A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

by Norman Maclean

  It was getting to be after their bedtime, and it had been a long day for Paul and me, so I thought I'd help Mother with the dishes and then we'd turn in for the night. But I really knew that things weren't going to be that simple, and they knew it, too. Paul gave himself a stretch as soon as it was not immediately after dinner, and said, “I think I'll run over town and see some old pals. I'll be back before long, but don't wait up for me.”

  I helped my mother with the dishes. Although only one had left, all the voices had gone. He had stayed long enough after dinner for us to think he would be happy spending an evening at home. Each of us knew some of his friends, and all of us knew his favorite pal, who was big and easy and nice to us, especially to Mother. He had just got out of prison. His second stretch.

  From the time my mother stood looking at the closed doors until she went to bed, she said only, “Goodnight.” She said it over her shoulder near the head of the stairs to both my father and me.

  I never could tell how much my father knew about my brother. I generally assumed that he knew a good deal because there is a substantial minority in every church congregation who regard it as their Christian duty to keep the preacher informed about the preacher's kids. Also, at times, my father would start to talk to me about Paul as if he were going to open up a new subject and then he would suddenly put a lid on it before the subject spilled out.

  “Did you hear what Paul did lately?” he asked.

  I told him, “I don't understand you. I hear all kinds of things about Paul. Mostly, I hear he's a fine reporter and a fine fisherman.”

  “No, no,” my father said. “But haven't you heard what he does afterwards?”

  I shook my head.

  Then I think he had another thought about what he was thinking, and swerved from what he was going to say. “Haven't you heard,” he asked me, “that he has changed his spelling of our name from Maclean to MacLean. Now he spells it with a capital L.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “I knew all about that. He told me he got tired of nobody spelling his name right. They even wrote his paychecks with a capital L, so he finally decided to give up and spell his name the way others do.”

  My father shook his head at my explanation, its truth being irrelevant. He murmured both to himself and to me, “It's a terrible thing to spell our name with a capital L. Now somebody will think we are Scottish Lowlanders and not Islanders.”

  He went to the door and looked out and when he came back he didn't ask me any questions. He tried to tell me. He spoke in the abstract, but he had spent his life fitting abstractions to listeners so that listeners would have no trouble fitting his abstractions to the particulars of their lives.

  “You are too young to help anybody and I am too old,” he said. “By help I don't mean a courtesy like serving choke-cherry jelly or giving money.

  “Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.

  “So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, ‘Sorry, we are just out of that part.’ ”

  I told him, “You make it too tough. Help doesn't have to be anything that big.”

  He asked me, “Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?”

  “She might,” I told him. “In fact, yes, I think she does.”

  “Do you think you help him?” he asked me.

  “I try to,” I said. “My trouble is I don't know him. In fact, one of my troubles is that I don't even know whether he needs help. I don't know, that's my trouble.”

  “That should have been my text,” my father said. “We are willing to help, Lord, but what if anything is needed?

  “I still know how to fish,” he concluded. “Tomorrow we will go fishing with him.”

  I lay waiting a long time before finally falling asleep. I felt the rest of the upstairs was also waiting.

  Usually, I get up early to observe the commandment observed by only some of us—to arise early to see as much of the Lord's daylight as is given to us. I several times heard my brother open my door, study my covers, and then close my door. I began waking up by remembering that my brother, no matter what, was never late for work or fishing. One step closer to waking and I remembered that this was the trip when my brother was taking care of me. Now it began to seep into me that he was making my breakfast, and, when this became a matter of knowledge, I got up and dressed. All three were sitting at the table, drinking tea and waiting.

  Mother said, as if she had wakened to find herself Queen for a Day, “Paul made breakfast for us.” This made him feel good enough to smile early in the morning, but when he was serving me I looked closely and could see the blood vessels in his eyes. A fisherman, though, takes a hangover as a matter of course—after a couple of hours of fishing, it goes away, all except the dehydration, but then he is standing all day in water.

  We somehow couldn't get started that morning. After Paul and I had left home, Father put away his fishing tackle, probably thinking he was putting it away for good, so now he couldn't remember where. Mother had to find most of the things for him. She knew nothing about fishing or fishing tackle, but she knew how to find things, even when she did not know what they looked like.

  Paul, who usually got everyone nervous by being impatient to be on the stream, kept telling Father, “Take it easy. It's turned cooler. We'll make a killing today. Take it easy.” But my father, from whom my brother had inherited his impatience to have his flies on water, would look at me visibly loathing himself for being old and not able to collect himself.

  My mother had to go from basement to attic and to most closets in between looking for a fishing basket while she made lunches for three men, each of whom wanted a different kind of sandwich. After she got us in the car, she checked each car door to see that none of her men would fall out. Then she dried her hands in her apron, although her hands were not wet, and said, “Thank goodness,” as we drove away.

