Growing Gills

by David Joy

  Instantly fish rose and began slapping at the fly, but I quickly pulled the Stimulator from the water and let it settle on the current behind me. The fish that had risen were a school of warpaint shiners, a species of aggressive baitfish that can sink a dry fly in a matter of casts. The shiners are beautiful in their own right—mirroring barracudas in shape but with bright red lines down their cheeks and only growing to five or six inches—but they were not the fish I was after.

  I edged closer to the pool. Being careful not to move too fast, I approached from the right side using the fallen log for cover. I stood on a sandy bank beside the log and peered deep into the incoming current. A shadow lifted from the bottom and ascended slowly and methodically toward the surface. Just before nosing through the current, the fish lowered back into the darkness. A big trout. Possibly twenty inches. My heart began beating hard against my rib cage.

  I played out the scenarios in my head: the trout hadn’t risen all the way to the surface; the fish was holding tight to the bottom; it hadn’t come up fast; and it was BIG. Running through my options, I decided to attach a dropper off the back of my dry fly. I reached into my vest, pulled out my nymph box, and scanned the rows of flies. I decided on a bead-head Pheasant Tail with a strip of flashback running down the wing case. I tied tippet from the bend of the Stimulator and attached the nymph eighteen inches down. Hopefully, the fish would rise.

  I cast the flies on the far side of the log, hoping that the barrier would slow the drift. The flies held tight to the bark, and I saw a shadow begin to emerge. The fish came up on the nymph, but in a moment of refusal, sank back to the sandy bottom. I made another cast, but the trout didn’t appear again.

  Evening glow shone through the limbs of a forty-foot eastern redbud, and crickets began to call from the field grass. I checked my flies and peered back into the sheen. Suddenly I saw the fish fin under the log and swim into the shallow pool of slack water at my feet. The trout was less than two feet from the tip of my left boot, but, surprisingly, was not startled by my presence. The fish was too close for me to make a cast, so I held the rod tip high and tried to drop the flies right over the trout’s head. The Pheasant Tail slid down the trout’s thick cheek, spooking the fish back under the log. A moment later the trout came back into position, and I tried again.

  The Pheasant Tail Nymph dangled from the bend of the Stimulator and hung right above the fish’s snout. The trout rose a few inches and, in a short opening of gills, sucked the fly into its mouth. I raised the rod hard, setting the hook into the trout’s toothy jaw. The fish tore off downstream, and I let it run, fearing tension might snap the tippet. The line held and, with a few slow reels, the trout was flapping in the shallow water at my feet. With my right arm fully extended, holding the rod high over my head, I bent toward the creek to wrap my free hand around the fish. The strain was too much and the tippet popped. The fish was free. Instinctively, I dove onto the trout’s back, straddled its thick body between my thighs, dropped the rod, and grabbed. The fish squirmed but my grip was tight. The trout was mine.

  My hand could barely fit around the arched back of the brook trout. The brookie’s back was humped like a male salmon’s; and he had an upturned kype, the distinctive hooked upper jaw of an adult male trout. I unhooked the small nymph from his kype and laid him on the grassy bank. The fish was a solid nineteen inches and thick in girth. I know he would have been a record brook trout in South Carolina, but here he was no record—although equally a leviathan. His dark lavender back faded into mustard yellow around the stomach, his sides were dotted with buff yellow spots, and his maroon fins along the stomach were tipped in chalk white. I took a quick photo, kissed the fish, and held him in the water, allowing him to slowly tail away into the bottom. He was a monster brook trout, and as he finned away I lay back on the grass and lit a smoke. One down and two to go.

  *****

  The ’bow

  Four days before I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in literature, I was headed for water. My education had taught me a lot about “the greats” and literary criticism, but on the streams surrounding the campus, I found myself. Learning from distinguished Chaucerians and Miltonists was fantastic—don’t get me wrong—but trout became my professors of life, my piscine colleagues, my reason to wake up and breathe. During my college career I had reeled in a humpbacked nineteen-inch brook trout and a solid eighteen-inch rainbow, both big fish, but I wanted a twenty-incher. More specifically, I wanted a twenty-inch brown that would end my quest.

