Lines on the Water

by David Adams Richards

  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 r
adically. 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.

  Eight

  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.

  “Try ’er again, she’s there.” He whispered in the urgent way a guide does early in the morning. The sun warmed his old sweater and touched the peak of his cap. His face, looking at the water, was as captivated as a child’s.

  I threw a better cast this time at forty-five degrees above the fish. The fly would come right over its nose, I felt. The line went out, and the fly floated down and touched the current. My fly began to arc. I watched it. There is a point when you know the fish must take—right NOW. I tried to jot it as Mr. Simms asked. But all I managed to do was make a ripple. The fly went past that point by a centimetre, then two, then a foot, then two.

  “Must be me,” I said.

  “Try ’er again,” he said. There was not a breeze in the air, no other fisherman in sight. Only the sound of the rapid above us and the occasional knock of the pole against the gunnel of the canoe.

  I tried twice more. Both times we waited, watched the fly skirt over the hidden rock, move away from the dark spot on the rock’s far side we were both watching in anticipation.

  “Give ’er here,” he said.

  I handed the rod to him. He braced the pole, took the rod in the other hand, holding the canoe fast in the water, and threw the line. It went towards the rock. He moved his wrist back and forth, the line trembled, the fly looked like it was jumping up and down on the water. The fly dotted along for a second, two seconds, three—bang. The rod bowed, the line began to zing from the pull of a young salmon.

  “Here you go,” he said. “I’ll pole it in.”

  I might say that sometimes that works and a lot of times it doesn’t. In fact, I watched him try it again a few times after this with no success at all. The truth remains, if a fish is going to take, it will take.

  As we sat on the shore, he made up tea with seven bags in a two-cup pot, stirring it with a stick. And then later we poled back into the rapids and moved downriver.

  He was growing old, and the world was changing. He was well over sixty that summer. He had an old camp, with an old flat-iron stove and three cots. He had a pin-up picture of a young woman selling lubricant from the late fifties, dressed in Levi’s shorts and a halter top. He had some rods on the walls, a trophy or two, his diary. If he was there when you went to his camp, the door was always opened. No one bothered him. He would walk over the hill to his own little stretch and fish. It wasn’t a great pool, but like so many home pools, once a person became familiar with it, knew where the fish were and had some luck, it became a place to invest their time. And he knew his old pool very well.

  The problem was, that year he was told by people from away that he no longer could fish it. They put up a sign near the water, and met him on the shore three times to tell him he wasn’t welcome. This happened quickly and without warning. And I still don’t know the full extent of it. But he did not happen to have riparian rights to the water. The camp that did—a mile or so below him—had decided that he was a bother to them and to their camp guests.

  For a while he put up a fight, said he’d get proof and no one could fool him. Said he would rock the pool or fill it all in. But he could no more do that than hurt someone. Then there were lawyers and all the rest of it involved. He told me that everyone had decided it wasn’t him but a Mr. Jeffreys from Halifax who owned the water. He said he would build another camp somewhere—even though this one was forty years old. He looked about, saw others fishing on the water he once considered his, water which he never tried to regulate himself, and asked me to drive him to the south branch.

  So I did. We got into the Jeep one morning and went around the Fraser Burchill Highway to the south branch of the Sevogle on a day in late July. He sat in the Jeep with his hands folded, looking out the window, looking like a child who has just been punished.

  “I’ll show you a place to fish,” he said. “It’s where I’ll build me new camp. I’ll go over to Fred-ric-ten—that’s what I’ll do—I’ll go to Fred-ric-ten, and talk to the Forestry.”

  I took a road beyond Clearwater Pool, came to the top of a hill. We both looked down, where far, far away the river turned into the sun.

  For miles there wasn’t a tree. The ghostly remnants of trees stood in single file, blackened and desperate against the yellowish horizon. Like the rainforest, like all those things man had come to take for granted, to step upon, it had been clear-cut out. Old Mr. Simms had not been there in years. His lips trembled just slightly, the river in the distance glittered like a bayonet affixed against the sky.

  “I’m a fool,” he said.

  “NO, yer not,” I said.

  “I got no place to fish now.” He smiled, shaking his head.

  The next Saturday I went to his camp. However, this time, the door was closed.

  Nine

  BY THE END OF THE sixth summer I had managed to learn to fish. And I fished mostly alone, leaving the cottage where Peg and I lived in the summer at dawn and trying to get back by mid-afternoon. I always carried with me, besides my dog, two rods, two reels weighted with weight-forward lines for those rods, three boxes of flies—bugs and butterflies being my favourite—a flashlight, a spare pair of jeans, and waders, two jugs of water (for the radiator), a thermos of tea, and a lunch bucket of sandwiches.

  I love travelling the rivers alone, and now spend much more time by myself than with other people, even though I’ll never forget them for teaching me what they could.

  By then, my line was touching the water where I wanted it to and I was able to cover the water I wanted to as well. (But I still got knots and flubbed casts and had days when nothing went right.) I no longer us
ed a blood knot, but went with nine or ten feet of leader. I was using both hands, without having to think about it, and felt comfortable whenever I went fishing.

  Often I did not make it back by afternoon. It would be dark when I left in the morning and dark when I got back out at nightfall. I stood in pools in the pouring rain, too stupid to come out of them, and I wallowed about the shore in the desperate fly-soaked heat too stupid to go home. And more than once I had to rely on luck to get my old truck started, miles away from anyone.

  Some days I would start into Little River Pool just above the Miner’s Bridge on the Norwest, but go on the long rough road into B&L.

  The year before, Peter had seen a grilse jump in the swift little run, directly off from where the path came out unto the shore—on the other side of the river, and he left B&L Pool one day and went down and hooked two grilse. Although most people bypassed this run, which ran tight to the other shore between two rocks, grilse always rested there on their journey before moving into the pool proper. Or they would rest there and move right through the pool. So we usually stopped to throw a line over it. It was easy to reach. One just walked out up to their knees and threw a short tight cast into the top of the run, defined by an eddy swirling over a submerged rock. From there to another rock half-submerged about thirty yards downriver, it was a run alive with possibilities.

  This run below B&L didn’t look like much but it was often as not productive—until about eleven-thirty in the morning, when the action would taper off. It fished better in the morning than in the evening, and you could take fish on a variety of flies. I fished bug on the Norwest. But I’ve taken grilse on butterfly and Black Ghost, and Blue Charm, there as well.