Trout Quintet

by Steve Raymond

  The days grew shorter as August waned. The season of grasshoppers soon passed and with their disappearance many anglers disappeared too; only a few regulars remained to patrol the stream. One day Sam sighted Frank Vincent, his old fishing partner, coming downstream, pausing to throw a few casts into each pool as he came, though without visible result.

  Suddenly Sam had a wild idea: He would take Frank’s fly, allow himself to be hooked, and give Frank the fight of his life! It wasn’t suicide he was contemplating, for he knew that Frank always released every fish he caught. The only risk was the possibility that he might fight too hard or too long and exhaust himself beyond recovery. But he thought he could recognize his limits and prevent that from happening.

  He moved beyond the sheltered bank and positioned himself in the pool at a place he knew Frank was bound to cover with his fly, and waited for his old friend’s approach.

  That’s when he started having second thoughts. Was this really such a good idea? Could he be absolutely certain that Frank would release him? For a moment he was consumed with doubt. Then he remembered the many times he and Frank had spent together on the Amalak, how they had always trusted and respected one another, how he had never seen Frank kill a trout, even a rainbow larger than Sam was himself. Thus reassured, he waited until he saw Frank’s fly swinging toward him, the lethal hook hanging from its dubbed body. Focusing as well as he could, Sam assured himself the hook had no barb. He rushed forward and took the fly in his mouth.

  The hook entered his lower jaw, but there was no pain—just an unfamiliar sudden feeling of restraint. He had not expected any pain; as a human fisherman, he had learned that the pea-sized brains of trout lack a neocortex, and without one it is impossible to experience pain. He didn’t like the feeling of restraint, though, and his response was more from instinct than calculation. He turned and raced downstream through the pool, as fast as he could, feeling the weight of Frank’s line and the restraining drag of his reel as he went. He knew the reel must be making a lot of noise, giving Frank an extra thrill, but to Sam it was inaudible over the sounds of the river and his own frantic passage.

  He ran as far as he could, but finally had to pause and try to force water through his gills. He looked around desperately but did not know where he was; he had run downstream into an unfamiliar pool. Then his head was jerked cruelly around as Frank tightened the connection and began reeling in line. Against his will, Sam was pulled roughly upstream against the current, which now pulsed so rapidly through his gills that he thought he might drown from the sheer volume of water. This was something he hadn’t expected, something he had never known a trout had to cope with in a battle for its life.

  Frank was still some distance upstream, but Sam could see him advancing, reeling as he came. He fought the relentless pressure, gained a tiny bit of slack in the line, and used it to fling himself high out of the water. The sudden flash of daylight nearly blinded him, and in a corner of his mind he realized it was the first time he had been completely out of water since he had become a trout.

  He’d hoped he might fall back on Frank’s leader and break it—all thoughts of treating Frank to a good fight were now gone—but Frank dipped his rod skillfully to ease tension on the leader, and Sam either missed it or was unable to break it. He took advantage of the moment of slack and again hurled himself high into the air, then fell back into the water with a heavy splash, again missing the leader.

  Frank stopped his advance and planted his feet firmly upstream, apparently ready to fight it out. He kept up the pressure, forcing Sam grudgingly but steadily upstream. Up ahead Sam saw an old branch with one end anchored to the stream bottom and the other waving an invitation in the current. If he could reach it, he could foul Frank’s leader on the snag and break off.

  Frank had seen it too, though, and when Sam veered toward the snag he reared back on his rod and knocked Sam off balance. For an instant he was at the mercy of both Frank and the stream, and soon his old friend had him back under control, reeling in, forcing Sam steadily in a direction he now desperately did not want to go.

  The give-and-take battle continued for what seemed a long while, with Sam growing ever more exhausted. He burned all his strength, used every trick or tactic he could remember or imagine, but Frank’s pressure was relentless and finally Sam had nothing left. He rolled sluggishly on his side, unable even to stay upright in the current, and could not resist as Frank led him, this time gently, into shallow water, then eased him onto the streamside gravel. His old friend knelt beside him, gently gripped Sam around his middle, then reached with his other hand into Sam’s mouth and expertly removed the barbless hook. For a long time he held Sam in the water, moving him back and forth to restore a rhythmic flow through his gills. Sam’s right eye transmitted a close-up view of the river bottom, but his left eye was looking up into Frank’s weathered face. Frank was looking right back, and Sam wondered if he saw anything familiar in the trout he held.

