by Tony Taylor
We stopped, as all good anglers should, six metres away from the water—the exact length of Dame Juliana Berners’ stiff and heavy fishing rod. I explained to Ned how she would have fished and that fishing for us was absolutely impossible. The little chap nodded his head wisely.
‘The water is so fierce today, Grandpa, there is a good chance that the abbess would be washed away,’ he said.
We stood looking at the river, listening to its roar, for what seemed like a full five minutes, and I was impressed with the way Ned took it all in. He seemed thoughtful for his age and able to concentrate, and I thought this was a good sign. I felt pretty sure then—although fishing would be difficult for some time, and we only had a few days—that he would catch a fish.
We walked upstream to the big canyon, to where I thought the young man visiting from Mexico had launched his rubber raft. I tried to understand why anyone would attempt to travel down a river in this condition, but it was beyond my comprehension. I concluded that many of us had become disconnected from nature, although I wasn’t sure why. A lot of things puzzled me these days, so I patted my grandson on the shoulder and suggested we should return to the cabin. The smart little chap agreed.
On the way back, we talked a lot about living in the woods, and he seemed remarkably sensible for an eight-year-old. Maybe Matthew had told him that he should listen to his grandfather, but I don’t think that was so; instead it seemed to me he had the same kind of curiosity I’d had as a child. I decided that probably all eight-year-olds were like this to some extent, although I couldn’t remember much about his father at that age at all. Perhaps the problems I was having at that time with my marriage had interfered with my relationship with my son and now nature was giving me a second chance. At any rate, whatever it was we talked about as we walked back from the river was good for both of us and we arrived at the cabin with an appetite for lunch.
Food, perhaps because it is harder to get and more difficult to prepare, always tastes better in the bush. If things had gone according to plan we would have been eating salmon or at the very least a trout, but as my father, Ned’s great-grandfather, used to say, the red gods hadn’t smiled. I suddenly flashed back to following my father carrying his double-barrelled shotgun through the English woods and me walking three paces behind him like a trained gundog. It was during the Great Depression. I thought perhaps I should mention this to Ned, but in the end I decided just to write it down in my notebook.
I noticed Ned watching me closely. He was too polite to ask what I was writing about, and I decided his parents were doing an excellent job bringing him up. He was cheeky like his father was as a kid, but more polite. Or perhaps I am more tolerant.
Our lunch was a hearty one: long, crusty loaves, plentiful butter and excellent cheese and, most thrilling for me, real root beer. Australia nowadays has probably the world’s best ginger beer but North America has root beer and the really good stuff is not found anywhere else.
During the afternoons for the last year or so I have got into the habit of taking a short nap. There were plenty of interesting things close to the cabin for Ned and Matthew to do without me. Kindling needed to be split for a start, so I left that for my son to organise and stretched out on one of the bunks and fell asleep. I slept much longer than I intended and when I woke the fire was blazing and it was dark. Obviously my body was still adjusting to having sat upright for all those hours on those cramped and narrow seats over the Pacific. Talking to my grandson for the first time, although marvellous, was also perhaps a stressful experience.
In one corner of the main part of the cabin there was a shelf where people had left books, magazines and games. Ned and Matthew were playing chess. Dinner simply required heating on the top of the stove and we passed the evening telling stories instead of watching bad television. It was very enjoyable, and we all agreed that people should stay in log cabins more often.
We told lots of stories. I told Ned about climbing mountains in Greenland and how back in 1957 with some other geologists I had measured the size of the Atlantic Ocean and proved it was nineteen centimetres wider than when Alfred Wegener first measured it in 1930. That, I told Ned, was just before he fell into a nearby crevasse and disappeared forever. Ned was impressed, not because continents moved, but because they moved so slowly. He didn’t know anything about glaciers and crevasses so I had to explain. I livened things up by telling him how a musk ox chased my friend John Soulsby up a hill and I captured it all on a movie camera. That film, I told him, was somewhere in his basement and if his dad got it reprocessed onto a DVD he could watch the whole thing on his computer or TV.
Eventually we went to bed. Ned climbed his ladder to his top bunk. On his way, he said, ‘Grandpa, the best thing about staying in a log cabin is the stories.’
His father took a bedroom downstairs to the left and I just pulled up my sleeping bag and slept on the couch in front of the fire. From time to time during the night I threw on another couple of logs.
As I lay there in front of the fire it seemed to me there were five things a person could do every day to be healthy, hopeful and happy and I wanted to pass these on to my grandson. I knew I couldn’t just tell him; I had to demonstrate by my example. The first is to develop friendships so I always smile and greet people politely giving them a chance to speak if they want to. Being physically active is always important, although I don’t have a high opinion of organised games. Thirdly, everyone every day until the day they die should foster curiosity about the world. Doing this achieves the fourth and most important thing, which is continuing your education throughout your life. The last is not to think about money all the time. Instead offer help and services to all. These five things maintain good mental health.
