Lines on the Water (16 page)

But in a sense, if you wish to get technical, we all play-act not only in fishing or hunting, but in our entire lives.

I have not bought a poached salmon in my life. Though I know many who do poach them up on the pools at night—some of the very pools I have gone fishing in during the day. I have sat and drank with poachers, and their arguments are often the same. It is their right to do so, because the law favours others—rich sportsmen or native Indians. Also there is the idea that they do not hurt the river more than anyone else. That to me is a particularly self-seeking rationalization. But still, their excuse is not without foundation, that they were the ones left out of the draw.

Of course there were always poachers like my friend Henry. But for the sake of discussion, let’s give it a starting point. Let’s say that it goes as far back as the Black Law of 1723. This was when the middle class was starting to rise, and being very protective about their little piece of the pie. A law was passed to protect them from poachers who in the previous centuries would be able to take a deer or two, or a fish or two, from the master’s land or ponds without commotion. It changed with the arrival of the liberalized gentry, who did not see this with such favour. So men poaching (the Black Law was so called
because these men would camouflage themselves in black faces) were not only fined and jailed, but hanged as well.

And those who poached challenged this law very bravely, with their lives, because to them some fundamental principle of fair play was at stake: All the game should not be for gentlemen when my child is starving at home.

Though there is now less starvation and almost no gentlemen, the contest between these two groups is still an ongoing one. I see it on every river I fish, and every time an animal falls from a poacher’s rifle. The rules are still the same as well, as too is the deceit and the accusations of one group or the other.

It is only the animals that suffer. The animals become a commodity, or a political flashpoint. And once something becomes a commodity, or a political weapon, there is no end of nefarious backbiting and greed involved.

To me there is nothing worse than seeing a fish fight a jig hook. It is a three-pronged barb a person will put on the end of their line and toss into a pool where fish are lying, and then jig the barb upwards to catch the fish under the belly or along the back. You can tell when a fish is on a jig because of how crazily they run in the water. It demeans fishing in a way few other things do.

Laws do not work if a white poacher believes in his mind that Indians have a certain favouritism because of who they are.

Certainly the fish, the salmon, becomes the fodder. Like most other political weapons, the real reason why it is used becomes in the end obscured and demeaned.

The Miramichi can become a war zone in the summer. A war zone over the great fish who have no idea of the part they play. Sometimes the war is just a few skirmishes with disgruntled fishermen. On other times it is an all-out confrontation between whites and Indians, the federal Fishery Department, and the RCMP.

But so many of the poachers I know believe rightly or wrongly (and all of them have a case) that the laws were made by and for the king’s men, and not for them. So I return to the Black Law of 1723. They believe they are the ones left out of the equation. And so too were their fathers and grandfathers and his father before him. And if we look closely at this, it usually has some validity. To a poacher, the salmon or moose becomes a political weapon in a battle with other human beings, who have no other political weapons left to use. In all cases it is the salmon that suffer. Any other view is hauling the wool over our own eyes.

The sports fisherman or woman must know they play a part in this, and sometimes there is resentment towards them, because they are looked upon with a special favour. The government wishes to attract them to the river with the ideas of
pristine wilderness and abundant game. And many of the places on the river are out of reach, for one reason or another, to the average person living on it.

Society is usually unfair and the warden becomes seen as the arbitrator of unfairness, a parcelled-out unfairness, that deems certain people more acceptable in certain areas on the water than others. The law will always favour some more than others.

So a few fish are taken, or a few too many fish, or a few deer or moose out of season. These things always have a tendency to escalate. And then it becomes a game within a game of which poacher can outwit the other.

Also I should mention that I have seen the grandeur of some of the camps that others have never gotten to, and have listened at times to the ribald idiocy of wealthy or privileged people, who could fish in pools which those I have loved could never come near to. Then you think of the British commoner and what he must think of the blood sporting of the nobility.