  So Sara and I headed to the Tuckasegee River to try to catch my graduation present. I believed that today the river would bless me with one final gift. We drove to the hole I had nicknamed Beaver Kill Hole after seeing a wounded beaver bludgeoned to death by two rednecks wielding giant sticks trying to end its misery, because I knew there would be an opportunity for big fish. Before my fishing partner, Zac, had graduated and left town, we had consistently brought large trout off the bottom to take flies in that hole. On one memorable afternoon, I caught the eighteen-inch ’bow, and Zac caught a beautiful twenty-two-inch brown trout. The photographs of that day are prized possessions: Zac holding a pancake brown, leopard-spotted giant and me with a gorgeous rainbow sporting a thick red lateral line. The point is, Beaver Kill Hole held big fish and lots of them.

  After parking at a nearby apartment complex, Sara and I hiked up an ivy-covered hill and down a dusty farm road. Beaver Kill Hole was nestled fifty feet down a kudzu-smothered ledge dropping down from the right side of the road. Sara and I walked hand in hand but never said a word. I was focused on the fish that I knew were there.

  Sara often joined me on the water. We always talked during the entire ride, but muted our conversation when the stream was in sight. She understood why I was there, and she just enjoyed being in the woods. While I spent hours casting to trout, Sara lifted rocks, searched for salamanders, and crawled around the bank. We each had our own reasons for being there and today was no different.

  As the road flattened out to water level, we tromped down a steep mud bank and under the branches of a giant mockernut hickory. Four granite boulders lined the current. Sara climbed up the side of the flattest boulder to lie down, and I made my way around the edge of the deep hole. The steep hill barely left a bank to stand on as I hiked around the outside bend at the bottom of the kudzu ledge, but the water was too deep to wade through. A groundhog munching kudzu leaves stared down from the hillside, then waddled into its hole when I got close. Upstream the river shallowed to soft ripples running over a freestone bed. Finally, around the bend, I stepped into calf-high water above the hole and walked into the stream.

  Sara was still in sight, her tiny frame outstretched on the giant chunk of granite. I called her name, she turned, and I smiled. I thought it would be one of my last days in the mountains, and I wanted her to see me in my prime. She flipped her hair out of her face and smiled back, the squints around her eyes visible, even at a distance. “Catch me a big one,” she called out, her voice echoing off the hillside.

  “I’ll try.” We ended our conversation and soaked in the silence.

  A few stoneflies and caddis were on the water, but there was no great hatch to speak of. Water boatmen skittered in the shallows, and small caddisflies dropped to the surface, sporadically laying eggs. I tied on a CDC Caddis pattern that Roger Lowe, a renowned fly tier from nearby Waynesville, had developed for the Tuckasegee caddis hatch. That fly consistently produced in this hole, and I hoped today would be the same. Out of habit rather than necessity, I also tied a Caddis Pupa off the back of the dry. I started fishing the flies on the swing, letting them drift clockwise across the outside edge of the hole. Once the flies straightened out downstream, I stripped them back in two-inch tugs to mimic caddisflies skittering across the surface.

  A fish erupted on the flies downstream, and I instantly set the hook. I yelled for Sara to watch while I reeled in the feisty, stocked brook trout. After a short battle, I held the trout firmly in my grasp,
removed the fly, and released upstream, trying not to spook the other fish in the hole. I continued to catch trout with the CDC Caddis for the next hour, but not the big fish I had hoped for.

  Discouraged, I headed across the river to the inside bank of the bend and began searching through my fly boxes. The tall American beech overhead cast shadows across the stream. Looking out into the river, I noticed something snaking in the current. My first thought was that it was a piece of trash, probably a bag of some sort caught on a rock, tangled synthetic made lifelike by the movement of water; however, upon second glance I could see it was a big trout “holding steady,” as Hemingway would put it. I stripped some line off the reel and prepared to make the cast. The branches of beech wouldn’t allow for a standard overhead cast, so I side-armed the flies low across the water and watched as they entered the trout’s feeding line. The flies moved directly over top of the trout, but the fish didn’t move. Even with a few more nice presentations, the trout never rose, so I decided to change flies.

