Lines on the Water

by David Adams Richards

  One day that year I took my younger brother John and another man into B&L. My brother just came along for the ride, which was so bumpy the other man said he would never travel with me again—and so I’ve not invited him.

  It was a nice day in early July and we walked down the long sun-drenched path to the water. Our acquaintance turned to his right and headed for the pool, about a quarter of a mile away.

  “I’m fishing here,” I said to my brother.

  John looked at the water as I waded out up to my knees.

  “The pool’s up that way,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Well, why are you fishing here? There’s no water here.”

  “Oh, there is fish here,” I said, although I was unsure of it at that moment.

  “Where?” John said, craning his neck and looking at me in a kind of embarrassment.

  “Right here,” I said. My little brown hackled bug landed on the far side of the flat rock and the line tightened. It was the first and probably only time I was able to predict a fish would take at the very instant it did.

  In July we moved on to the Little Souwest—which is perhaps my favourite of all rivers and fishes well all July. The fish on the Little Souwest seemed to be always slightly brighter and more active to me than those on the Norwest. It is a bigger and in some ways grander river with less pressure on it than the Norwest. But the fish came in spurts because of the nets from the reserve just below.

  It was on the Little Souwest where I decided one day that year to give up waders as soon as it got warm. It is a larger river with many tricky spots, and I was there one afternoon with David Savage. We were crossing in high water to Clellend Pool, and I was almost halfway across when I realized I had no left leg under me whatsoever. I let out my fishing line for balance, but knew that I could not go back or forth. There I was. The water swelled about me in the middle of the river. I tried to take one more step, and started to go, on the slippery boulders beneath me. Just below me the pool gleamed in the morning sunshine. But I wouldn’t be able to stop from being swept into the rapids beyond them.

  I hated to call out to anyone but I knew I would have to. And back Savage came and helped me across. It was a great day to fish, so I’m happy I didn’t miss it. After that day, as soon as it got warm at all, my waders were relegated to the back of the truck.

  The next day I was again fishing with David Savage. We both caught grilse very early in the morning. By afternoon the river seemed dead. But hour after hour David kept at it. He would sit on the log on the beach, stare at the water like a man investigating a certain painting for the tell-tale signature stroke of the painter, take a chew of plug, stare at the beach, and look through his box, swatting flies away with his hand. And then he would go out into the pool again and fish. It was a long pool, and had three different sections to it. The pool far at the top of the island we were on was deep and had two swift-running rips, which joined in a Y. And where that Y joined was the best spot on this part of the river. Down below the water got quite deep again and slow moving. In any of these three places fish would take. But normally if they took in one place, you would not find them in another. You would never be certain where they were lying, and try to switch fly patterns accordingly.

  At the end of the day I was more than a little perturbed.

  “We each got a fish. Let’s go.”

  “I’ll try it again,” David said, fishing now through the middle stretch of the pool for about the fifteenth time.

  I don’t know what I bet him, but it was something—that he would not get another fish. I prayed that he would not get another fish. I put a hex on the water and on all his flies.

  “No, I’ll get another fish,” he said calmly.

  The morning crowd had left, the afternoon crowd had left, and the evening crowd was getting pretty tired. Still Savage fished through the long pool, cast after cast without comment, came out, sat down, spat his plug, and looked through his fly box again.

  There had not been a fish taken since an hour after I had taken my grilse at the top of the pool earlier that day. I looked at my pocket watch, then I would sigh. I would sigh just so Savage would know I was sighing and looking at my pocket watch, perturbed.

  But again he would look through his fly box, scratch his head, and put on another fly.

  Finally he took out a small bug, about a number 8 or 10, half-brown and half-green, with a bare body.

  “I’m going to give this a try,” he said, smiling. “Just one more try.”

  “That’s about the worst godforsaken fly I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  And out he went into the pool again. Then he got down to his last few casts.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “I’ll cast twice more,” he said. He threw his line out, the fly gracefully touched the water and moved across the pool in the twilight. The sun was almost gone, the sky red and white, and nighthawks and swallows skimmed the surface of the water, while the trees in the background were solid and dark. He stripped in his line and brought it back.

  “Last cast, Mr. Savage,” I said.

  His fly hit the water. The tip of his rod began to bend and butt. The fish took a run, jumped high in the night air. He turned and smiled, a chew of Red Man plug in his cheek.

  Now and then, when I was fishing, I would hit some trout. And on certain lone summer nights I go fishing them myself. The flies we are using for trout are tiny, number 12s or 14s on those occasions. They are called, aptly enough, mosquitoes, mayflies, etc. Some tied are a variation of small flies and have no proper name. Nymphs—you can hardly see them in the water, but in a black pool near an old wood bank on the Bartibog or Bay du Vin these little flies cause the trout to stick their mouths out of the water and suck them in. You fish early or late because of this. A trout is finicky about dinner. Ravenous, yes—finicky as well. But at a point in the evening with that tiny little fly skirting above them, they will suck them down the same way we might accidentally suck a mosquito down. We are looking for three- or four-pound trout.

