Lines on the Water (7 page)

After supper the world takes on a different hue. It is suspended between light and darkness, and the evening becomes more and more still. Only the sound of the water over rocks, or trickling through the sweep of fallen branches, while the sunlight cools, the shadows moment by moment lengthen.

Then, just at dark, with the water entertaining a dozen variety of small hatches, David, using small nymph flies, number 12 or 14, would feel the pull on his line. He has a variety of flies he uses for trout, and I have used many of them in the last few years, on the Bartibog, Church, and Bay du Vin. Fishing trout this way is wonderful—perhaps, in memory, the finest fishing there is.

He would make his way out in the dark, back to his car, with four or five large trout, having fished the same spots others had fished two hours earlier with no luck.

I went back fishing with a few more flies. I felt I should have my own box of flies—to look professional.

Of course the only thing I couldn’t quite do at that moment was cast a fly-rod line. It seemed to be a difficult proposition for me. And it hampered my plans. I focused all my energy upon learning something that to others came so easily (or so I thought).

I could cast three or four yards all right, but anything beyond that I was in trouble. I knew where the fish might lie. I was in a quandary over how to get my fly to reach them. I spent long hours—and hours and hours—still learning this. To make matters worse, everyone told me that a six-year-old could cast three hundred yards or more—that it wasn’t strength,
it was simply dexterity. But that was the problem. I have always had strength—dexterity was my problem. And I was in dread that I would meet a six-year-old, and his five-year-old sister on the river who would show me up.

So I practised every chance I got.

The rod is another extension of imagination. The fish that takes hangs off it by the slender line and, much more slender leader, and bows it down like a springboard and, like a springboard it has a ton of force. The fly is cast, the movement of the arm is generally from ten o’clock to one o’clock, and the line rolls out and lays down. That is how fishermen describe it. To lay down a cast. A line that is cast at a forty-five-degree angle into the pool is the most proper, though people have variances. Some will determine it is better to cast straight out at an eighty- or ninety-degree angle, but the fly will not work half so well. The fly will move from that forty-five-degree angle along an arc until it stands slack in front of you. By this time the fisherman has stripped his line, has moved his position by a foot or two, and is ready to pick up again. The fly raises in the air, the cast is lain down again and, in this way, the water is covered. No matter where you think the fish might or might not be, it is better to work your fly towards it. Even the minutest water missed can miss a fish. I discovered this one day fishing with a friend. On a certain stretch I thought I had
covered the water fairly well. But my friend watched, borrowed my rod, went out and placed the fly exactly in an area no more than a few square inches I had missed. As soon as his fly touched I knew he would take a fish.

When the fish takes, you allow the rod to work. You hold your rod up until the fish jumps and then lower it, so as to take strain off the leader. You let the fish have its way until it is tired and slowly work it towards you, while backing into shore. Most people beach their fish on the Miramichi, and net them on the Restigouche. When a fish is beached the person will back up onto a shore, bringing the spent fish with him. But I’ve seen people—generally Nova Scotians—turn around and run to shore with the rod over their shoulder. The first time I saw someone do this, on the Renous, I thought they had gone mad with excitement.

But in learning how to use the rod I became aware of another side to fishing. There are those who have a degree of snobbishness about them and their fishing ability and judge you accordingly. This snobbishness can cross all class and cultural lines, but it is instantly aggravating when you run into it as a novice. If you meet it as a young fisherman, it can ruin a good day or a good season. The best thing is to try not to let it bother you. When I ran into it the first few years it was most often from people who themselves were worried about
belonging
in the world in some more exclusive way than you. An immaculate fisherman, a jurisprudent fisherman, a judgemental fisherman is somehow in some way an elitist and close-minded fisherman.

But my fishing life doesn’t belong to them, and my stories, for the most part, are not about them.

WHEN HE WAS YOUNG
, and had a young family to support, Peter McGrath, one July day, decided that the only way to know those branches of the great river was to walk them. To become, in a certain way, a part of them.