  At last Sam felt a spark of life returning to his weary body. Frank felt it too. “Good-bye, old friend,” he said, releasing his grip on Sam and letting the river have him back. Sam swam wearily to a patch of quiet water behind a nearby boulder and settled down to rest. He knew it would take a long time to recover his strength. He would need it to find his way back upstream to his cut-bank home. While he rested, he chastised himself for ever having thought of such a damn fool idea. He must have been out of his mind! The fight might have been a treat for Frank, but it seemed perilously close to suicide for him.

  He thought about what Frank had said and wondered if his old friend might somehow have recognized him. Then he remembered he’d heard Frank say “Goodbye, old friend” to nearly every trout he released, so he probably hadn’t known he was releasing Sam. How could he? Sam had no mirror in which to see himself, but he was quite sure his trout face bore no resemblance to his human visage.

  September brought a noticeable loss of light at each end of the day. Equally noticeable was the slow decline of the Amalak’s water temperature and the increasing number of leaves that fell upon the river like confetti at a parade. Those changes also brought fewer fishermen, including Frank; Sam saw him only twice more, and carefully avoided him each time.

  But Doctor Hobbs still came, his visits as deadly as ever. Without hatches to imitate, he fished what anglers called “attractor patterns”—flies with colors or flash designed to appeal to unwary or gullible trout. As always, his flies were perfectly designed and perfectly tied, and he seemed to catch and kill as many trout as ever.

  Small wonder, because soon there was little natural food of any kind left in the river. The water grew colder still, the days shorter, and more and more leaves came spiraling down. The current turned and tumbled them in its flow and the flickering gold, green and crimson images reminded Sam of how much he had loved the autumn colors when he had been able to see them in the world above. He regretted not having taken more walks in the autumn woods, or simply sitting at streamside to contemplate the season’s changing hues. These, he realized, were only a couple of many opportunities he’d squandered during his human existence, which left him more regretful still.

  To keep from being depressed by such thoughts, Sam turned to foraging, anxious to put on weight and store up strength for the coming winter. He rummaged through weeds on the river bottom, scooping up scuds and snails, and mined the rocks for unwary crayfish. One eye he kept always on the surface, searching for the water-logged remains of flies or terrestrial insects that had fallen into the stream. His other eye scanned the bottom, looking for slow-moving caddis larvae in their cases. That was one advantage of having trout eyes that could look in two directions at once.

  As the days passed, the routine of foraging became more a frantic quest because the results were ever less. Those spring mornings when Sam had waited pleasantly for the river to warm him and its other life were all but forgotten now; each morning seemed colder than the last, and it was a greater effort for Sam to stir, to f
lex his muscles and go about his daily business, especially when that business returned so little profit. More and more he found himself lunging after unidentified bits of drift that turned out to be tiny pieces of bark or moldy leaf instead of the insect larvae he had hoped they were. His trout brain signaled constantly that he was hungry, and it seemed impossible to stem the emptiness he felt inside.

  Then it began to rain. At first the rain was gentle and came only in spurts, but then it began raining steadily, harder and harder, until it seemed it would never stop. The river, usually placid, suddenly grew hostile and snarling, its gentle sounds of passage replaced by a fearful and relentless roar. Clear water became cloudy, cloudy water turned dark and frothy, and the river brought down a harvest of rotting leaves, broken branches, and other bits of flotsam. Rocks began tumbling noisily in the riverbed and the skeletons of fallen trees flashed by in the rising flood. The Amalak spilled over its banks and flooded the woods and fields on either side, and for a trout there was no chance to think of food or anything except the need for shelter. Sam edged as far back into his cut-bank home as he could go, finding at least a modicum of protection from the freshet. There he hunkered down and waited for the flood to pass.

  He had no idea how long he waited, but the rain eventually subsided, the river slowly settled back into itself and its water changed gradually from muddy back to cloudy, then to almost clear. The fearsome sound and violence of the flood became muted and at last faded altogether. When it was safe to move around again and the water was clear enough to see, Sam looked out into a world very different from the one he remembered. The pool next to his home had been completely rearranged. Rocks of all sizes and even a few large boulders had moved or disappeared, a deep spot on the pool’s far side had filled with silt, and the skeletal remains of an old fir tree had become lodged at the tail of the pool. The tree’s octopus-like roots were wedged firmly in a cluster of rocks and its narrowing tip was pointed diagonally downstream, near enough to the surface that water was breaking over it. Only Sam’s lair seemed to have escaped damage from the flood.

