Fly-Fishing the 41st (33 page)

“James,” was all she said, and kneeled down next to me. She looked at me with the adoring look a mother gives her son. Then she stood up and walked back to the fires to help cook the lunch.

That evening at dinner at the research station, in the dim of the wooden cabin, Dr. Glubakovsky suggested we have a banquet. He wished to recognize some individuals, present a special meal, and then get drunk and dance. Our friendly server who looked like Ida brought us a fish soup. Several cheeses were brought out, a berry wine, and salted salmon eggs. After dinner, those remaining moved the tables to clear a space for dancing. Russian dance music, rock and techno, played from a cassette player.

As the night wore on, Igor turned off the music and fetched a guitar.

The guitar was in poor condition and irreparably out of tune. He tried to play it but there was too much discord. Then a small middle-aged Russian man named Valérie, whose face reminded me of one of those black-and-white mug shots of an old-time train robber, came in carrying an amber-colored instrument, in tune and pleasant sounding.

Valérie played melancholy Russian war songs and everyone stayed
to listen. My friend Fred told them I played some guitar and Valérie handed the instrument to me. I don't remember the first song I sang, maybe it was a Woody Guthrie tune. We all were very drunk.

Valérie, who now looked to me like a fox, was an exceptional folksinger. His songs were about war and love and mother Russia. Sergei Alexeev, another of the Russian biologists, crept up to me several times to tell me what the songs were about. “This song is for World War Two,” he would say. “This is the song of the Russian Civil War.” The drivers, the cooks, the boat mechanics, all the people who worked at Raduga Station, drank and enjoyed the music.

Olga danced to my songs, and when Valérie played I danced with Olga and held her by the waist and shoulders and felt the valley along her spine and put my leg between her legs and she laughed and let me go, spinning. I walked outside at one point into the chilly night to pee. When I returned I could no longer find Olga.

A small limping man, one of the boat mechanics who lived at camp and always seemed drunk, poured vodka in my mouth and corked it with a pickle. After the playing, around four in the morning, Yoichi and I went to the
banya
but the fire was out and the stones were not hot. We ran down to the iron dock by our cabin and jumped off into the river anyway. It felt good to be naked. When we came up dripping from the river, Olga was walking by with her dog, Cleopatra.

The next afternoon, a group of fifteen of us fished in a small tributary of the Kamchatka River, a short boat ride from camp. It was a kind of exploratory fishing trip and I caught a species of char I had previously seen only in Japan. It was
Salvelinus leucomanis,
the white-spotted char, locally known as the
kundja.
The first one I caught was small, cerulean blue on the sides with large round white spots. Yoichi caught a larger one, close to two feet long. We also caught Dolly Varden char,
Salvelinus malma,
and a char that Dr. Glubakovsky had first described,
Salvelinus albus.
No one else but Glubakovsky considered
albus
a separate species.

“It's identical to the Dolly Varden,” Yoichi said. “It should be called Glubakovsky's ego char.” We cooked fish for lunch on the bank of the river. The wind was down and the small biting flies were numerous.

Remnants of the evening redness could still be seen on the peaks of the volcanoes at the hour we returned to Raduga Station. In the dining cabin after we ate, the tables were cleared and moved for another night of festivities. Soon Valérie was plucking and picking his songs and singing with his throaty Dylanesque voice. I sat down on a bench in the corner and listened to Valérie until he had done playing and he handed me the guitar. The limping boat mechanic tilted a cup of vodka to my mouth and then fed me a pickle. Time passed, and individual members of the caravan slipped off to their cabins. I handed the guitar to Valérie and went outside to relieve myself. On the way back through the dark hallway into the room, someone took my hand. It was Olga. She led me into the kitchen, where we sat among pots and jars and fragrant bunches of dried sage and bay leaves. We lay down, embracing. Through a hole in the wall I could see the warm light of the dining room and hear Valérie's voice and the soft treble of the guitar strings on his fingers.

Olga kissed me and muttered several words in Russian.

“Sh, sh, sh,” she said and kissed me again.

She led me out of the kitchen but someone was walking by the entrance so we ducked back in. Olga showed me that she would leave first and then I should follow. She made the moment darker than it was.

I met her in the damp grass under the full moon. We held hands again and she led me to her room.

“Sh, Cleopa,” Olga whispered to her dog, closing her door. Cleopatra settled in a square bundle beside the bed. I watched Olga's dress fall as she stripped off her clothes. She helped me undress.

I touched her.

“Sh, sh, sh, James,” she said. The cold world of wood walls, full moons, and wet grass was somewhere beyond the warmth I felt. I heard her delightful panting as I pulled her closer. I smelled salmon on her fingers. I asked Olga if I could light a candle and see her. Somehow she understood, for she moved the window curtain and moonlight spilled over her breasts. I saw the animal in her eyes.

Cleopatra was quiet and sleeping on the floor. Olga held me for a long time, then loosened her embrace and indicated to me that I mustn't fall asleep.

I kissed Olga's soft cheek and dressed and ran down the path through the dark, half elated, half bewildered, to the
banya.
I took off my clothes, hung them on a peg, and felt pleased to be alone in the dark. I moved a small washbasin below a large spigot and filled it with warm water, which I poured over myself.

The stones were still warm in the sauna. I put some water on them and light steam filled the room. I closed my eyes but did not sleep.

Later that morning, on my way to breakfast, I passed Cleopatra licking the dew off the grass. The dog had strayed from Olga's side but she must not be far. At midday we left Raduga Station and began the two-day trip back to Petropavlovsk.

Not until we arrived at the gate for our flights out of Kamchatka did I hold Olga again. She put a small figurine carved from mammoth ivory in my hand and said good-bye, smiling.