  I had seen a big one-inch stonefly on a leaf, so I decided to tie on a size 12 Stimulator to match the natural. I tied on the elk-hair fly and made the cast. Again the imitation drifted directly over the fish, but the trout would not come off the bottom. I feared that the giant trout was spooked and had put down, refusing to feed because of my persistent pressure. With the fish unwilling to move, I decided to try one last presentation.

  The sun had already fallen behind the western peaks, and the evening sky glowed cornflower blue. A caddis hatch began to surface and fish resumed feeding in the deep hole downstream, but the fish I had targeted held firm in the shallow riffles just above Beaver Kill Hole. I picked through my fly box and unhooked a size 6 streamer from the foam lining. The streamer, a Gray Ghost, was tied with brilliant orange floss, silver tinsel ribbing, a white wing, and jungle cock cheeks. The fly was a classic pattern dating back a century, but I had never fished it before. I tightened a Uni-Knot on the hook eye and made my first cast.

  The streamer hooked across the current and swung around the backside of the trout. Through clear water I watched the huge fish angle on the streambed and then fin back to its holding position. The next cast would have to be shorter in order to swing in front of its nose. I reeled in a couple of feet of line and made the cast. Again, too long, and the fly drifted right across the back of the fish. The trout jolted to the right and then slowly repositioned itself on the seam of current. If it hadn’t been spooked before, it was damn sure scared now, but I tried again.

  I reeled in a couple more feet and repeated the cast. This time the fly curved right in front of the fish, and as the Gray Ghost was stripped through the water, the trout rose slowly, bit hard, and descended. I set the hook. I wish I could say that the fish bolted downstream tearing line from the reel and taking me to the backing, but surprisingly the trout swam slowly, shaking its head as it was pulled by the rod’s tension. In a burst of energy, the trout took off downstream for a brief moment, ripping the line that dangled between the stripping guide and fly reel. I tightened the drag and played the trout toward me, but I had one problem: I wanted a picture taken and Sara was forty yards downstream with the camera. I yelled for Sara to ready the camera as I began making my way downriver toward her. I just kept screaming, “It’s BIG! It’s BIG!” over and over as if the words needed to be echoed for emphasis.

  I saw the fish roll near the surface and instantly knew it was the biggest trout of my life. “This is the biggest trout I’ve ever caught! This is the biggest trout of my life!” I yelled, restating the same words in every possible form. I walked carefully along the sandy bank curving around the inside edge of the hole. The water was shallow on the side where I stood, but I didn’t know how in the hell I could make it to where Sara was.

  Looking across to the boulder where Sara sat, I saw a few scattered stones lining the bottom of the river. The stones were just high enough to keep me from swimming and just close enough to be navigated by foot. This was the only shot I had. I kept the line taut and began wading across, carefully stepping on each scattered stone. I had to be sure not to put too much pressure on the fish or else the tippet was sure to snap under the weight, and I had to make each step perfectly so that I wouldn’t fall in. Rocking on a stone, I made it there, pulled the fish to hand, and showed off my graduation present.

  Pictures show a twenty-three-inch rainbow stretched across my cradled arms. The ’bow’s soft pink cheeks seem to blush from the embarrassment of being fooled. A pale cherry blossom pink line runs thinly down the trout’s sides. The fish is covered with black specks peppering its olive and silver body. My smile stretches from ear to ear, cheekbones raised high with satisfaction. This is my proudest photograph. That rainbow trout was the biggest trout I’d ever caught—an absolute monster on this river. Since that day, I’ve caught other trout over twenty inches, but none stands out in comparison. Coming four days before graduation seemed prophetic, a generous gift from the river I’d devoted the past four years to learning.

  I left the stream that day in awe. Cicadas buzzed from every limb, and the sky smoldered a lilac purple. I dismissed all thoughts of good grades and graduating cum laude. With the twenty-three-inch fish caught and released, I felt my college career was finally complete. Sara talked to me on the walk back, but I was speechless. My body was stirring with excitement as Sara wrapped her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek. My smile never lowered. I smiled for the rest of the night and into my sleep. That trout was by far the best present I received and was another check on the list. Two down and one to go.