His determination was intensified by the fact that he did not have a canoe or a truck to travel in at that time. He had a car, and worked shift work, so he could only get to the river every so often.

When he was little he pleaded with his mother to take him hunting and fishing, because his father could not stand to
hunt, to see anything hurt, and never fished. Peter once told me this story about himself as a little boy.

“One autumn afternoon we were up on the Renous highway,” he told me. “My dad and mom and I were driving along. It was a Monday, and about four in the afternoon. We came around a turn, and a large buck was standing off on the side of the road. Dad had his rifle with him, and pulled the car over.

“There it is, Dad,” he said. “Shoot it.”

His father got out of the car, took the rifle from the back seat, put the shell in the chamber, and stood there. But he could really never bring himself to kill anything.

“Shoot it,” Peter pleaded.

He lifted the rifle, aimed, and then looked back at his son.

“Shoot it,” Peter said.

“I can’t,” his father said, almost apologetically.

“What do you mean you can’t?” Peter whispered. “What do you mean,
can’t
. There is no such thing as can’t. Could shoot—could shoot,” Peter insisted.

“I just can’t,” his father maintained. “I don’t want to kill it.”

Peter was in the car. All his friends’ dads were getting deer, and coming home and bragging.

“Can’t, can’t—what do you mean? There’s no such thing as can’t. Shoot, shoot, shoot.” Peter bounced up and down on the seat.

“No, I can’t.”

“Shoot it, Mom,” Peter said.

“Do you want to shoot it?” his father asked his mother.

“Of course she does. Shoot it, Mom, shoot, for God’s sake.”

But before his father could pass the rifle over to his mother, the deer turned and hightailed it across the road, and without a sound it was gone.

“Well, there it goes,” his father said. “It’s gone now—good luck to it.”

“What do you mean, ‘good luck to
it.’ ”

Peter told me that he knew his father was not going to be his inspiration as far as hunting and fishing went, so he began to hang out with his mother. She took him out fishing in the spring, and waded the brooks with him, and when Peter got a bit older she would drive him along the dirt roads as he hunted partridge. They would go along the road, in November, after a snowfall. It would be brilliantly cold at three in the afternoon and soon Peter would begin searching the trees.

“Stop”—and his mother would pull the car over. He would walk into the birches with his shotgun and come out a while later with a bird or two, and they would proceed on their way.

He became very good at doing this. He can spot a deer in
a chop-down quicker than anyone I know, or a salmon in a pool. It is as if he has a sixth sense about him.

One July, just after high school, he was on the south branch of the Sevogle for a fish, at Clearwater Pool. It was one of the few pools that he could drive to with his car. He had an old Hardy rod and reel, and a tapered leader to which he had attached a ten-pound test. I do not know if he still uses a tapered leader, but he did for years. Some friends of mine call tapered line a leftover from the years of gentleman trout fishing, but others swear by it, saying your fly will look more natural and move much better, and that your line lays out in a proper fashion. Besides this, it is easier to change a small leader if you get a knot or crimp when you have a tapered that stays on your main line.

This was the age when Peter began to fish bug—and now he has the best assortment of bugs of any man I know. They come in every size but they are slim and fast, usually with a little longer shank, tied back, for low water. He sometimes will use another fly, like a gull attracted to something bright, but not often—just as my friend David, from the Bartibog, will use almost anything
but
a bug.

Peter parked his car that long-ago day, took his Hardy rod and reel. He never bothered with his waders. He put on his
vest and his Polaroid glasses, tied on a bug with brown hackle, and went down through Clearwater Pool, which had a bridge over it. The bridge is gone now, and so is the warden’s camp that used to be there. I guess they were burnt. Clearwater is a nice, quiet pool that should hold fish, and though I’ve seen a fish or two taken from it, and hooked and landed fish there myself, it never seems as productive as it should be.

