A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

by Norman Maclean

  When we fished the canyon we fished on the same side of it for the simple reason that there is no place in the canyon to wade across. I could hear Paul start to pass me to get to the hole above, and, when I realized I didn’t hear him anymore, I knew he had stopped to watch me. Although I have never pretended to be a great fisherman, it was always important to me that I was a fisherman and looked like one, especially when fishing with my brother. Even before the silence continued, I knew that I wasn’t looking like much of anything.

  Although I have a warm personal feeling for the canyon, it is not an ideal place for me to fish. It puts a premium upon being able to cast for distance, and yet most of the time there are cliffs or trees right behind the fisherman so he has to keep all his line in front of him. It’s like a baseball pitcher being deprived of his windup, and it forces the fly fisherman into what is called a “roll cast,” a hard cast that I have never mastered. The fisherman has to work enough line into his cast to get distance without throwing any line behind him, and then he has to develop enough power from a short arc to shoot it out across the water.

  He starts accumulating the extra amount of line for the long cast by retrieving his last cast so slowly that an unusual amount of line stays in the water and what is out of it forms a slack semiloop. The loop is enlarged by raising the casting arm straight up and cocking the wrist until it points to 1:30. There, then, is a lot of line in front of the fisherman, but it takes about everything he has to get it high in the air and out over the water so that the fly and leader settle ahead of the line—the arm is a piston, the wrist is a revolver that uncocks, and even the body gets behind the punch. Important, too, is the fact that the extra amount of line remaining in the water until the last moment gives a semisolid bottom to the cast. It is a little like a rattlesnake striking, with a good piece of his tail on the ground as something to strike from. All this is easy for a rattlesnake, but has always been hard for me.

  Paul knew how I felt about my fishing and was careful not to seem superior by offering advice, but he had watched so long that he couldn’t leave now without saying something. Finally he said, “The fish are out farther.” Probably fearing he had put a strain on family relations, he quickly added, “Just a little farther.”

  I reeled in my line slowly, not looking behind so as not to see him. Maybe he was sorry he had spoken, but, having said what he said, he had to say something more. “Instead of retrieving the line straight toward you, bring it in on a diagonal from the downstream side. The diagonal will give you a more resistant base to your loop so you can put more power into your forward cast and get a little more distance.”

  Then he acted as if he hadn’t said anything and I acted as if I hadn’t heard it, but as soon as he left, which was immediately, I started retrieving my line on a diagonal, and it helped. The moment I felt I was getting a little more distance I ran for a fresh hole to make a fresh start in life.

  It was a beautiful stretch of water, either to a fisherman or a photographer, although each would have focused his equipment on a different point. It was a barely submerged waterfall. The reef of rock was about two feet under the water, so the whole river rose into one wave, shook itself into spray, then fell back on itself and turned blue. After it recovered from the shock, it came back to see how it had fallen.

  No fish could live out there where the river exploded into the colors and curves that would attract photographers. The fish were in that slow backwash, right in the dirty foam, with the dirt being one of the chief attractions. Part of the speckles would be pollen from pine trees, but most of the dirt was edible insect life that had not survived the waterfall.

  I studied the situation. Although maybe I had just added three feet to my roll cast, I still had to do a lot of thinking before casting to compensate for some of my other shortcomings. But I felt I had already made the right beginning—I had already figured out where the big fish would be and why.

  Then an odd thing happened. I saw him. A black back rose and sank in the foam. In fact, I imagined I saw spines on his dorsal fin until I said to myself, “God, he couldn’t be so big you could see his fins.” I even added, “You wouldn’t even have seen the fish in all that foam if you hadn’t first thought he would be there.” But I couldn’t shake the conviction that I had seen the black back of a big fish, because, as someone often forced to think, I know that often I would not see a thing unless I thought of it first.

  Seeing the fish that I first thought would be there led me to wondering which way he would be pointing in the river. “Remember, when you make the first cast,” I thought, “that you saw him in the backwash where the water is circling upstream, so he will be looking downstream, not upstream, as he would be if he were in the main current.”

  I was led by association to the question of what fly I would cast, and to the conclusion that it had better be a large fly, a number four or six, if I was going after the big hump in the foam.

  From the fly, I went to the other end of the cast, and asked myself where the hell I was going to cast from. There were only gigantic rocks at this waterfall, so I picked one of the biggest, saw how I could crawl up it, and knew from that added height I would get added distance, but then I had to ask myself, “How the hell am I going to land the fish if I hook him while I’m standing up there?” So I had to pick a smaller rock, which would shorten my distance but would let me slide down it with a rod in my hand and a big fish on.

  I was gradually approaching the question all river fishermen should ask before they make the first cast, “If I hook a big one, where the hell can I land him?”

  One great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing. It is also interesting that thoughts about fishing are often carried on in dialogue form where Hope and Fear—or, many times, two Fears—try to outweigh each other.

  One Fear looked down the shoreline and said to me (a third person distinct from the two fears), “There is nothing but rocks for thirty yards, but don’t get scared and try to land him before you get all the way down to the first sandbar.”

