Hostages to Fortune

by William Humphrey

  But today it was onto the water, not onto the ice. Their punt, double-pointed for getting out of dead-end windings too narrow to turn around in, was waiting on the ramp. They stuffed two canvas bags with decoys and hauled the boat down to the water. Nero leaped aboard and seated himself in the bow: a fitting figurehead. He took his place amidship and Tony launched them. The motor responded to the pull of the cord, the bow rose high out of water and they planed across the cove headed west. The rising tide was near the full. To pass under the railroad trestle they had to duck their heads.

  Inside the cove, separated from the river by the railway embankment, the water had been smooth but on the river the wind funneling down the valley raised waves and the ride was rough as the boat crested and bottomed, crested and bottomed. A southbound freight train, its length lost in the mist, overtook them and clanked alongside with a noise like the links of a chain being dragged over the ties.

  The train’s caboose had disappeared into the mist when they turned from the river and passed under the trestle into the bay. Under reduced power they crossed the open water to the marsh. There Tony cut the motor and took it aboard and stood with his long push-pole. In their jump-shooting it was always Tony who poled. There was a knack to it, a final twist of the pole against your hip, gondolier fashion, that momentarily turned the pole into a tiller and steered the boat through the tortuous narrow channels, a knack he could never get.

  They entered one of these channels tunneled by tall purple loosestrife and cattails. Their heads frazzled and faded, these latter looked like oversized cotton swabs. Darkness was lifting as they glided silently along the channels and through still pools that shone like quicksilver. At their edges floated pinfeathers plucked from themselves by preening ducks. He could just see to shoot now and he loaded his gun and stood, bracing his right leg against the seat, rocking in rhythm to Tony’s steady stroke of the pole. Their progress resembled that of the lone gallinule that swam in spurts ahead of them, its head bobbing.

  It would be a day early in the season but it would not be opening day. That they passed up. Too many green and greedy gunners then, who opened fire on birds impossibly out of range and scared them off from gunners into whose range they were being decoyed. The bay sounded like warfare then, and sometimes erupted into it, with shots exchanged not far above heads. Now you shared it with fewer, more dedicated, more experienced, and more courteous sportsmen.

  They rounded a bend and a pair of mallards flushed, beating the water with their wings in their takeoff. They were thirty yards away when his swing picked up and momentarily blotted out one with the muzzle of the gun. Then the sky reappeared momentarily and in that moment he fired. The boom reverberated around the bay and without pause he swiveled, picked up, at forty yards, the second bird, covered it, swung past, taking a slightly longer lead this time, fired, and followed through on his swing. Whether he had touched either bird he did not know. Or rather, he knew he had, but he had not seen it happen.

  “Keep that up,” said Tony as Nero swam back with both birds by their necks in his mouth, “and you’ll have time on your hands waiting for me to fill my limit.”

  The shots had disturbed the birds in the area and they took to wing out of range. Without putting up another they reached their blind on the edge of and commanding its own spot of open water. They set out their stool of decoys, concealed the boat, and climbed into the blind. They had built it on weekends in early autumn, boating out on a falling tide with poles for the stilts and boards for the floor and the walls and hemlock boughs to camouflage the whole thing, working when the bay was drained, then boating back when the tide had risen to float them. Just out of gunshot range from one another, other blinds were going up on those weekends. Come opening day of the season, the bay looked like the site of some primitive tribe of bog dwellers. Yours brought back to you the clubhouse you had built with some playmate as a boy.

  They stood back to back and each scanned his section of the gray sky. To the west the mountains loomed loftily, their tops still indistinct, as though the day came up from earth and forced the night to lift. Guns were beginning to sound now, most often automatics emptying their legal limit of three shots, in fire so rapid the echoes, trapped by the low-lying cloud cover, got in one another’s way.

  “Wood ducks!” Tony hissed. “Wood ducks!”

  He too had spotted them, a flock of seven or eight, and had identified them by their speed and by their characteristic bunching and scattering in flight and by their habit, unique to them among ducks, of turning their heads in flight. Both froze, hunching to conceal the white of their faces, not daring to look to the side farther than the rolling of their eyes allowed. This was the prescribed reaction to the appearance of all ducks, but wood ducks were not to be missed. Not because they were the most prized on the plate, for they were not, but because theirs was the plumage most sought after by tiers of trout flies. The five most indispensable patterns required feathers from the cape of the wood duck drake, and the sale of them was illegal. You got your own or you got none—unless, as both were hoping now, you had a father and a godfather to get them for you. For years the breed had been so near extinction that all shooting of them was banned. They had recovered from decimation and come back in numbers enough to permit shooting—limit one per day. Would these wing over now or would they circle and come back, maybe flock in to the decoys?