Peter didn’t see anything at Clearwater that day either. And he was thinking that he would drive back around to Mullin Stream Bridge and walk from there into the Narrows Pool on the south branch of the Sevogle to fish—a good thirty-five-minute walk. But then with a spontaneity he has always had, he decided to walk the river.

“If I want to know where the pools are, then I must walk it.”

And so he began an eight-mile journey on a river he had never been on before, with no one knowing where he was, to find pools he had never fished, sensing only that somewhere off to his right, over the great rugged hills of deep wood spruce, was an old logging road that would, if he could find it, lead him back to his car after dark. I suppose in a truly elemental way that day, years ago, was to become his baptism of fire.

It was a long walk, hugging one side of the river or the other, hanging on to branches to keep his balance, watching for sudden dips and pockets which would make him lose his
balance. And after he got down about a mile he began to discover that this might not have been such a wise idea. It was like wading a part of the Amazon. Fishing was slow, and the water was low. The river, which empties into the big Sevogle, which in turn meets the Norwest Miramichi, is a very slippery one, so it’s entirely possible to sprain or break an ankle from the rocks on the river or the hidden holes on the paths. And if you do this alone, miles from anywhere, you are in trouble. Especially when no one knows where you’ve gone to or where you are. And this was the situation he found himself in. Besides this, this baptism of fire—this elemental journey contains the blackfly and mosquito, bedded down and hatched by swamp ground on either side.

July is the best time for fishing the south branch, but that day he had yet to see a fish.

He walked down past the rough water of Simpson’s Pool, down by Allie’s Pool below it, and the river trailed away, spined and dotted by rocks, and interspersed with swift currents and small pockets, being swept by wind and bursts of rain. He got further down to a nice pool we were to call “Disappointment Pool” in the years to come, and continued on, past a large dead-water pool on his right, called “the Salmon Hole,” where he was to take a beautiful salmon one day a few years later.

On the Sevogle the wind comes up suddenly and can interrupt or even ruin a good day, because you have a problem with casting and the fish don’t want to take. A windy day for trout, Hemingway said, is a good day. As true as that might be, I don’t know where the hell he was fishing. On the Miramichi the wind generally comes up some time about one in the afternoon, and might stay until evening, with the high banks on either side of these many fertile rivers acting as a wind tunnel.

Of all the rivers I have walked, and I have walked a good many, the south branch of the Sevogle is the worst. The river is spined with rocks, slippery and sharp, the bottom is uneven, flies are everywhere, and at certain places it’s hard to keep your footing. Off on either side the footpaths are swallowed in thick branches and hidden holes. Off in the woods the ground is boggy and replete with mosquitoes.

It is a beautiful river, a habitat for moose and deer and bear, a picturesque place of startling grandeur and privacy, far away from man. It is where I have fished whole afternoons without seeing another soul, and brought fish back to our solitary camp at night. Very few rivers afford this.

About halfway on his journey down to Island Pool the day had cleared, and Peter was in a better mood. He had walked off his anxiety and was feeling in good shape. He relaxed a moment, studied the pool, and decided to give it a try.

Island Pool, he discovered, was not going to be an easy pool to fish because there was an undertow, where the small peninsula of land juts towards the right shore, and he found that at first his line just dragged in a swirling undertow. He then decided it was best to fish from the left bank because it was hard to work a fly on the right. But from that angle he knew he would miss what he thought was the hot spot in the deep agitated water at the top of the pool.

Still he went to the left and threw his fly towards the bottom of the pool, not thinking he would have any luck. This was an age ago now, and he was just beginning to know about where the fish might or might not lay. He was alone on the river, with miles more to go. On either side spruce and cedar ran up into high hills, which dwarfed him.

His fly—a bug with brown hackle—moved quickly, skimming the top of the water. But it skimmed the surface where the best part of the pool ended and flattened out into what seemed a dead shallow. He didn’t think he was giving himself much of a chance at this pool and was looking downriver as he stripped his line, picked it up, and cast once more. You don’t need a long line here, and he was just dabbing the water.