10
The Mad Swede
By now it was Thursday morning. Ned and I went down to the river and between the little fellow’s questions, each of which I answered immediately, I found myself thinking about the other rivers that flowed to the west instead of east like the Cowichan. Ned, I think, became conscious of his grandfather’s meditative mood and experimented for himself lowering his fly into a small patch of slightly less fierce water that was protected by a huge rock. It was an excellent place for a steelhead to lie, but in these conditions there was no response. At this time of the year because of the spring melt the fishing in rivers everywhere on the island was particularly bad.
I thought again about the one occasion I had fished the Nitinat with Big Arthur and a friend he had brought along. Mostly I fished that river that ran into Nitinat Lake alone, but Arthur’s friend had apparently always lacked success as a fisherman and Arthur, although he hadn’t said so, had decided to bring this stranger along and give him to me for instruction.
When we got to the river Arthur shot off a kilometre upstream, where he knew a good place to fish, and he left me at a less desirable spot to help the beginner. Teaching is a never-ending learning process for anyone who attempts it. But it is a valuable experience because, as time goes on, the teacher learns that there are very few correct answers.
On that far-off day in the sixties I stood at the end of a gravel bar with the person I have thought of ever since as the mad Swede. I don’t actually know if Erik was a Swede, but he wore a white peaked sailor’s cap like I remember Swedish students wearing in Europe. Arthur told me his friend could never catch fish, and years later I realised it was the white cap that was the problem. A flash of white high above the water looks like the white underside of the wings of a predatory bird. Fish instinctively dash for cover.
So Erik and I were left on the tip of a stretch of gravel sticking out into the river casting to a couple of steelhead that I had spotted some way upstream. Erik stood meekly by and asked me to demonstrate how it was done. It was a very long cast so I had to double-haul, a difficult operation which puts quite a powerful bend in the rod. About thirty metres away my fly hit the water. I then allowed it to sink, and bumped it a few times past the first steelhead and fina
lly irritated it into striking. It was such a long cast that the fish could not see us. I led that steelhead away from the other fish. It ran out into the big pool and I fought it hard. Finally, I drew the fish in and killed it by whacking it on the head. I laid it on the gravel bar behind us and that was it for my day.
‘Your turn now,’ I said to Erik, but he made some excuse, saying that he hadn’t really understood what was happening, so would I do everything again and hook another fish. Then, he said, he would play it and reel it in. I thought this a silly idea and refused, but eventually I agreed to do it because he could not possibly cast to where the other fish was lying. I made a second cast and the second steelhead was now on. It was bigger and harder to land than the first.
The fish was leaping all over the river when I heard the most terrible noise behind me. Erik was swearing in a mixture of Swedish and English, and I twisted my body, still fighting the steelhead, to see an angry adult black bear. It was standing up and roaring while Erik hurled grapefruit-sized rocks at its head with deadly accuracy. The bear didn’t like it at all.
‘He’s trying to get your fish,’ shouted Erik.
‘Let him have it,’ I shouted back.
‘Not bloody likely,’ shouted Erik and he hit the bear with another rock squarely between the eyes.
It was quite ridiculous: a three-hundred-kilogram male black bear being attacked by an angry, bilingual, swearing seventy-kilogram Swede wearing a ridiculous white yachting cap. I suppose the contest didn’t really last that long, but in the end the bear retreated into the bush very annoyed. It started ripping out small trees and throwing them into the river. I landed the second steelhead about the same time and Erik and I avoided the angry bear on the left bank by wading and half swimming across the river and upstream to join Big Arthur.
When we got there Erik gave me the smaller fish. ‘How did you do?’ Big Arthur asked and Erik showed him the larger fish and said, ‘This is mine.’
I learned quite a lot from that day. Some people can be more aggressive than bears and sometimes outwit them, but I still think it is largely luck—you can’t rely on it. I learned that some people are possessive about fish, even more so than bears are. Also, for some people size does matter especially with fish and it is important to have the biggest one. I still think Erik should have allowed that hungry bear to have the steelhead.
Since that day I have had lots of encounters with grizzlies as well as black bears. Of the two I think black bears are probably more dangerous simply because they are not monarch of all they survey and are forced to use subterfuge. Most of the time neither of these bears are much of a problem and when I look at the world around me, read a newspaper or watch television, there is no doubt in my mind that man is the world’s most dangerous animal.
I talked to Ned about this and he agreed it would have been more sensible to have left the bear with the first fish and have gone fishing somewhere else.
‘Do you think we might meet a bear today, Grandpa?’ he asked. I reassured him that if we did we would quietly move away and if we didn’t have any fish the bear probably wouldn’t bother us.
I told Ned I loved the area around Nitinat Lake, even though the wind that funnelled down the lake in the afternoons made it much more dangerous to canoe than the slightly larger Cowichan Lake. I had spent a lot of time there fishing the rivers that entered it and exploring the numerous other lakes in the area that nearly all connected up. It seems now, looking back to those days in the late sixties when I lived in Meade’s cabin on the North Arm, that every time I went out with my rod I caught fish.