  I was at the wheel, and I knew before we started just where we were going. It couldn't be far up the Blackfoot, because we were starting late, and it had to be a stretch of water of two or three deep holes for Paul and me and one good hole with no bank too steep for Father to crawl down. Also, since he couldn't wade, the good fishing water had to be on his side of the river. They argued while I drove, although they knew just as well as I did where we had to go, but each one in our family considered himself the leading authority on how to fish the Blackfoot River. When we came to the side road going to the river above the mouth of Belmont Creek, they spoke in unison for the first time. “Turn here,” they said, and, as if I were following their directions, I turned to where I was going anyway.

  The side road brought us down to a flat covered with ground boulders and cheat grass. No livestock grazed on it, and grasshoppers took off like birds and flew great distances, because on this flat it is a long way between feeding grounds, even for grasshoppers. The flat itself and its crop of boulders are the roughly ground remains of one of geology's great disasters. The flat may well have been the end of the ice age lake, half as big as Lake Michigan, that in places was two thousand feet deep until the glacial dam broke and this hydraulic monster of the hills charged out on to the plains of eastern Washington. High on the mountains above where we stopped to fish are horizontal scars slashed by passing icebergs.

  I had to be careful driving toward the river so I wouldn't high-center the car on a boulder and break the crankcase. The flat ended suddenly and the river was down a steep bank, blinking silver through the trees and then turning to blue by comparing itself to a red and green cliff. It was another world to see and feel, and another world of rocks. The boulders on the flat were shaped by the last ice
age only eighteen or twenty thousand years ago, but the red and green precambrian rocks beside the blue water were almost from the basement of the world and time.

  We stopped and peered down the bank. I asked my father, “Do you remember when we picked a lot of red and green rocks down there to build our fireplace? Some were red mudstones with ripples on them.”

  “Some had raindrops on them,” he said. His imagination was always stirred by the thought that he was standing in ancient rain spattering on mud before it became rocks.

  “Nearly a billion years ago,” I said, knowing what he was thinking.

  He paused. He had given up the belief that God had created all there was, including the Blackfoot River, on a six-day work schedule, but he didn't believe that the job so taxed God's powers that it took Him forever to complete.

  “Nearly half a billion years ago,” he said as his contribution to reconciling science and religion. He hurried on, not wishing to waste any part of old age in debate, except over fishing. “We carried those big rocks up the bank,” he said, “but now I can't crawl down it. Two holes below, though, the river comes out in the open and there is almost no bank. I'll walk down there and fish, and you fish the first two holes. I'll wait in the sun. Don't hurry.”

  Paul said, “You'll get 'em,” and all of a sudden Father was confident in himself again. Then he was gone.

  We could catch glimpses of him walking along the bank of the river which had been the bottom of the great glacial lake. He held his rod straight in front of him and every now and then he lunged forward with it, perhaps reenacting some glacial race memory in which he speared a hairy ice age mastodon and ate him for breakfast.

  Paul said, “Let's fish together today.” I knew then that he was still taking care of me, because we almost always split up when we fished. “That's fine,” I said. “I'll wade across and fish the other side,” he said. I said, “Fine,” again, and was doubly touched. On the other side you were backed against cliffs and trees, so it was mostly a roll-casting job, never my specialty. Besides, the river was powerful here with no good place to wade, and next to fishing Paul liked swimming rivers with his rod in his hand. It turned out he didn't have to swim here, but as he waded sometimes the wall of water rose to his upstream shoulder while it would be no higher than his hip behind him. He stumbled to shore from the weight of water in his clothes, and gave me a big wave.

  I came down the bank to catch fish. Cool wind had blown in from Canada without causing any electric storms, so the fish should be off the bottom and feeding again. When a deer comes to water, his head shoots in and out of his shoulders to see what's ahead, and I was looking all around to see what fly to put on. But I didn't have to look further than my neck or my nose. Big clumsy flies bumped into my face, swarmed on my neck and wiggled in my underwear. Blundering and soft-bellied, they had been born before they had brains. They had spent a year under water on legs, had crawled out on a rock, had become flies and copulated with the ninth and tenth segments of their abdomens, and then had died as the first light wind blew them into the water where the fish circled excitedly. They were a fish's dream come true—stupid, succulent, and exhausted from copulation. Still, it would be hard to know what gigantic portion of human life is spent in this same ratio of years under water on legs to one premature, exhausted moment on wings.

  I sat on a log and opened my fly box. I knew I had to get a fly that would match these flies exactly, because when a big hatch like this or the salmon fly is out, the fish won't touch anything else. As proof, Paul hadn't had a strike yet, so far as I could see.

  I figured he wouldn't have the right fly, and I knew I had it. As I explained earlier, he carried all his flies in his hat-band. He thought that with four or five generals in different sizes he could imitate the action of nearly any aquatic or terrestrial insect in any stage from larval to winged. He was always kidding me because I carried so many flies. “My, my,” he would say, peering into my fly box, “wouldn't it be wonderful if a guy knew how to use ten of all those flies.” But I've already told you about the Bee, and I'm still sure that there are times when a general won't turn a fish over. The fly that would work now had to be a big fly, it had to have a yellow, black-banded body, and it had to ride high in the water with extended wings, something like a butterfly that has had an accident and can't dry its wings by fluttering in the water.