  The Second Fear said, “It’s forty, not thirty, yards to the first sandbar and the weather has been warm and the fish’s mouth will be soft and he will work off the hook if you try to fight him forty yards downriver. It’s not good but it will be best to try to land him on a rock that is closer.”

  The First Fear said, “There is a big rock in the river that you will have to take him past before you land him, but, if you hold the line tight enough on him to keep him this side of the rock, you will probably lose him.”

  The Second Fear said, “But if you let him get on the far side of the rock, the line will get caught under it, and you will be sure to lose him.”

  That’s how you know when you have thought too much—when you become a dialogue between You’ll probably lose and You’re sure to lose. But I didn’t entirely quit thinking, although I did switch subjects. It is not in the book, yet it is human enough to spend a moment before casting in trying to imagine what the fish is thinking, even if one of its eggs is as big as its brain and even if, when you swim underwater, it is hard to imagine that a fish has anything to think about. Still, I could never be talked into believing that all a fish knows is hunger and fear. I have tried to feel nothing but hunger and fear and don’t see how a fish could ever grow to six inches if that were all he ever felt. In fact, I go so far sometimes as to imagine that a fish thinks pretty thoughts. Before I made the cast, I imagined the fish with the black back lying cool in the carbonated water full of bubbles from the waterfalls. He was looking downriver and watching the foam with food in it backing upstream like a floating cafeteria coming to wait on its customers. And he probably was imagining that the speckled foam was eggnog with nutmeg sprinkled on it, and, when the whites of eggs separated and he saw what was on shore, he probably said to himself, “What a lucky son of a bitch I am that this guy and not his brother is about to fish this hole.”

  I though
t all these thoughts and some besides that proved of no value, and then I cast and I caught him.

  I kept cool until I tried to take the hook out of his mouth. He was lying covered with sand on the little bar where I had landed him. His gills opened with his penultimate sighs. Then suddenly he stood up on his head in the sand and hit me with his tail and the sand flew. Slowly at first my hands began to shake, and, although I thought they made a miserable sight, I couldn’t stop them. Finally, I managed to open the large blade to my knife which several times slid off his skull before it went through his brain.

  Even when I bent him he was way too long for my basket, so his tail stuck out.

  There were black spots on him that looked like crustaceans. He seemed oceanic, including barnacles. When I passed my brother at the next hole, I saw him study the tail and slowly remove his hat, and not out of respect to my prowess as a fisherman.

  I had a fish, so I sat down to watch a fisherman.

  He took his cigarettes and matches from his shirt pocket and put them in his hat and pulled his hat down tight so it wouldn’t leak. Then he unstrapped his fish basket and hung it on the edge of his shoulder where he could get rid of it quick should the water get too big for him. If he studied the situation he didn’t take any separate time to do it. He jumped off a rock into the swirl and swam for a chunk of cliff that had dropped into the river and parted it. He swam in his clothes with only his left arm—in his right hand, he held his rod high and sometimes all I could see was the basket and rod, and when the basket filled with water sometimes all I could see was the rod.

  The current smashed him into the chunk of cliff and it must have hurt, but he had enough strength remaining in his left fingers to hang to a crevice or he would have been swept into the blue below. Then he still had to climb to the top of the rock with his left fingers and his right elbow which he used like a prospector’s pick. When he finally stood on top, his clothes looked hydraulic, as if they were running off him.

  Once he quit wobbling, he shook himself duck-dog fashion, with his feet spread apart, his body lowered and his head flopping. Then he steadied himself and began to cast and the whole world turned to water.

  Below him was the multitudinous river, and, where the rock had parted it around him, big-grained vapor rose. The mini-molecules of water left in the wake of his line made momentary loops of gossamer, disappearing so rapidly in the rising big-grained vapor that they had to be retained in memory to be visualized as loops. The spray emanating from him was finer-grained still and enclosed him in a halo of himself. The halo of himself was always there and always disappearing, as if he were candlelight flickering about three inches from himself. The images of himself and his line kept disappearing into the rising vapors of the river, which continually circled to the tops of the cliffs where, after becoming a wreath in the wind, they became rays of the sun.

  The river above and below his rock was all big Rainbow water, and he would cast hard and low upstream, skimming the water with his fly but never letting it touch. Then he would pivot, reverse his line in a great oval above his head, and drive his line low and hard downstream, again skimming the water with his fly. He would complete this grand circle four or five times, creating an immensity of motion which culminated in nothing if you did not know, even if you could not see, that now somewhere out there a small fly was washing itself on a wave. Shockingly, immensity would return as the Big Blackfoot and the air above it became iridescent with the arched sides of a great Rainbow.

  He called this “shadow casting,” and frankly I don’t know whether to believe the theory behind it—that the fish are alerted by the shadows of flies passing over the water by the first casts, so hit the fly the moment it touches the water. It is more or less the “working up an appetite” theory, almost too fancy to be true, but then every fine fisherman has a few fancy stunts that work for him and for almost no one else. Shadow casting never worked for me, but maybe I never had the strength of arm and wrist to keep line circling over the water until fish imagined a hatch of flies was out.

