Lines on the Water

by David Adams Richards

  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.

  Fifteen

  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.

  Far upriver one day on the open water of the elbow stretch on the Norwest Miramichi, a small Green Butt Butterfly fell out of my box of flies when I was ready to put my rod away and walk back to the truck.

  Was this an omen? Well, I don’t have a clue. But fishermen certainly think of things like this, as omens. So I put it on and began to work my way into the water again.

  I had fished this section on the way up and had seen nothing, but running the river the year before with friends we had picked up two fish here, and I cast over towards the left bank, watched my fly work towards the middle of the run, and felt my line jerk.

  I brought the grilse in, in the rain, and backed up stepping on Roo’s feet, so that she let out a terrible wail. The fish looked as if it had just come into the river.

  I made it along the path with Roo and found my truck, and my tire flat. Again I was without fly dope, and I had left my adrenaline needle at my father’s. Trying to find a place to put the jack up against the rusted body of my old truck was a job, and worse, I was trying to jack up in muck, so I had to find some rocks. Then it took me an hour or more—with some kicking and screaming—to get the spare tire down, and when I put it on, it was almost as flat as the tire I had just taken off.

  Then I piled Roo in the truck and started off. I was halfway home when I remembered my fish, lying on the grass where I had first discovered my predicament.

  I’m a bugger for fun, so back I went, and at ten o’clock that night found the fish, and turning about again, started for home.

  “I know how to take a shortcut to the pool,” Peter says. It is late June and the water is still cool and high. We have started out in the early morning to walk to a pool a few miles away. But Peter explains that there is a better way to get there.

  Peter takes a compass reading and we head off, wearing waders and fishing vests, carrying rods and a hatchet straight into the fly-infested woods—half foolhardy and more ambitious than we will be later on.

  We hit an old logging road. The trees are just beginning to wave slightly, silently above us. Come to an old bridge, torn apart at least two generations before by ancestors of both he and I.

  “Just over there,” he said, “I’m sure.”

  I was not so sure. I tried to hear the river. Look at the sky, the dip of the land, and you can tell. Couldn’t tell.

  This was not a new experience for Peter and me at that time. We had done this often in those years a while ago. Sooner or later we’d find ourselves in the middle of a bog, searching for a distant pool, where we knew the fish had moved into the night before—or were perhaps just moving into now.

  That’s the thing. They are always there.

  There is always a better forest path to the spring, as the great writer and unrepentant drunk Malcolm Lowry knew, that will bring you out to the pool, easier and quicker than ever before.

  In the bog, walking
towards a sparkling river in the mid-June heat is one side of the equation.

  Then there is the other side of fishing.

  Sitting at a dinner in Montreal one night an influential man making small talk told me we had something in common.

  “We both fish,” he said.

  “Fly-fish,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do okay. Take my jet down to New Brunswick every year. Spend about fifteen hundred dollars at the camp, have my guide meet me, you know—I get my fish. It’s relaxing. I like it. Like to hear their stories. The old guides have great stories, you know—and its surprising how smart they can be. Takes my mind off this.” And he waved his hand at the palatial room.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t understand that I had a good deal of sympathy for him at that moment.

  There is always the big fishing trip Peter and I are going to go on also. Win the Lotto. Go to Labrador. Bone fishing down south. As long as it’s a fly rod.

  I’ve heard fishing described as Zen. Most of the people I know as fishermen wouldn’t know Zen. Fishing has its own language. Like great hockey, it manages to be an act in itself. And of course, beyond all the pleasant afternoons beside a pool, narrowing to a fine rip, and the sometimes naive, ethereal descriptiveness, fishing is finally about Green Butts, Copper Killers, Rusty Rats, low-water bugs, Green Machines, blood and death.

  Remembering this, it becomes no different than waxing eloquent about hunting or bull fighting.

  Taking roe out of a hen fish that has fought you to its death for twenty minutes is just a difference in degree from gutting and taking the hide off a doe whose spine you shattered with your .306 on a logging road one November afternoon.

  I say this only because of those I’ve met who, while talking in poetic psycho-babble about fly-fishing, have clamoured to stop the bestiality of the moose hunt.

  Having done both, I don’t think the fly-fisherman has an iron-clad case.

  We were in the woods, the flies black about us, swimming in and out of my great big ears.

  “I don’t know—think we’re turned about,” Peter said. “Any fly dope?”

  “Never wear it,” I said.

  We lit a smoke and watched the trees.

  Thinking the river was much closer, we had not trusted the compass. So here we were, sitting in the heat of mid-morning, in the middle of a fly-infested bog.

  “Well, we can’t stay here.”

  “I’m going to finish my smoke,” I said.

  Actually the arthritis in my foot was paining and I didn’t think I could walk for a while. All this for a fish.

  “The thing is we’re not trusting the compass. Trust the compass and we’ll get back out to the logging road,” he said.

  I know a man who once owned his own surveying company, and had to make himself dizzy—literally close his eyes and turn in a circle until he fell down. Then not knowing what direction west or east was, he would finally have to rely on his compass. It was at this moment I knew why.

  Anyway, sweat pouring down, we took another reading and found we were going in exactly the wrong direction. Even then, we hesitated to believe it.

  Once we decided to believe it we were back on the logging road in ten minutes. But the morning was gone.

  “All this for a fish,” my friend said.

  But fishing is still fishing. And what people do for it still shows you what it’s worth.