 

The other Americans and I were about to board the weekly flight to Anchorage, Alaska, when a tall man approached me and introduced himself. I recognized him from photos I had seen. It was Dr. Robert Behnke, my wellspring of information, the one who had introduced me to Johannes Schöffmann and shaped my travels along the 41st parallel.

“It is a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said. “I'm Bob Behnke.”

“A pleasure for me too,” I said. “It's so strange you're on this flight. I didn't know you'd be in Russia.”

“I was supposed to join
your
party, in fact,” he said, “but I decided to go on a separate research trip up the Amur River—some colleagues and I were studying Siberian taimen and lenok.” He combed his lacy reddish hair with his large fingers. “I was determined to return with specimens,” Behnke said, “but the vodka ran out and the bush guides drank all my ethyl alcohol. It was not an entirely successful trip, scientifically speaking. We could not navigate as far as we had hoped up the river because of a large log jam.”

“You were fishing with nets?”

“Some, but I did better with my fly rod.”

“Oh,” I said. The wind was blowing hard.

“Why don't you visit me at the university in Fort Collins on your way home,” Behnke said, pausing to stuff and light his pipe. The smoke blew across his face as he struggled to keep the match lit in the wind.

“I retired from teaching this year, my seventieth birthday, but I still have my office in Wagar Hall, the old veterinary building. I'll take you fishing on the upper Poudre River, it should be very near your parallel, forty-one degrees north. We have a lot of beaver ponds with brook trout; they are an introduced species so we can catch and keep some.”

“That sounds great.”

“We'll have a meal and share stories.” He turned his back to the wind and puffed on his pipe. “Plan on coming about October fourth and staying a few days. I have a doctor's appointment on the third. You can coax me out of the office for some fishing. Where are you heading now?”

“I'm going to visit and fish with a friend in Berkeley.”

“I did my Ph.D. work at UC Berkeley,” he said. “Nice town.”

When we arrived in Anchorage, making the four-hour flight across the Bering Sea, I said good-bye to Behnke and some of my new Fanatics friends. Then I boarded a plane for San Francisco.

T
HE
A
BRIDGED
S
CHWARZFISCHER
L
EXICON

Invitation to join ISOS,
the International Society of
Schwarzfischer

 

President: Johannes Schöffmann

Vice President: James Prosek

 

Dear prospective members—Yoichi Machino, Dr. Robert Behnke, Pierre Affre

You have been chosen to become members of the ISOS because you exhibit characteristics of the founding members; that is, you foster the urge to fish by any means possible: 1. because you are a predator 2. in order to advance the world's awareness through art and science concerning the biodiversity of salmonid fishes, especially trout and char.

The following is a dictionary of terms and sayings of invention and collection in languages from countries where
Schwarzfischer
(
s
) have traveled in search of fish. It is a kind of
Schwarzfischer
code
—the Schwarzfischer lexicon.

 

Schwarzfischer—
German: literally,
black fisherman;
illegal angler, poacher,
pescador furtivo, pêcheur noir
(not proper to say
Schwarzfischer
s, but it is said nonetheless).

Spanish—official language of the
Schwarzfischer,
as it is the first language in which the
Schwarzfischers
communicated. “
Mal vino es mejor que no vino
”—saying in Spanish of Johannes's invention: “Bad wine is better than no wine.”

Gambatar—the name of an amicable driver in Mongolia used in
place of the Spanish infinitive
ir,
to go, and conjugated like a Spanish verb.

Schweinehund—
German: literally,
pig dog;
used as a light insult. trout/char—favored fish of the
Schwarzfischer,
known variously as:
truite
(France);
trota
(Italy);
trucha
(Spain);
Forelle
(Germany);
forel
(Russia);
pestrofa
(Greece);
pstrimika
(Albania);
gouzelleh
(Iran);
ishkhan, bahtak, kharmrahait
(Armenia);
alabalik
(Turkey, Azerbaijan);
iwana, yamame, oshorokomo
(Japan);
bleikja, sjógengin, urrithi
(Iceland);
massi alé
(Kurdish).

Johannes-cut—antonym of shortcut, or a means of taking time off your travel by choosing a more direct route. Used ironically because a shortcut is intended to save time by abbreviating the route, but a Johannes-cut ends up making the trip longer.

cheese—v. smile. ex.: She is cheesing. Derived from American custom of saying “cheese” and smiling when a photo is taken. A Johannes slip.

bekhwe—
Mongolian, roughly means there are none, a common response to questions asked in Central Asia; ex.: “Do you have any toilet paper?” “Toilet paper
bekhwe.
”

yow—
Icelandic: yes. Repeated slowly in succession
—yow, yow, yow—
it suggests the American yeah, yeah, yeah. ex.: “Sure you caught a twenty-pound char
—yow, yow, yow.
”

chishik unem—
Armenian: I have to pee.

gola hanne—
Nepali method of fishing with explosives.

Einfahrt-Ausfahrt-gutefahrt—
An amusing interlanguage wordplay.
Einfahrt
in German,
entrance; Ausfahrt—exit;
fart, American slang for flatulence;
ein
in German,
one; gute Fahrt
in German, good travel; good fart in English, good flatulence.

fruta de tavuk—fruta de,
Spanish for fruit of;
tavuk,
Turkish for chicken. A convoluted way of saying “egg.”

Oscar—a restaurant in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, with good, well-priced food. Used to describe any such rare place with those characteristics. Also conjugated like a Spanish verb, suggesting the following—“Let's go to the place with good, well-priced food.”

pectopah—
reads
restoran
in the Cyrillic alphabet; i.e.,
p
is pronounced
r.
But
Schwarzfischers
say this word with roman pronunciation, pronouncing it
pectopah,
to also mean restaurant, but in code. ex.: “
Oscamos a la pectopah,
” or, “Let's go to the restaurant with good, well-priced food.”