  I like fishing for trout because even more than salmon it provides me with a link to my youth—to my father and brothers, my aunt who fished for trout instead of salmon, because fishing salmon was not considered ladylike when she was a girl. A link to that little eight-inch trout I caught at Beaverbrook Stream when I was four. It is perhaps the most pristine of fishing, the most poetic. You are able to think of fishing stories from the Saturday Evening Post, of Norman Rockwell, of long dusty roads, and cool streams, and children. You are able to reflect upon all of this as an essential part of rural life, like sleigh bells and Christmas, or your favourite writers like the catfish-seeking Mark Twain, or the brilliant rural observer, Ernest Buckler. And if that is all sentimental and nostalgic, so be it. Trout fishing can do this for you just at twilight with a tiny nymph fly, a smell of fly dope, and an old warm fishing basket strung over your shoulder.

  I will trout fish with my son in the small ponds that lay in woods near the Norwest, with a small yellow-and-red bobbin. I will fish with him along the Kingston Peninsula and in small streams through cow pastures downriver. All of this brings me back to my own childhood. Though I rarely keep a trout any more unless it is near the size of those three- and four-pound trout I caught one June night at B&L. Along the Padapedia last summer I released all but two trout on the three-day canoe trip. That is, I released fourteen trout. Many of them were the size of trout I wouldn’t think of throwing back a few years before. But now I am careful. I hold them under the water and remove the fly as tenderly as possible, and hope to myself when I release them from my hand that they will spend a year or two to grow large and strong. I also released a seventeen-pound salmon on that trip and felt not a bit the less for it.

  There are big trout in the Bay du Vin, big brown trout. And sometimes we ran it with a flat-bottom boat, early in the spring when the water was high.

  The last time I ran this stretch with an acquaintance, years ago now, we pull
ed in halfway along and made supper. It was a warm evening, every now and then gusts of hot air hitting your face when the breeze picked up. The river was still high enough—just—to run the boat, although a canoe would have been much better.

  After supper, just before dark, we got some trout—the largest almost three pounds, taken by my friend before we settled down for the night, in a large hole near the bank. I got a good-sized trout about a pound lighter just above our camp.

  I walked up and threw a tiny little butterfly over some rapids we had poled through earlier, and I could see the back of the trout as it came up almost to the top of the water trailing my fly, somewhat like those file films on sharks trailing a piece of meat. My friend was using spinner and worm.

  The Bay du Vin River—its lush undergrowth on either side and the orange reddishness of the water, vin-coloured—makes one think they are far to the south, on a river in Central America at times. The bugs and mosquitoes might make you think this as well.

  We soaked the trout in butter and flour and ate them resting near the water’s edge—for near our camp, and everywhere else, the bugs were voracious. Yet we went to bed that night in the open air, and I lay awake listening to the water.

  Just before I drifted off to sleep I could hear a movement far away on the hills to my right. It got closer over time, and then closer still. I realized I was listening to a moose making its way down to the river. The flies were bad, and it was probably being driven crazy. It kept getting closer, and still I tried to go to sleep, until it crashed right on top of me—no more than a yard away.

  And it wasn’t about to stop.

  I jumped up and threw a hand out at it. In the darkness I could see its nose about a foot from mine. The young cow put on the brakes and turned and ran.

  The next morning I could see where its tracks stopped, digging into the dirt about three feet from my sleeping bag. I guess I had startled it as much as it did me.

  Ten

  MY FISHING WORLD IS filled with eccentrics and I suppose I am as eccentric as most. But, at this point a more sinister reflection. A reflection about the great woods, and the deep unending trials in these woods. Of animals and man.

  One summer—my seventh or eighth fishing—when the weather was rough most of the summer and fishing not very good, I had a visit from Henry. He came to my camp after eight at night. This was the first camp my brothers and I had managed to build near Mullin Stream. It was a small camp with one room, the inside walls made of pressed boards, the table a cut of rough plywood, the cupboards made of two-by-sixes. The ceiling was a run for mice, and we had one propane lantern. Our door, too, like old Mr. Simms’s, was always open.

  Henry came in and sat with me in the half dark of this camp, in the middle of nowhere, listening to the brook run below us, like a meandering lullaby. Outside dark spruce hugged the yard in a melancholy way, and night was coming on.

  He sat there sipping from a bottle of wine and looking about, as if ready to make comment about what our camp lacked or needed in the way of improvement. He was almost bald. His eyes were bright and black. If I ever want to describe something about the world, I know I would have to mention Henry. Henry was a poacher.

  He took fish on a pitchfork or in nets that he lay out in a pool, where the salmon had no hope of escaping. The splashing in the water was something similar to dolphins being caught up in a tuna net. He’d down a moose on the side of a dirt road just on a whim, and then take an axe to its head.

  He worked at night, the pretence being that he kept it all hidden from someone like me who disapproved.

  I wrote something about him in Lives of Short Duration, or people like Henry. Poachers often are self-justified, and always seem morally affronted when you challenge them. They also wish to make you feel like a prude if you say anything. It is extremely complex and psychological warfare. Also some of the wardens were once poachers themselves, a few years before they became wardens.

  He’d asked me if I’d seen such and such or who’s and who. He was mentioning wardens by name. When he asked he would cast his eyes here and there as I spoke.

