Lines on the Water (14 page)

I was addicted to Red Man plug, Copenhagen snuff, cigars, and cigarettes. I believed I couldn’t catch a fish without a chew of plug in. I would quit during the winter, but the first moment I saw the river begin to open I would look at my rod, reels, flies, and vest, check my waders for holes, and go out and buy some Red Man loose-leaf or plug. Then I would spit for five months.

If I was called away to a meeting in Toronto, I was in a terrible state. I would sit in an office, and mumble, “ ’Scuse me—I got to spit.”

I was never comfortable without it, and certainly not comfortable with it between my jaws in an office on the ninth floor of a publishing house. I made serious heroic attempts to quit each summer, and every time I did my mind wandered, and my fishing got lousy.

But all superstitions are validated by the superstitious. I believed I could not get a fish without a chew of plug. This started my first year fishing, and has remained with me ever since. And since I have a problem with tobacco—I started to smoke when I was three—I have a hard time letting go.

A man will wear a certain hat, another a certain kind of boot. Others will make sure they go to Mass before they go fishing or as soon as they get home.

Over time it becomes as essential to them as the water they intend to fish. Or they will take one path through the woods to a pool instead of another:

“If I go down that path I won’t get fish,” they will rationalize, because of some remote occurrence in their past, and it all seems logical and highly probable to them. I know a dozen fishermen like this.

Peter used to make sacrifices to the water. Perhaps he still does. Only little ones. Not a goat or a herd of sheep. But a pack of cigarettes. And he would shake his head at me if I didn’t. To him I was blasphemous.

People, myself included, have to have certain things on them to feel that they will have luck. An old fly they never used any longer, or a certain buck knife. For me it was a pair of clippers I wore around my neck on a brown shoestring.

One night, the previous season, I had fished Doug Underhill’s camp pool on the Renous with an older man named Simon, coming out on the other side of the river to fish his productive run below Simon’s rock. There were other people on the river as well. Jim McQuaid who owns the camp with Doug and others had taken fish. At the lower part of the run, gone orange in the late sunlight, I had a hit. I fished over this fish for a while, and looking back saw that Underhill had hooked a grilse halfway down the pool. I stepped down, and reeled in my line. A man at the camp above came down to ask if he might borrow my clippers.

I handed them over and forgot to get them back.

The next spring as I was checking things over I couldn’t find them. I had had them for eleven years. I went from place to place in the house, feeling generally miserable.

“What’s wrong?” my wife asked.

“I can’t find my fingernail clippers,” I said.

“Well, why don’t you just take a pair of mine?”

But I could never get comfortable with a new pair.

A few weeks after I ran the river to get fiddleheads, my brother John decided to run the river with me.

We took my canoe and put in at Miner’s Bridge. It was a warm day in late June. And lots of people were running the river. So all of the pools would be well fished or paddled through by the time we got to them.

I had a pair of my wife’s fingernail clippers in my vest and away we went.

I fished Ledge Pool and then the little run where I hooked a grilse beside the rock that first year, the one that made a leap and split my fly.

When we got to Dr. Wilson’s I was being bitten very badly by flies. The sun was warm, and I took off my waders and went into the water in jeans. The water wasn’t that cool. And besides, I feel that once your legs go numb you’re halfway home.

I began to fish down through the pool. There is a small rock just out from shore once you get past the deeper boulders in the middle of the pool, where I have hooked half a dozen fish. But by the time I got down to it, I felt out of sorts.

I came into shore and asked John for some fly dope. I was bitten on the face and neck and hands.

“You’ve got to eat,” John said.

I took the Deep Woods Off and poured it over my wounds, got into the bow of the canoe, and away we went. The day was clear and warm and the water was the right level to run a canoe fairly easily.

I shook my head, had a drink of coffee, but I felt miserable when we came to Stickney Pool.

The water was high enough that I couldn’t see one of the boulders just jutting above the water when we came into the pool. The canoe ground on it, and John jabbed his paddle down and backed the canoe up before it turned sideways in the rapid.

“David, you should have seen that,” John said.