One camp I stayed in had flourished in the age of the king’s men, in the age of princes and princelings who had grown up on the fox hunt and had brought their trophies over to Canada as a testament to their privilege. The heads of water buffalo and the skins of lions, the hand of a gorilla as an ashtray and the foot of an elephant for a garbage can.

There was no way we could fish near those pools that their successors did, unless we were invited in for half an afternoon. When one time a friend of mine and I were invited there, he was like a child.

“My God,” he said. “The water—have you ever seen such beauty in the water.”

“I want to show you where the fish are,” the guide said. My friend looked over the water, squinting his eyes.

“Oh, I know where the fish are,” he said. And went out and hooked two that morning.

The people who had been there just before we arrived had flown in their private jet to New York for brunch. My friend had yet to be in a plane.

Such are the monumental gaps in the fishing life that the New Brunswick infomercials about conservation never seem to get.

That year, the year I fished on the Bartibog with Peg, I went hunting along the Fundy coast. I came across, at different times, two small graveyards of Irish immigrants who had died during the hard winters of the 1850s.

They were buried and their communities disappeared, and they were left for eternity to themselves. One day I came across Mary and Jacob Kelly, lying alone in the middle of nowhere, having died in 1858.

One night, just at dark, after waiting on deer in the snow well beyond the road towards the craggy shore of Fundy Bay, I made my way back to the truck, and came across Mary McGregor’s family. Her children and she were there, under a granite stone, and a pair of angel’s wings covered with moss. I stopped to look at the writing and heard the far-off rattle of a buck.

I made my way back out to the truck in the dark, and the next morning went in early. Just at dawn I walked down to the shore where the deer had been moving. The bay was frothy and cold, the swells calm and deceptive. It is a huge bay, terrible for its cold and rich in sea life. Hardly a fisherman from the shore of Fundy who goes to fish knows how to swim, although they walk back and forth on eight-inch gunnels from bow to stern. What would be the point in knowing how to swim when the temperature of the water would take you under in two or three minutes?

I made my way through the woods and sat down to wait. The day, except for a visit from an occasional moose bird and the chatter of a squirrel, was lonely and quiet.

At quarter to five that night a huge deer stepped out of the thicket of spruce just below me.

I was to lose that deer not by a poor shot but because the wardens decided I didn’t have the proper tags. I don’t think I’ve ever been
more
infuriated with authority in my life.

Although they gave the deer back later—took the hide off and cut the meat for me, because it was their mistake—it ruined the deer season, and what I had gone through to get it. It was the first and only time I thought seriously of poaching a deer. I got up one morning at five o’clock and drove along the back road between Sussex and Saint Martin. There, just at daybreak, I saw a little four-point buck standing in the ditch in front of my headlights.

Well, I couldn’t do it. I put the clip away and went home.

Although I was not going to hunt again the next year, the second last week of the season I took my rifle and drove north. Spurred by the idea that I would have a good hunt, and that I would get a buck, and that there would be no mix-up in my credentials. I hunted for two days and on the third the snow started to fall.

That third day I saw one deer but couldn’t get a shot at it. I don’t know if it was a small buck or a doe. But going in towards the beaver dam I saw the scrape of a very large buck, which I couldn’t have missed by more than fifteen minutes.

I waited until dark but the snowstorm was getting very bad, and I drove out to my father’s house. I started to pack, to leave for Saint John the next morning. Then I thought that I would give it one more chance. It would be the last chance I would have to hunt.

So I set the clock and got into bed.

When I woke I heard my father shouting out to me: “You can’t go hunting in this.”

I looked out the window and it was almost blizzard conditions.

“I’ll give it a try,” I said.

I started off in my four-wheel drive, my windshield wipers slapping away, and rubbing the fog from the window every few minutes. I parked the truck on the side road I wanted, and everything was getting worse. I took my rifle and walked the mile or so into the small backfield where the buck had been crossing. The trees were waving and wind was howling. Halfway into the field I saw the buck’s shoe-size slur of tracks on the road. I went up to the place I had stood for most of the hunt and waited.