  *****

  The Brown

  While living in Jackson County, I had caught plenty of big trout in the last few years, including the monster brookie and the big ’bow. Now in graduate school, the only thing left on my list was a fat-bellied brown trout. I’d seen friends catch twenty-inch browns with toothy mouths gaping and pitch black spots haloed in crimson. Envy is not a strong enough word for my yearning. I had to catch a big brown. It was a must.

  I’ve always been drawn to fish, and my favorite freshwater species as a kid was always the brown trout. That golden coloration had always seemed fascinatingly unnatural to me. I remember standing in front of the glass at the aquarium in Chattanooga, staring for what seemed like hours at the brown trout holding still in the artificially generated water. I read about their origin, as well as their introduction into North American waters. Amazingly, fly fisherman actually despised the European trout in the beginning, claiming that they were not sporty and refused traditional offerings. Their disapproval meant little to me. I knew that I had to catch a goliath brown.

  On the day that I saw the fish of my dreams, I was not even planning on catching a big trout. I entered the water at Webster Bridge, upstream of Beaver Kill Hole, at eight o’clock in the morning. There were thick clouds in the sky, but rain hadn’t fallen. I knew the torrents would come: I could smell the heaviness of summer rain in the air and could see it in the upturned leaves. There’d been few showers recently and the water was low, but the clarity was unusually darkened in the dim light. A sparse mayfly hatch carried over from the night before, and dead mayflies floated past with wings like willow leaves. Trout rose slowly, sipping the bugs from the film, and I knew it wouldn’t take long to fool a fish.

  I reached into the river and scooped up one of the spent mayflies. The body was a light orange-red. Trying to match the hatch, I chose a Sulphur Spinner that I’d tied and never fished. My imitation wasn’t an exact match, but maybe close enough to trick a trout. With the fly dangling from 6X tippet with a three-and-a-half-pound breaking strength, I cast into the slow run along the left bank. As the Sulphur drifted across the riffles, a shadow moved from the sandy bottom and, with its nose barely breaking the surface, swallowed my fly. I pulled up, felt the trout swimming toward cover, and turned the fish with steady tension from the 5-weight rod.

  With the fish reeled into my grasp, I held a gorgeous fourteen-inch brown trout with a deep o
chre back blending into school bus yellow around the belly. The fish was covered from snout to tail with leopard spots, some outlined with red coronas. The trout was breathtakingly beautiful but lacked the size of my dream brown. After kissing the fish on the snout, I went back to casting.

  Trout came up all over the water, grabbing mayflies like takeout lunches. I caught fish after fish for hours as I waded downstream. Surprisingly, every fish all morning was a brown. And to think those fly fishermen who first encountered brown trout in American water said that they wouldn’t rise to a dry fly. The Tuckasegee browns certainly were rising during the closing hours of this mayfly hatch, and quite sportingly as well, a hell of a fish to fight on the fly and gorgeous enough to hold me speechless.

  Around eleven o’clock, I stood in the deep bend just above Beaver Kill Hole. A light drizzle sprinkled the water’s surface, each drop producing liquid fireworks as the ripples spread into convergence. With rain coming down, the trout had stopped rising, losing sight of passing mayflies amid the chaos of undulating droplets pouncing across the top of the water. I searched through fly boxes for a Woolly Bugger, opting to fish a large pattern deep. I found a glittery, chartreuse Bugger with a golden bead head, barred silicone legs, and yellow Flashabou shimmering through the olive tail. Bright, big, and buggy, this fly would be perfect.

  The first cast swung along the current and was hammered, producing a nice, stocked brook trout. The next cast ended with the same result: a short fight, a stocked brookie, and a smile on my face. The action held firm, every cast producing a trout, for the entire shower. I caught trout on that fly until the palmered hackle was ripped away from the body, and even then the fish continued to nail the half-naked Bugger.