One day I had a visitor from Australia: the museum curator in the geology department at the Australian National University. I had known George Halford well when I was teaching at the ANU and we had fished together on several occasions when collecting rock and fossil specimens. The most memorable was at the beautiful Blue Waterhole in the Snowy Mountains where I was introducing George, a skilled bait fisher, to the joys of the artificial fly. The limit for trout in those days in Australia was ten fish. I have never liked the idea of limits because many anglers will continue to fish until they catch the limit as George was trying to do that day. But after landing six rainbow trout he hooked himself in the back of the head and I had to remove the fly from his skull with a pair of pliers in the headlights of the Jeep.
I took George fishing in the big pool in the Cowichan River just below the bridge. If I remember correctly he wanted to fish in the river because it had just been listed as one of the top six rivers in the world in Field & Stream. I suppose George fished for about two hours and I paddled the canoe around the big pool. We saw the odd swirl of what looked like a fish, but George didn’t have any luck. Finally, he suggested I try. I was reluctant because I really wanted him to connect, but he insisted. I think maybe it was on the second or third cast that I had a fish on. It jumped all over the big pool and towed the canoe around until George got it into the boat. It was beautiful and silver and I showed George the fresh sea lice on its body. Sea lice can only live for about twelve hours in fresh water so the fish must have entered the river that day from the sea. I think it weighed about five kilograms. George was as thrilled as if he had landed it himself. We took it back to the cabin and made dinner.
Until that time I had never really fished the Cowichan. I had always fished to the west because the country there was deserted and wild. The fish I caught with George was the first I ever caught in the river, but was not the last. Later in my time in the cabin I fished the river occasionally with a much older man, Professor Lewis Clark, who was writing a book on the botany of the region and used to come to the Cowichan to fish. I learned a lot from watching that old man who was an effortless caster and a skilful angler. Like me he didn’t care about the size or weight of a fish, he fished because he loved the river. Much of the time he just photographed flowers for his book.
About this time my new rod arrived from Scotland. In the sixties quality rods were made of split cane and the cane was always Tonkin bamboo. The normal fly rod in those days was only eight feet (2.4 metres) long in order to keep it as light as possible but this special rod, made for me by Rob Wilson of Brora, was eight foot, nine inches (2.7 metres). It was intended to replace the big salmon rod that had snapped in two when I was fishing the river below the Chief’s Hole. It was stiffer than my regular trout rod as well as eight centimetres longer but still very light. Rob built it especially for me and modelled it on what was then the world’s most famous distance-casting rod, the Kohinoor made by Hardy, and he only charged me six pounds.
Many fly rods even today are still about this length for it is argued that continual casting demands a light rod. True, most of the rivers I fished to the west of the lake did not require much long casting, but it seemed to me then that the Cowichan, which was a big river and fished more often than the western rivers, might require a more sophisticated rod capable of casting further than was normal.
I realise now that all young anglers think long casting is necessary. It is a big mistake. Armed with this equipment and a stripping basket to hold the loose line I could cast a shooting head right across the river, but I would have been far better off watching Lewis Clark who always seemed to catch fish right in front of his feet. Why I thought I needed this extra tackle I don’t really know because most of the steelhead I had caught so far I had landed using my lighter trout rod.
The new rod of course was designed to be used for salmon as well as large steelhead, but now, forty years later, I think it was not really needed. The eleven-foot (3.3-metre) rod I use now is perhaps not quite as light as the old standard nine footer popular in the sixties but it fishes much better. Every foot added to a rod doubles its usefulness but for rods longer than eleven feet one is probably forced to cast using both hands.
The fish I landed in the river pool with George that in our excitement we identified as a fresh run silver salmon I now think was a lone steelhead. We just assumed it was a salmon because of its size. M
ost people at that time believed that steelhead were trout and even biologists had not yet worked out they are in fact the ancestors of the five other Pacific salmon—the chinook or spring, the coho or silver, the sockeye, the pink or humpback and the chum or dog. There were so many large fish in those days that people paid less attention to them and knew far less about them than they do today.
The big fish we caught hadn’t been in the river long enough for even the faintest rainbow stripe to develop on its flanks, for as I said it had only been a few hours since it had left the sea. I think now the fish was one of that special race of steelhead that went right up through the lake to spawn at the far end of Shaw Creek on the north-west side of Cowichan Lake. When it reached that lovely creek, much beloved by Farson, it would develop the characteristic rainbow stripe and be ready to breed.
I was thinking about all these things and had lost track of time. Then Ned came up to ask me if we could explore downstream. Our foray travelling up the river had been unsuccessful, but I could tell he had gained something from it.
‘There will probably be even more fast water down there, Grandpa,’ he said, ‘but let’s go and look anyway just in case.’
‘Good idea,’ I said.
We crossed the footbridge which led to the old logging road, and then Ned and I followed a rough trail that veered to the right. There were lots of rushes in the area and a bit of a swamp, and it was quite hard going for a while until we reached the river. There appeared to be a narrow channel separating a rocky tree-covered islet. The main part of the river flowed on the other side of the islet. The water in the narrow channel was also very fast and it was clear that it had overflowed into the swamp. It didn’t seem to be suitable water to hold fish.