But it was impossible. Even if he was circling towards me, I would be frozen by the time he got there. My teeth were chattering and my fingers were swollen numb.

“Dammit,” I said, after an hour, and I put my rifle over my shoulder and started towards the truck. I had not gone twenty yards when the big buck stepped out in front of me and stood still.

I had a long way to go with the deer, and it was a hard pull. So I went back to the truck to get some rope, and then decided
to give Peter a call. He came with a friend and helped me bring it out, a nine-point buck, 220 pounds. It was the last time I seriously hunted. And it is not that important to me if I ever hunt again.

THE NEXT YEAR I WAS
on the river early. I went black salmon fishing for the first time, which is fun, but I can’t get too excited about it. They are salmon that have wintered up under the ice and are backing out into the bay. They are voracious and skinny and not very great fighters, although they are certainly well worth fishing. Some people used to do all their fishing in the black salmon season and fillet the fish to fry them. But I would far rather fish the bright lads coming in.

It was now my eighteenth year fishing and I had learned much. I still have much to learn, but I knew when the fish
would take. I knew what pools to fish and when to fish them and I was no longer subject to worry about whether I could get fish or not. I had done it.

I have fished with some excellent casters——Wayne Curtis, and his sons, Jason and Jeff—and realize that success depends a good deal on consistency to throw a line in the right way and right measure cast after cast.

I had some fun times learning this. I used to try and expend too much line, and cast well beyond the fish, or for the life of me I couldn’t
get
to the fish.

But it is all in the presentation and the fly. You have to know which fly to use, in high water, in low, and all the levels in between. On a bright or cloudy day, you usually adjust to the colour around you.

Yet at times a big fly works in very low warm water.

One day at a pool on the Norwest with my wife’s uncle, Bill Savage, we had fished every fly we could. It was in the middle of July and we had walked in a long way. By midday it was very warm. The sun was hot and high, the water was low. Both of us had been through three pools about five times, and we were tired of moving back and forth. Each pool was separated by flat water a quarter mile apart, and each pool was now dead and warm—and there wasn’t another fisherman on the river.

By that time, with the walk in, and the fishing, we had
covered about eight or nine miles. I lay on the rocks of the shore with my waders in the water.

My wife’s uncle pointed just below the rocks towards the middle of the pool.

“There’s fish there,” he said.

He rummaged about his fly box and took out a fly—a large Mickey Finn streamer that he used for black salmon fishing in April.

“What in hell are you after—marlin?”

“We’ll see—I’m goin’ big.”

“Come big or stay home,” I said shaking my head.

He tied on his Mickey Finn. Then he walked out. He started at the top of the pool and worked his way along. When his fly reached my side of the rock and just started to make its arc, into the run that widened out into the larger part of the pool, I saw a splash and his line tighten.

“Here it is,” he said matter-of-factly, looking over at me, as if he knew all along that this would happen. I heard the singing of the reel, and stood to get a look at the fish.

I could not believe it. The grilse took a run and jumped. It was well hooked, and not accidentally jigged by the tail as I thought might have happened. My wife’s uncle looked carefully at it as it jumped the second time, and then he began to work it towards shore.

The fly I dislike the most which I have gotten fish on is the Green Machine, a green bug with a light-brown hackle. I have talked to the three fishermen I respect the most and all of them admit to the same aversion. They hate it but they keep it in their box because they know it is productive. This is a strange anomaly within a fisherman’s life. For if you dislike a fly, you’ll rarely take a fish on it.

The one fly I do love is a stiff-winged butterfly with a green butt. A fairly common fly to be sure, but a great fly to work a pool with. I love a Silver Doctor as well, and any fly with some silver on the body is bound to attract my attention, even if it doesn’t attract the fish.