I didn’t reply because I felt my throat was swelling up.

“Aren’t you going to fish here?” he said.

“Let’s just keep going.”

Nor did I fish the long productive stretch below it.

So we reached Cedar Pool a little while later.

John and I came in on the beach, and watched a few canoes pass down ahead of us. Now I felt very warm and took off my shirt.

I walked back and forth on the beach trying to get some
air and a man came in from the pool and looked at me.

“What happened to you?”

My body was covered in red welts and my legs were starting to give.

“Let’s go,” John said.

When we got to the nice little run below Cedar there was a rock in the centre of the river. I paddled the canoe right into it without seeing it. I couldn’t see anything at the moment. Three men we knew were fishing that run and they were a little upset, to say the least. I never cared for them very much anyway, and John had had a run in with one before, so it wasn’t much to start an argument.

“Learn how to run a canoe,” one of them said. “I thought I was bad.”

John jumped to my defence.

“You are bad,” he said, standing in the canoe. “You are about as bad as they come. Come over here and I’ll show you how bad you are!”

And then he got out and pulled the canoe away. Now I couldn’t see and couldn’t breathe. My right hand was swelled like a pumpkin, and I kept splashing water on my face.

“The bugs finally got ya,” John said.

Well, the bugs finally did get me or as I now suspect the deet in the fly dope. I could only breathe every little while, with
my throat swelling. I put the paddle away and let John handle the canoe from then on.

When we got to Peter’s camp an hour later, he was fishing his pool, and actually had a salmon on.

“You look like death warmed over,” he said when he saw me. I told him I was bitten by a bug.

“A bug,” he said. “Not a bear, a moose, a mouse—not even a turtle—a bug.”

I reminded him succinctly that Alexander the Great died of a mosquito bite, so it must be an honourable demise.

We got to his truck and headed to the hospital, with my head out the window trying to get air. Peter was glancing over at me and thinking up a storm.

“What we’ll have to get you—I guess—is a giant bubble,” Peter said. “You can bubble yourself up, and bob downriver. You’ll be the bubble boy of the Miramichi. I can make you a bubble at work if you want. It’s no problem. We’ll have those accordion-like arms, with giant rubber gloves, so you can cast, and I’ll put duck feet on the bottom so you can walk.”

When I got to the hospital the doctor cavalierly said, “Oh you just had a reaction. People usually live through the first one, but I’m going to give you a prescription for an adrenaline needle. Keep it on you in the woods, because the next reaction might be deadly.”

I have taken the needle into the woods with me. But I still don’t use fly dope. And though a nurse said to me, “You just never know what they’re putting in a bug nowadays,” I still have a feeling it was the deet.

I couldn’t get going that summer, though I spent more time on the water with the canoe than I ever did before. That reaction seemed to sap strength from me and often I was exhausted when I got to the river.

One day that summer Peter watched me fish down through Black’s Pool. I thought I had covered the water okay, and my line seemed to be working well. I worked my way down carefully, certain I had covered the stretch. But when I came in, Peter said, “Give me your rod a second—”

He walked above me and crossed the river, with his head down, as it usually was, looking into the water. Then he took my rod, waved the bug back and forth above his head to dry it out, and cast into a small run I had missed.

As soon as his fly touched I knew he was going to hook a salmon, and he did.

In the end it was all because I had lost my nail clippers with the brown shoestring.

When Peggy came up to join me on the river one day, Peter took pity upon me and gave me one of his fish.

“Here—never mind. Barbecue this for Peg,” he said.

A friend of his teased me, saying, “God, have you stooped to this degree? Do you have to get Peter to get yer fish for Peg?”

That was enough.

“I’ll pay you back tomorrow,” I said as I left the camp.

I went home and barbecued the fish for Peggy and her mother, set the clock for five in the morning. Then I got up and took Roo in the truck with me and headed for the Norwest. I had the key for Stickney road, and drove into Wilson’s Pool. Then Roo and I walked down to Stickney.

We walked down to the run above Cedar, and I fished Cedar Pool.