  One blowsy day in mid-July and David Savage had had enough of salmon fishing and was looking through his box of trout flies. He drove far up the Bartibog and parked his car under the giant spruce with the lightning mark. It was coming onto twilight. Just when others were going home. He walked through the woods to the pool. He had put his salmon rod away, and had his little trout rod with him. The air had turned still and smelled of rain.

  He started downriver, flicking his small bug under the alders. Soon he had one trout, and then two. It was growing dark. He knew he should turn back, find the path. But as he was playing a fish, he saw a trout break water at the bottom of a pool far downriver.

  That’s a big fish, he thought. And he moved towards it.

  He reached the pool, shortened up his cast, and worked his way to it. On the fourth cast the fish came and he felt the line tighten.

  The air was still, and it was almost dark. It was a big trout too, about four pounds. He managed to net it after a time. But it was dark. Only the water glimmered milkily. Far off he saw the very top of the spruce tree he had parked his car under.

  He decided to cut through the woods. He broke down his rod and put his fish in the knapsack. He started up the hill.

  By the time he reached the top of the hill it had started to rain heavily. It was dark. And it was only then did he realize that it wasn’t the same spruce, the one with the lightning mark.

  He would have to go back to the river.

  It was so dark he took his rod tip and began to feel the trees so he wouldn’t lose an eye. And he made his way along silently as the rain pitter-pattered the leaves. He knew reaching the river he could make his way back to the path. But before he did this he fell. All of a sudden his legs went, and he found himself tumbling into a pit half-filled with water.

  He climbed up one side and sat on a ridge.

  “Well, I don’t know which direction I fell, or where the river is now—I’m here for the night.”

  He sat in the pulverizing rain and waited.

  He sat for over two hours in the same spot. It was almost midnight. And then far off he heard the sound of a transport on the highway.

  Ah, he thought. The highway was to his right. His car then must be to his left. He would inch his way left until he found the path. And with this in mind, and taking his rod tip, he started out again.

  Little by little he inched along the hill, the water far below him. He walked in the dark for almost an hour.

  And suddenly he noticed an animal in front of him.

  Too big for a deer or coyote; it was either a bear or a moose. But he couldn’t tell. It was still raining and the black shape stood in front of him. There was now only one thing to do. Hit it with his rod tip—scare it away. He took a deep breath.

  “Go on,” he said, snapping it.

  It was his car.

  I am down at Dr. Wilson’s fishing through for the second time in the morning. The sun is now above the tree line, and the day ticks with the scent of coming heat.

  I have raised a fish too, and have seen another jump—it may have been the same fish. I haul out a chew of plug, and spit and watch the water as it swirls about my waders.

  “Thirty of them dead, thirty more gone.” I think suddenly about a poem I have written about my friends. I suppose it is strange to think this way when the day is nice and you are having a fish, but then who said I wasn’t strange. Maybe the fish think this way about each other. Who’s to say.

  I have put on a Bear Hair and wade far above the rocks. The water is high but not too much, and is dropping now, and mild-coloured leaves swirl away in the eddies. I lean against the boulder in back of me, and feel the heat on my face, and watch the light and spray as the water runs to rapids just below.

  I let my line relax in the water and stare off at the morning haze, and then up at a plane skimming so high above me that I cannot hear it for moments, and then only as a distant drone.

  My friend Peter is working. He’ll be off in the next few days and we’ll go up again—one more time to the south branch of the Sevogle.

  We will once again put the canoe in at Clearwater or Simpson and move out in the early morning to fish.

  As I am thinking this, still standing in Wilson’s Pool, a canoe comes around the corner with two men and a boy. The men are two old mossy-backed charlatans of my youth. They don’t recognize me, as I them. We are all bearded, midsummer tanned, and they are shouting wildly to one another about the rapids, and about tipping the canoe.

  Then they pull in just above me. I start in again, and fish down, but their canoe is pulled u
p so it is hard to cast. So I let my line slacken and wait. The taller of the men takes the little boy and starts across the river, wading into the rapids above me, like an old moose with her young.

  The man leaves the child on the rock directly above the heaviest rapid, at the widest part of the river, and continues on across—to effectively move down and cut me off from the fish I saw roll. But I can’t move.

  I feel obligated to stay with the child. I don’t know whose child it is—it is not mine—but sitting in the middle of the river, with thirty pounds of waders on, and weighing no more than forty-five pounds himself, it seems that he is an easy drowning victim.

  As I am deciding what to do, the second man, who has finished his beer at a walk, now enters the river just below me, which is about the height of bad manners—and really I can’t think of much worse. Perhaps killing a man in his sleep, and then calling it bravery.

  He looks back at me and says, “Well, you weren’t fishin’—you were waitin’.”

  There are incidents like this on the Miramichi also. Thank God they are not as many as the pleasant ones.

  Sixteen

  IT IS THE SUMMER OF 1995. And now once more we are going to find the fish. Again the water is moving unconcerned with us, with those who have come before, and with those who will come after. To the water we are all the same. Once again the water is the right temperature and the day is sky-high and cool, and my friend Peter and I put the canoe in at Clearwater and make our way out into the South Branch, past the rocks, and skirting the trees that come from ancient sources. Away we go, searching the rocks and crevices where the water swirls, moving to the rhythms of moving water under it we cannot see. The rocks of Karnak one might think of, or that each rock is like a jutting Sphinx made by the hand of God, amended by the weather which is the breath of God, and giving sound to the water, which is the voice of God. And this voice is the life of God. We see the rips and eddies where fish were taken ten years before, we remember the hour and the day, the kind of wind, and the kind of fight the fish gave, where it lay, and how it was hooked, the sunlight upon it that has disappeared into the universe once more.