  “They’re turning,” Tony whispered. “They’re circling. They’re coming in. Oh, damn it, they’ve seen us! Now or never!”

  This was pass-shooting at tiny targets going fifty miles an hour. The eye had to focus and function with the speed of a camera shutter. He chose a bird out of the flock, tracked it on its line of flight, overtook and passed it, fired and kept swinging. When he looked back the crumpled bird was tumbling out of the sky, striking the water with a splash. Tony too had scored.

  These two would not be plucked, they would be skinned whole. They would make many trout flies; even so, they would soon be used up. The flytying that Anthony had taken up as a hobby had become a business. In the beginning he sold flies to the members of the fishing club. They showed them to friends and soon he was filling mail orders. Now he had several part-time employees, boys and girls whom he had trained and who tied flies as a cottage industry. Never one to do things by halves, he bred his own gamecocks. He kept them in coops and incubated the eggs, always in quest of a strain that would consistently produce feathers with hackles of the requisite stiffness and of the perfect subtle shade of dun blue. Toward the undesirable poults he was unsentimental, businesslike. Lately he had found a use for them. He fed them to the hawks he had begun to fancy.

  Long before they saw them they heard the geese. They appeared over the mountaintops to the northwest. There must have been two hundred of them. They grew louder as the stately beat of their wings brought them overhead. If the ducks streaked over dipping and banking in formation like squadrons of fighter planes, these were bombers massed on a mission navigating a straight and steady course. Big Canada geese they were, recognizable even at that altitude by their white throat patch like a clergyman’s collar. Tirelessly chanting their command, they were like a column of marching men in the regimented, plodding steadiness of their pace, and when one of them got out of line it quickly got back as a straggler among soldiers closes ranks. For a long time they stayed in sight before disappearing into the southern sky, and still for a long time afterwards their honking, more like baying, could be heard against the wind.

  Small flocks, mainly mallards and teal, swooped down only to flare off. There was gunning now throughout the bay and the heavy boom of the big long-range magnums of gunners out on the open water of the river. They decoyed one flock of five and he singled and missed while Tony doubled. Then a distant whistle blew.

  “Noon in Hudson,” said Tony.

  A couple of minutes passed and another whistle blew.

  “Noon in Catskill,” said Tony.

  Another couple of minutes passed and
another whistle blew.

  “Noon in Germantown,” said Tony.

  A fourth whistle blew and Tony said, “Noon here.”

  They stacked their guns, rubbed the backs of their stiff necks, stretched themselves, and sat down on the bench. A hot toddy never tasted better than then, and was all the better for being limited to one—many a hunting friendship had been ended by a shooting accident in a duckblind. Tony uncorked the wine and tasted it and said, smacking his lips, “Why, be this juice the growth of God, who dare blaspheme the twisted tendril as a snare? A Blessing, we should use it, should we not? And if a curse—why, then, Who set it there?” To which he responded with, “I wonder often what the Vintners buy one half so precious as the stuff they sell.” In the hamper there might be a pate, a cold fried chicken, an avocado to share, cheese, fruit tarts with bitter black coffee. Ducks seen during the lunch break were usually seen too late and winged away unscathed. Neither minded. They were there not just to fill their game pockets.

  It was in a duckblind that began a practice of theirs. It was one of the closest of the many ties that attached them to each other. It came about because of the nature of duck shooting. Much of the day in the blind is spent doing nothing at all. To be good, the weather must be bad: gray, misty, fogbound, with little to interest the eye, distract the mind. The shooting is best early in the morning and late in the afternoon. Throughout the long middle of the day the hunter scans the sky mainly because he has got nothing else to do; only seldom is he rewarded then by the sight of birds. It was during such a barren midafternoon stretch on one of their early hunts together that Tony had said, “You ought to bring along something to read at times like this.”

  “And yourself?” In those days he believed that Tony had read everything.

  “For this I’ve got something better than a book. I recite poems to myself. I’ve got a collection in my head and I add new ones to it from time to time. That way I’ve got something to occupy my mind without taking my eyes off the sky. I do it while I’m driving long distances, when I’m in the dentist’s chair, when I’m doing any kind of still-hunting, like this.”

  So, as they scanned the sky, they passed the time reciting to each other Shakespeare and Milton, Donne and Marvell, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, Yeats—breaking off when birds appeared to wait them out if they came in range to fire. The once-great flights had dwindled. No longer did clouds of them darken the sky or settle upon the river thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Valambrosa, but on most days they bagged their limit.

  The sun would have dropped below the clouds behind the blue Catskills, setting the sky ablaze, the mist would be rising off the water and lights shone from the windows of a northbound passenger train when they retrieved the decoys, for they would have stayed out late. So, always, would one last lone duck, now hurrying to rejoin its flock for the night. To it he said:

  Whither, midst falling dew,

  While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,

  Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

  Thy solitary way?