Then we walked back to the truck and had lunch. The day was warm and cloudless. I watched the pool above as I ate. This was the first year in ten years I had not taken a fish from Wilson’s Pool. I knew my fly crossed the nose of many fish that day alone. But I was, in the parlance of Hemingway, the worst kind of unlucky.

I drove around to the run above Hawthorn’s. After I fished there I went to Black’s large pool. I fished Black’s for an hour. It is a great pool to fish, but I often found it was deceptively
too
good. That is, more people seem to fish it than get fish from it. Perhaps it is because you are uncertain where
fish are because you can look upon it as being a pool in three sections.

I left and drove all the way around again, and fished the Turnip Patch Pool, especially the lower end where fish had been taken earlier. Turnip Patch always seemed an unpleasant stretch to fish, though it is productive. You hug close to the right bank coming down, and have to be aware of your back cast, unless you’re left handed. Your line moves too fast in the rough water and your fly can get dragged behind it. But the lower part is fine, and you can work your line better.

Then I went into the Miner’s camp pool. That was the day Roo wouldn’t allow the Americans, who had come to fish from Maine, to come near it. She was trying to protect me, I think. I put Roo in the truck, put in some plug, and went down it twice.

Then I went to Allison’s and fished. A herd of people were there. They had been chasing the fish back down with their boots. The theory being that fish would get so frustrated that they’d finally take.

I then thought of Caul’s Pool above the Miner’s Bridge. So away I went.

Roo and I walked into Caul’s. It was almost deserted. An Indian man was fly-fishing there alone.

“Anything?” I asked.

“A few were taken this morning, but it’s pretty slow,” he said.

But I gave it a try. Then we left.

“Where else can we go, Roo?” I said.

Roo didn’t comment but just stared out the window, ignoring me. She was mad because I’d put her in the truck. So I gave her part of my last bologna sandwich, and poured a little Pepsi in my hat for her to slurp.

“Have a slurp of Pepsi, Roo,” I said. “Lick about the fly dope.”

There was only one place left. I went, tail between Roo’s legs, to Peter’s camp pool at eight that evening.

Peter was finishing supper dishes. His camp is so spotless it looks like a museum. The great moose rack that I took from the thousand-pound bull is there, along with stuffed birds, pictures of salmon and deer. It is such an immaculate camp that you could eat off the floor; if a blind is a quarter of a centimetre from being perfectly straight, Peter will work an hour to get it just so. He owns his camp with Les Druet who is even a better woodsman than he is.

“Are you going down to the pool?” I asked.

“Most definitely,” he said.

And we started out with Roo and George trailing behind
us. Peter took the lower part of the pool and I went to the very top, about two hundred yards from him. I took off my bug and put on a small Green Butt Butterfly, with white wings that seemed as soft as fairy dust.

Roo and George were behind us running about in the woods. And I started along. The water at the upper end of the pool is flat and flows deep below Portage River, and now looked dark and full, because night was coming on. There is a rock in the middle of this run, and a set of smaller rocks further out and down. It is a meandering part of the river, butterfly country—no doubt about it.

I was throwing my line towards the far rocks, and letting the fly move along in the slow darkening current. Far above me an osprey circled, and above the pool a poor little doe gone crazy with night flies swam across the river into the woods, and came out ten minutes later below Peter and swam across the river again.

“Poor damn thing,” Peter yelled out to me. I nodded and cast again, let my fly cover the water, stripped my line and began to bring it back, when I felt a hard pull.

“That’s a trout,” Peter, who was still turned towards me, said.

“No—it didn’t take like a trout—it’s a grilse,” I said.

“It’s not acting like a grilse.”

“That’s because its swimming right towards me,” I said.

I reeled in as much line as I could before the grilse started to jump. Then Peter walked up the shore, and I made my way to the beach.

I brought the fish in, killed it, tagged it, before Peter got to me. The day was growing dark. The osprey had gone home.

“Here you go,” I said, handing the fish to him, looking at the red sky with the sun gone down.

I’d had about ten minutes to spare.