  “NO, I haven’t seen him.”

  He would look at the stove.

  Or I might say, “Saw the truck yesterday.”

  He would glance at the door.

  I was worried for a variety of reasons. When he was in the woods with me, I knew that if given half a chance, he would try to net a pool. To him, it didn’t seem like a challenge unless he was breaking the law. For him, the idea of fishing was not so much to use skill and dexterity to catch fish but to use this skill to violate all the regulations applied to fishing in one day. That dexterity was required only to confront and affront the principles that men invoked to protect themselves from each other, just to test your own will.

  Once when we were fishing on a small pool that was open on the Norwest, he left me where I was. After a time calling to him, and getting no answer, only the sad waving of the trees, and the smell of earth just at twilight, I crossed the slippery river and began my trek. And a half-hour later I found Harry looking at a pool.

  “This is Crown reserve,” I said.

  “I know, boy, I know. It’s a goddamn shame,” he said.

  And he began to cast through it. And then looking at me he took out a jig hook—three-pronged, which looked like an anchor—and threw it in, gave a riff, and away went the salmon, jigged in the tail.

  Just then a group of American men came down to the pool for an evening fish, and their guide with them.

  “Get the hell out of there, Henry,” I said.

  “I would, I would, by God, I would—but I’m pretty well committed now,” he said. The salmon tore the jig hook away after a minute or so. But it was a disturbing minute. After that I tried not to fish with him.

  But I must say something else. I liked him—he was very likeable. He had a variety of likeableness about him that would endear anyone to him. He was more than likeable—he was hill-billiable. He dropped twenty dollars into the Salvation Army bowl without a thought, kept care of his brother’s family without a thought—was always worried if they had enough clothes or scribblers for school, or if they would have a good Christmas.

  Except—for there is always an except here—he was a dyed-in-the-wool poacher.

  Once hunting in deer season he shot two moose, and once in moose season he shot two deer.

  “I must have got it all mixed up,” he said. I suppose he was self-will run riot, but I could not help but like him.

  There is a problem about this. He was always on guard and always on watch. By the end of it all he trusted no one, and fought with those he poached with. It seemed a hard price to pay for a fish.

  If anyone has ever seen a movie about moonshine runners worried about G-men, then Henry fit the description of a suspicious moonshine runner. He would hide his Jeep, but never hid it well enough. He would circle back to his house, to throw his scent. No matter how often he tried to hide his nets he was always cornered with nets on him. He lived hiding, and staring out of shed windows at dusk, looking for the wardens. In his suspiciousness he had made me realize that some part of him felt guilty about it—that his guilt went beyond the law and into his conscience. And that’s when a poacher such as Henry will turn on you—when you see that guilt.

  The idea that a poacher has guilt that goes beyond the arm of the law, and into a Dostoyevskian idea of Crime and Punishment, fits like a glove on most of their hands after a certain amount of time. That is not to say that a man or a woman can’t take an extra fish now and then without suffering the pangs of misery and guilt. If the world wasn’t big enough for that, it would be small indeed. But at a certain point, within the dominion of taking far too much, poachers like Henry begin to get agitated, feel sick, and the only cure for them is to not poach any more. Like criminals, they must get away as quickly as possible from what it is they have done.

  He came to my camp that cool and rainy night, the eighth year of my fishing. He kept staring
at the door, asking me questions, and relating that he was listening to me with a slight glance my way. Finally the door opened and a fellow, who looked deranged, came in. He looked at Henry and smiled, glanced at me and frowned.

  He had no teeth, his body one giant tattoo.

  He reminded me of the escaped prisoner I had once picked up hitchhiking outside of Dorchester (I had no idea he was an escaped prisoner). I asked him where he was going and he said, “Arizona.”

  I knew just by the way Henry walked he had jig hooks on him, and a net hidden nearby. It was as if I took an X-ray of Henry, I would see all of Henry’s bones—his thin rib cage, his legs, his pointy knees, his very bony feet walking back and forth in front of me—and while he was talking about heating up some soup, I would see jig hooks stuck everywhere.

  It was the idea of nondisclosure that bothered me as much as anything else. Henry couldn’t risk trusting me, and therefore I could not trust him. So then why was he at my camp? Even a poor camp such as it was. A poacher’s life is full of contradictions and abnormalities. Nothing is ever exactly right with them. He not only had his wife in on the act, but his children, two skinny little girls, who also seemed to be weighed down with jig hooks—and in hunting season, leaves of lettuce and cabbage sticking in their braids and apple cores from between their ears.

  In effect, Henry had managed to make his whole family lawless by his self-will. And I often felt that all of them were in hiding more than most of us, most of their lives. It made me realize that freedom, as he believed it to be, was an awful cross to bear and came at a tremendous price.

  Henry’s friend began jumping up and down on the cot: “Gonna get a fish.”

  “That’s nice,” I would say.

  “Settle down now, Melvin,” Henry would say, looking over at me suspiciously.

  “Gonna get a fish.”

  I wanted to tell Henry that this man was insane. An absolute nut bar. And it was a small camp. But then I considered, Henry wasn’t entirely sane himself.