dry cheese by a man who had unusually bright white teeth (for a Mongolian). Good-teeth, as we came to call him, understood when we told him that we wanted to fish for the native grayling, Thymallus breverostris. When we had done eating, Good-teeth joined us in the jeep.
We drove down to the bank of the wide river toward a big cliff, half brick red and half black clay. On the opposite bank camels were grazing and downstream you could see where the river spilled into one of the Black Water Lakes.
When we parked, Good-teeth got out and pointed to where he thought I should cast. I rigged up my fly rod and he looked at it, shaking his head. He made with his hands that there were big fish and that my rod was too small.
The river was dark and deeply stained like black tea. I put on a white streamer fly that would be visible in the water and on the third cast I pulled out a bright silver fish.
I managed to get it up on the bank on a bed of low stubby grass. Johannes leaped on it, bracing it between his knees.
“Oh my gosh,” he said, “it’s Thymallus breverostris! I am almost certain there has never been a color photograph taken of this fish.”
It was not typical in our minds of what a grayling should look like. The European and American grayling had a large colorful dorsal fin, a small mouth, and brick-and-yellow sides. This fish had a large mouth like a trout and a set of formidable teeth and larger silvery scales. It was easy to see how a biologist like Boulanger, studying Littledale’s specimen, would call it the missing link between trout and grayling.