  Vainly the fowler’s eye

  Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,

  As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,

  Thy figure floats along.

  He had not found in the flight of the duck the faith that Bryant had found, that

  He who, from zone to zone,

  Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,

  In the long way that I must tread alone,

  Will lead my steps aright.

  But he had had his little flock then and knew how to find his way home to them in the dark. Then there had been no long way that he must tread alone.

  He was casting better now, straightening line and leader, laying down the fly with better aim, more softly. The timing of it was coming back to him. When you had done a thing for many years you could put it aside and then take it up again, and seemingly, no matter what had befallen you in the interim, it came back to you. With fly-casting the thing was not to think about it. It was both subtle and simple and had to be done unselfconsciously. That was the hardest part for beginners to learn, not to think about it but just do it. Then it was as easy as a good man made it look, as natural as conveying food to your mouth. It had nothing to do with size or strength. Had it had then he would have been better at it than either Tony or Anthony, both of whom could outperform him any day. But then Tony was a natural and Anthony a perfectionist.

  Slowly at first so as not to disturb the pool, then with a steadily accelerating lift of the rod accompanied by a downward pull with his left hand, he picked the line off the water. It came back to him showering droplets and went swishing past his ear. Rod held high, he paused, timing the backcast to lengthen and straighten itself, to flex the rod. A million casts had taught him just when to start the rod forward. The line rolled over in a hairpin loop, straightened, sending the leader and fly to the fore. He checked it, and the line fell lightly to the water. In a swirl created by a boulder near the pool’s left bank the fly came to life. It looked more like a minnow than a minnow did. Through the clear water he could see its feathers pulse as though it were breathing. It looked like a finger-ling trout and the slash of crimson along its side like a bleeding wound. Easy prey for a hungry adult trout. They made of their generation messes.

  The current swept the line slowly toward midstream. When it was straightened to its full length he began his retrieve. He let the fly drift back, retrieved again in short rapid jerks. He began his lift, then felt it stopped by a tug, the throb of a fish, his first in more than a year. Experience told him it was not a big fish but to him it felt big, assisted in its pull by a lifetime, a buried and resurrected lifetime of fish.

  It would instinctively make its first turn for freedom upstream toward him. Out of old habit he put his feet together to keep it from going between them. Reeling rapidly to regain the slack line, he saw the fish in its dash past him. It was about a foot long.

  Regulated by its drag, the reel yielded line to the fish. The rod, bent in a bow, quivered like a divining rod. The fish leaped, leaped again, then turned and bolted downstream, retaking line. He lightened the drag to compensate for the added pull of the current. The fish stopped, turned, balked, shook its head. To keep the rod from developing a set, a permanent bend, he turned it upside down. The drowning, desperate fish darted past him headed upstream again. He shifted the rod to his left hand and with his right hand reached for his landing net. He drew it to the full length of its retractable chain and dipped it in the water to inflate its bag. He waited while the tired fish floated slowly up from the bottom. The current brought it, spent, tail first to the net. He bent to scoop it up. His reflection in the water, blurred and indistinct at first, sharpened as he neared it. It was as if a corpse, drowned and bleached, was surfacing—his corpse.

  The storm in the night had passed through like an army on the march and at half past two the distant rumble and the glare of its cannonade was faint and fast fading. The barroom barometer stood at 29.90 and was rising. That should bring fair weather and good fishing. The one reliable rule for when to go fishing, aside from the old saw about going whenever you could get away, was not to go when the cows were lying down. Cows lay down when the barometric pressure was falling, and so did fish. He had read that according to some researchers mental depression in people followed upon a lowering of the barometric pressure. If so, then in that, as in so much else, he was contrary. He had watched the one here on the wall rise for the past hour as, meanwhile, his own inner one steadily fell. His weather and the world’s weather seldom accorded anymore, just as the hours he kept were the opposite of other people’s. Fair days, when they were happy, emphasized that he was not. In gloomy weather he had the same excuse for his low spirits as everybody else. Now, with the contrariness that characterized much of his recent behavior, he chose this, always the low point on his chart for the day, to put himself to the most dreaded of the tests
awaiting him here.

  His half-drunk beer had long since gone flat. He went behind the counter, emptied his mug into the sink and rinsed the suds from it. He toweled it dry, then, turning to set it on the shelf, he saw himself in the mirror and the sight was so startling it was as though he had caught somebody watching him. He and his reflection stared first wildly, then searchingly, at each other.

  “Thou comest in questionable shape,” he said to it, and it said the same to him.

  Lots of old familiar faces had looked into his now unfamiliar one during these past few hours, with differing expressions of it but with universal shock and disbelief, or with evident effort to disguise it, and the progress he had made in getting used to himself had been undone.