  My brother’s wet clothes made it easy to see his strength. Most great casters I have known were big men over six feet, the added height certainly making it easier to get more line in the air in a bigger arc. My brother was only five feet ten, but he had fished so many years his body had become partly shaped by his casting. He was thirty-two now, at the height of his power, and he could put all his body and soul into a four-and-a-half-ounce magic totem pole. Long ago, he had gone far beyond my father’s wrist casting, although his right wrist was always so important that it had become larger than his left. His right arm, which our father had kept tied to the side to emphasize the wrist, shot out of his shirt as if it were engineered, and it, too, was larger than his left arm. His wet shirt bulged and came unbuttoned with his pivoting shoulders and hips. It was also not hard to see why he was a street fighter, especially since he was committed to getting in the first punch with his right hand.

  Rhythm was just as important as color and just as complicated. It was one rhythm superimposed upon another, our father’s four-count rhythm of the line and wrist being still the base rhythm. But superimposed upon it was the piston two count of his arm and the long overriding four count of the completed figure eight of his reversed loop.

  The canyon was glorified by rhythms and colors.

  I heard voices behind me, and a man and his wife came down the trail, each carrying a rod, but probably they weren’t going to do much fishing. Probably they intended nothing much more than to enjoy being out of doors with each other and, on the side, to pick enough huckleberries for a pie. In those days there was little in the way of rugged sports clothes for women, and she was a big, rugged woman and wore regular men’s bib overalls, and her motherly breasts bulged out of the bib. She was the first to see my brother pivoting on the top of his cliff. To her, he must have looked something like a trick rope artist at a rodeo, doing everything except jumping in and out of his loops.

  She kept watching while groping behind her to smooth out some pine needles to sit on. “My, my!” she said.

  Her husband stopped and stood and said, “Jesus.” Every now and then he said, “Jesus.” Each time his wife nodded. She was one of America’s mothers who never dream of using profanity themselves but enjoy their husbands’, and later come to need it, like cigar smoke.

  I started to make for the next hole. “Oh, no,” she said, “you’re going to wait, aren’t you, until he comes to shore so you can see his big fish?”

  “No,” I answered, “I’d rather remember the molecules.”

  She obviously thought I was crazy, so I added, “I’ll see his fish later.” And to make any sense for her I had to add, “He’s my brother.”

  As I kept going, the middle of my back told me that I was being viewed from the rear both as quite a guy, because I was his brother, and also as a little bit nutty, because I was molecular.

  Since our fish were big enough to deserve a few drinks and quite a bit of talk afterwards, we were late in getting back to Helena. On the way, Paul asked, “Why not stay overnight with me and go down to Wolf Creek in the morning?” He added that he himself had “to be out for the evening,” but would be back soon after midnight. I learned later it must have been around two o’clock in the morning when I heard the thing that was ringing, and I ascended through river mists and molecules until I awoke catching the telephone. The telephone had a voice in it, which asked, “Are you Paul’s brother?” I asked, “What’s wrong?” The voice said, “I want you to see him.” Thinking we had poor connections, I banged the phone. “Who are you?” I asked. He said, “I am the desk sergeant who wants you to see your brother.”

  The checkbook was still in my hand when I reached the jail. The desk sergeant frowned and said, “No, you don’t have to post bond for him. He covers the police beat and has friends here. All you have to do is look at him and take him home.”

  Then he added, “But he’ll have to come back. A guy is going to sue
him. Maybe two guys are.”

  Not wanting to see him without a notion of what I might see, I kept repeating, “What’s wrong?” When the desk sergeant thought it was time, he told me, “He hit a guy and the guy is missing a couple of teeth and is all cut up.” I asked, “What’s the second guy suing him for?” “For breaking dishes. Also a table,” the sergeant said. “The second guy owns the restaurant. The guy who got hit lit on one of the tables.”

  By now I was ready to see my brother, but it was becoming clear that the sergeant had called me to the station to have a talk. He said, “We’re picking him up too much lately. He’s drinking too much.” I had already heard more than I wanted. Maybe one of our ultimate troubles was that I never wanted to hear too much about my brother.

  The sergeant finished what he had to say by finally telling me what he really wanted to say, “Besides he’s behind in the big stud poker game at Hot Springs. It’s not healthy to be behind in the big game at Hot Springs.

  “You and your brother think you’re tough because you’re street fighters. At Hot Springs they don’t play any child games like fist fighting. At Hot Springs it’s the big stud poker game and all that goes with it.”

  I was confused from trying to rise suddenly from molecules of sleep to an understanding of what I did not want to understand. I said, “Let’s begin again. Why is he here and is he hurt?”

  The sergeant said, “He’s not hurt, just sick. He drinks too much. At Hot Springs, they don’t drink too much.” I said to the sergeant, “Let’s go on. Why is he here?”