Lines on the Water (10 page)

Yet there is something that would always separate the guide from the sport. Sometimes it was as different as life knowledge compared to acquired taste.

And that is the indigenous quality of the Miramichi and
its guides. They take these sports to places the sports have never been in search of those fish that those sports remember they have searched for as far back as the Mother Goose stories of their childhood. It becomes in part a certain longing to make good on the promises you made to yourself as a child. And I thought of this as I fed the little squirrel its bread.

Once one of my uncles, at the age of seventeen, was walking into a camp one day in midwinter. He was travelling with an older man, who became tired halfway along on their journey, on this cold day in January of 1935. My uncle built a fire and tried to warm him, and get him moving again, but, as the afternoon wore on, it was to no avail.

“You go ahead,” the older man said. “I’m ‘bout done.”

“You’ll freeze in the night before we can get back to you,” my uncle said. The wind had come up strong and there was a palpable taste to the air.

But the older man said he was unable to walk. That his legs had given out.

“I did the only thing I could,” my uncle said.

“What was that?”

“I carried him.”

My grandmother, who cooked for sports and men all her life, would never have expected anything less.

I do not know which uncle was the greatest in the woods, nor would I make it a contest, but one, Richard Adams, became world famous as a guide. The most famous people he guided were Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalind. When Rosalind took a salmon that day they asked my uncle how much it weighed. He glanced at it—“Twenty-eight and a half pounds,” he said.

When they weighed it the scales said: twenty-eight and three-quarters.

He is a frail older man now, but until last summer he was still guiding and doing things, which he said you couldn’t learn in a book.

That was my reverie, my source of reaffirmation, that night on the Restigouche. The little squirrel went home to bed, the propane light in the cabin flared out into the dark, the river ran on.

The sports have their own stories; the guides have theirs. Sometimes on a hard day, it is harder on the guide than on the fisherman. The guide will begin to hate the river he loved for so long. If the fisherman is cranky or unsatisfied, and if the guide is conscientious, it is a hard go.

Sometimes the guide will have to listen over and over again to the same hopes in stories told by people who believe in the
esotericness of fly-fishing, without understanding much more of it than that.

The meandering river, the sun just behind the trees, the fly dropped perfectly just at the right point in the pool, the line laid out so softly it gives a beat to the heart, and then from deep under the water in a hidden lay, a swirl and the line tightening. The guide knows this but still it is hard for him or her at times to act enthusiastically after forty straight days, rain and shine, on the river.

Sometimes a guide will tell a fisherman he has seen a fish rise, just to keep interest alive.

“You just raised a fish,” he will say. Sometimes a fisherman might know this isn’t true but hope keeps him silent. Or they will talk about how fishing was the week before. Or how it will be better the next day. Fishing can break your heart if you are between the good days. And this is how you can generally gauge things. If you get into a camp late at night, and people are talking about how well fishing had gone the week before, you are almost certain that fishing is going to be hard and slow.

Some guides will do anything to get his sport a fish. My uncle carried people on his back across rivers to afford them the best opportunity to fish a pool. He made sure they were not only in the best position to fish, but he made sure that they
had on the best fly to allow a chance. If a guide is conscientious, things are done to make a sport feel at home but never incompetent. They know that it is their world and the sport at times is out of place in it. A guide knows in a second what calibre the fisherman is, and how to adjust his day about that unspoken qualification.

One day I was fishing private water on the main Souwest with a guide and a person from Calgary. The guide had gotten a little disgusted with fishing. He almost declared that there were no fish.

Though he didn’t say it quite this way he still had that look about him that made you feel wetting a line was a terrible imposition on himself.

I was at a camp with a contingent of other fishermen, most of them clients of lawyers, who were being given a kind of trip of a lifetime because of what their lawyers had billed them. There were six guides. I arrived just before supper. I was told there had not been a fish taken in three days, and everyone was just a little tired. So of course it became a trip that soon had nothing to do with fishing for many of these people, who had a good supply of booze on hand. They were ridden in a canoe, by a guide, where they would drink, and if inclination allowed, throw a fly or two at some water.