  It was so big and flashy it was the first fly I saw when I opened my box. It was called a Bunyan Bug, tied by a fly tyer in Missoula named Norman Means, who ties a line of big flashy flies all called Bunyan Bugs. They are tied on big hooks, No. 2's and No. 4's, have cork bodies with stiff horsehair tied crosswise so they ride high in the water like drag-onflies on their backs. The cork bodies are painted different colors and then are shellacked. Probably the biggest and flashiest of the hundred flies my brother made fun of was the Bunyan Bug No. 2 Yellow Stone Fly.

  I took one look at it and felt perfect. My wife, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law, each in her somewhat obscure style, had recently redeclared their love for me. I, in my somewhat obscure style, had returned their love. I might never see my brother-in-law again. My mother had found my father's old tackle and once more he was fishing with us. My brother was taking tender care of me, and not catching any fish. I was about to make a killing.

  It is hard to cast Bunyan Bugs into the wind because the cork and horsehair make them light for their bulk. But, though the wind shortens the cast, it acts at the same time to lower the fly slowly and almost vertically to the water with no telltale splash. My Stone Fly was still hanging over the water when what seemed like a speedboat went by it, knocked it high into the air, circled, opened the throttle wide on the returning straight away, and roared over the spot marked X where the Stone Fly had settled. Then the speedboat turned into a submarine, disappearing with all on board including my fly, and headed for deep water. I couldn't throw line into the rod fast enough to keep up with what was disappearing and I couldn't change its course. Not being as fast as what was under water, I literally forced it into the air. From where I was I suppose I couldn't see what happened, but my heart was at the end of the line and telegraphed back its impressions as it went by. My general impression was that marine life had turned into a rodeo. My particular information was that a large Rainbow had gone sun-fishing, turning over twice in the air, hitting my line each time and tearing loose from the fly which went sailing out into space. My distinct information was that it never looked around to see. My only close-at-hand information was that when the line was reeled in, there was nothing on the end of it but some cork and some hairs from a horse's tail.

  The stone flies were just as thick as ever, fish still swirled in quiet water, and I was a little smarter. I don't care much about taking instructions, even from myself, but before I made the next cast I underlined the fact that big Rainbows sometimes come into quiet waters because aquatic insects hatch in or near quiet waters. “Be prepared,” I said to myself, remembering an old war song. I also accepted my own advice to have some extra coils of line in my left hand to take some of the tension off the first run of the next big Rainbow swirling in quiet water.

  So on this wonderful afternoon when all things came together it took me one cast, one fish, and some reluctantly accepted advice to attain perfection. I did not miss another.

  From then on I let them run so far that sometimes they surged clear across the river and jumped right in front of Paul.

  When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say “more perfect” because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it. Twenty minutes ago I had felt perfect, but by now my brother was taking off his hat and changing flies every few casts. I knew he didn't carry any such special as a Bunyan Bug No. 2 Yellow Stone Fly. I had five or six big Rainbows in my basket which began to hurt my shoulder so I left it behind on shore. Once in a while I looked back and smiled at the basket. I could hear it thumping on the rocks
and falling on its side. However I may have violated grammar, I was feeling more perfect with every Rainbow.

  Just after my basket gave an extra large thump there was an enormous splash in the water to the left of where I was casting. “My God,” I thought before I could look, “there's nothing that big that swims in the Blackfoot,” and, when I dared look, there was nothing but a large circle that got bigger and bigger. Finally the first wave went by my knees. “It must be a beaver,” I thought. I was waiting for him to surface when something splashed behind me. “My God,” I said again, “I would have seen a beaver swim by me under water.” While I was wrenching my neck backwards, the thing splashed right in front of me, too close for comfort but close enough so I could watch what was happening under water. The silt was rising from the bottom like smoke from the spot where lightning had struck. A fair-sized rock was sitting in the spot where the smoke was rising.

  While I was relating my past to the present rock, there was another big splash in front of me, but this time I didn't bother to jump.

  Beaver, hell! Without looking, I knew it was my brother. It didn't happen often in this life, only when his fishing partner was catching fish and he couldn't. It was a sight, however rare, that he could not bear to watch. So he would spoil his partner's hole, even if it was his brother's. I looked up just in time to see a fair-sized boulder come out of the sky and I ducked too late to keep it from splashing all over me.

  He had his hat off and he shook his fist at me. I knew he had fished around his hat band before he threw the rocks. I shook my fist back at him, and waded to shore, where my basket was still thumping. In all my life, I had got the rock treatment only a couple of times before. I was feeling more perfect than ever.

  I didn't mind that he spoiled the hole before I had filled my basket, because there was another big hole between us and father. It was a beautiful stretch of water, against cliffs and in shadows. The hole I had just fished was mostly in sunlight—the weather had become cooler, but was still warm enough so that the hole ahead in shadows should be even better than the one in sunlight and I should have no trouble finishing off my basket with a Bunyan Bug No. 2 Yellow Stone Fly.