After supper, at about five in the afternoon, I met my
guide. He had retired from his work in town, was now guiding in the summer and fall, and spent winter on unemployment insurance.

“Will we see a fish?” I said good naturedly as I shook hands.

“God knows,” he said. “There hasn’t been any seen in days—last week was great—but the water is low, and we need a rain.”

I knew we needed a rain, but still and all, the water level didn’t look so bad—and I felt that a fish would take if you could position a fly over it.

“I just finished three days of hard fishing without anyone taking a fish,” he said, and he screwed up his eyes at me.

“That’s too bad,” I shrugged. And I looked at my partner, a young man from Calgary who hadn’t fished before. I felt a little sad for him, standing as he was in his brand-new everything and waiting to be told where to go and what to do. It reminded me of myself not so many years before.

The young man from Calgary was very uninformed about fishing—and therefore very informed in the wrong way. He worried constantly.

“What will we do if we see a bear?” he asked, half in bravado and half in fear.

“Run a mile, shit a pile, and hide behind it,” the guide said lackadaisically. Which did nothing to lessen the man’s worry.

I too had been worried about bears in the woods until I met a few and saw them. It is still true, as it was with my dog Jeb Stuart and I, that almost none of them will bother anyone, and will turn and be long gone before you can ever get a good look at them. This was just as true on the Norwest one day when I saw a bear swimming the river. The bear crossed the river not many yards from me, went over to my truck, sniffed it, and hightailed it away faster than I have ever seen. But still I wouldn’t want to startle one on a path somewhere with a cub, as Jeb and I did, again.

It was late in August and after six in the afternoon when we finally stepped into the canoe, the guide pulled the cord, the outboard started, and away we went, downriver towards a small island that had a pool on the far side of it. We pulled into the island and walked down to the water. The water was flowing along. A few feet out from the bar there was a constant swift ripple that lasted for about twenty yards. Just on the outside of that rip you could see where the deeper water joined, and anywhere along there fish would be laying.

“Get into her,” the guide said, sitting in the canoe, and swatting at flies with his hat.

“Where do I fish?” the man from Calgary said.

“Walk along the bar—” the guide pointed. “And when you get up to the top throw your line over—and fish down through.”

The man from Calgary looked uncertain. He stepped into the water up to his knees and looked behind him.

“Keep going,” the guide said.

He stepped further along and looked back again. “What will I do if I fall in?” the man from Calgary said. “You’ll be able to get me out—with these waders on, eh?” he asked.

“Just make sure your hat floats so we know where your body is,” the guide said.

The man looked plaintively back at me and blinked two big sad blinks, as if this fishing trip of a lifetime was a fishing trip from hell, and stood exactly where he was, dabbing his line before him as if he was searching for minnows. I waited for him to move along through the pool, and he didn’t. I didn’t want to go in front of him, didn’t want to go above him and not be able to throw my line, so after waiting for ten minutes I began to look about for an alternative place to fish.

I spied a stretch across the river and down below us about three hundred yards.

“Is that on our stretch?” I said, pointing.

“That’s the end of her,” the guide said.

“Well, I’m going to wade across and fish there,” I said. “Is it any good?”

“Oh, ya get at her,” the guide said, grinning, not even trying to hide his disdain at my question.

I was starting to dislike him. I disliked him because he felt he was competent and we were not. But no one I’ve ever respected takes pride in lessening another man or woman because of their own capability, and I was awash in sympathy for my young friend from Calgary.

I crossed the river and made my way along the tangled sloping bank on the far side. Old growth woods loomed off to my left, and as I walked the bank became steeper and steeper, so that I ended up wading along the river to the stretch I had seen.

There was another canoe below me about four hundred yards, with two sports fishing from it, and my own guide sat in the stern of the canoe, waving at flies. I looked back, and my young acquaintance from Calgary had come out of the water and was offering him a beer. So with beers in hand they both stood by the canoe, drinking.

I went to the top of the water. It wasn’t half as good as the stretch I had left. The water was slow and dark. About twenty yards out from me there was a rock with another smaller rock just up to its right, and I felt that just between those rocks, on the far side, was the prime place for a fish to lay. I began working my way along to it, using a Green Butt Butterfly, because it seemed to me like butterfly country. On about the fifth or sixth cast, just before I reached the rocks, I had a
grilse on. At that position my back was slightly turned to my guide.

There was absolutely no place to beach the fish, unless I wanted to haul it right up the sheer bank on my left. The guide had the net. I waved at him, but he wasn’t looking my way. And so I played the fish. The grilse gave a run, and jumped twice, and looked like it had been in the river for a while. I turned and called out to the guide. No response. And then knowing the grilse was spent, I looked about for a place to beach it.

Up the sheer bank on my left was where I could go. I yelled to my guide again. No response again. But by this time, the canoe on the stretch below me was lifting anchor to come to my aid with a net.

At about this time my guide looked up, saw the bow in my line, and the grilse make another small leap, and frantically became interested in my position. He pushed the canoe out and began to pole downriver towards me, yelling, “Wait on it—wait on it.”

But I decided then and there I was going to gain or lose this fish without his support. So turning the grilse towards shore, and measuring how far up the bank I would be able to scamper without falling over backwards, up I went. The grilse came behind me. And I was able to drop my rod and pick it up, kill it. I was scraping the scales from it when my guide arrived.

The next morning I got a grilse early, on another stretch of water above the camp, but that was all that was taken when I was there. Our guide had changed radically. He kept asking if we needed anything, and it was never a bother to fish with people who knew what they were doing. I thought of the little grilse I had taken and wondered if they knew anything of what their lives played in what just went on.

ONE SUMMER, BACK IN
the early eighties, I fished mostly with Alvin Simms. He could no longer drive for his eyes were bad, and so I took him out.

We would go out early—sometimes getting on the river by five o’clock, me driving my old Suzuki Jeep. As June gave way to July we switched rivers, as July gave way to August we switched again, and each switch fulfilled a certain destiny for a certain number of fish.

Mr. Simms was a great caster, and always took more fish than I. He was as unconsciously a part of the river as any man
I have ever fished with. The best of it was, like all men I have fished with who are comfortable with themselves, he expected nothing from you.

Going down the Norwest in a canoe with him, he would pole to a dead still at the upper edge of a rapid, which would afford me time, at leisure to fish over a promising stretch or rock.

“There’s a fish there,” he whispered to me one morning, just below Stickney Pool, where the salmon always hold hard to the left bank before they enter Stickney itself. It is a deep leisurely part of the river between Stickney and the flat above Cedar Pool. I had often seen fish take here, and I believed him, but for the life of me, I couldn’t budge a fish or make one show. And by this time I had taken fish.

“Change flies,” he whispered urgently. “Put on that Bear Hair you have.” Which showed that even though his eyes were poor, just by a glance he knew the flies I had.

I did and I fished. Let my line follow the angle over the huge rocks beneath the run, watching the little blackfly move, waiting at every second with an anticipation that Mr. Simms had produced in me. The fly moved in the current towards the fish.

“Now,” he said.

And I tensed. But the fly moved across that clean water in the sun and wasn’t disturbed along the three-inch spot we were both watching.

“Ah,” he said, spitting, and holding the canoe fast with the pole. “Try ’er again, Davy. Jot yer fly over it, move it a little.”

I flubbed the cast. He waited. I began to get anxious. To jot my fly would be a new experience though I wasn’t skeptical that was what was needed. I brought the rod back, checked my leader, looked over at him.