  It was almost too much for a trout to comprehend, and Sam returned to his refuge and settled down to wait for whatever might come next.

  He spent the winter there, most of the time dozing in a sort of Zen state, moving little, thinking of nothing. A few times he stirred to peer outside his den, sometimes catching glimpses of thick snow clinging to tree limbs visible through his narrow, ever-shifting window of vision, but mostly all he saw was darkness. The cruel, relentless cold seemed to last forever, but at last Sam became vaguely aware the days were beginning to lengthen and the water was becoming infinitesimally warmer.

  One day he thought he saw a mayfly nymph drifting past. Instantly, he shook off his lethargy and tried to make his stiff fins respond as he moved into the mainstream to capture it. The effort failed, but a few more nymphs followed, and he did capture some. Yet despite having eaten hardly anything at all through the long winter, he was surprised to realize he had little appetite.

  That’s when he also realized his body was changing. With the usual difficulty, he surveyed himself and was alarmed at what he saw: His once pure-white belly was dark and dirty-looking, his flanks, formerly so bright, were dark and gravid, and the thin red stripes he had once sported on his sides had widened until they looked like angry sunsets.

  Suddenly the truth dawned: He was getting ready to spawn!

  The thought stunned him. In his old age as a human, sex was something Sam had almost forgotten; now the sudden prospect of having it again, as a trout, was mind-boggling, even frightening. He hadn’t bargained for this—well, for that matter, of course, he hadn’t bargained to become a trout at all—and Sam was not at all sure he wanted to go through with it. He wasn’t even sure he could go through with it. For one thing, he didn’t know the protocol. For another, the thought of making love on the hard gravel of a stream bottom, in icy cold water, was not in the least appealing.

  The more he thought about it, the more he decided he would try to resist the spawning impulse when it came.

  He had not long to wait. Other trout, strange ones he’d never seen before, started passing through the pool next to his undercut bank. They too wore spawning colors and were moving anxiously upstream, and Sam felt an overwhelming desire to join them, a deep instinctive urge to carry out what his trout’s body had been biologically programmed to do. Until this time he’d always felt in control of the body he occupied, but now that feeling was suddenly in doubt. His human resolve to stay put contended with the nearly irresistible instinct of the trout, and he understood the crisis of his trout existence was at hand.

  For several days he remained in his lair, fighting the relentless urge to join the steady procession of ripe trout passing by his home, reminding him continually of his trout’s duty. It required an almost physical effort to resist the powerful pull of instinct and the strain began to tell on both his strength and resolve. A fierce debate raged in his mind. Could spawning really be so bad? Should he just go ahead and get it over with? Why was he so determined not to go? Was he afraid he might humiliate himself because he wasn’t sure exactly what was expected of him? He felt like a teenaged boy about to go on his first date.

  It occurred to him his lack of experience was no excuse because most of the other trout swimming past were first-time spawners too; they didn’t know the drill any better than he did. They were relying on instinct; why shouldn’t he? Another thought struck him: Some of those other trout also might contain the spirits of reincarnated human anglers. If they could do it, why not he?

  In the end, his resistance gave out and his will gave in. The trout within him took control, and in a flash Sam found himself in the middle of a swarm of trout heading upstream. With no idea where he was going, he pushed against the heavy cold current that resisted every inch of progress, leaving familiar surroundings, passing through strange pools and riffles, going farther upstream than he ever had fished as a human. Keeping pace with the other trout, he pressed on toward an unknown destination, bypassing several small tributaries where some of the other trout turned off, following the others ever onward as the Amalak grew smaller and smaller.

  After what seemed an interminable journey, he came at last to a spot where most of the other remaining trout had halted and were circling restlessly off the mouth of a small tributary. Was this where they were bound? Water flowing from the tributary bore a scent that seemed vaguely familiar, though Sam knew he had never been in this place before. The only explanation was that the trout whose body he now inhabited had been in this place before and recognized the scent, and this indeed was his destination.

  He pushed his way through the circling trout and entered the tributary. It was narrow and even colder than the main stem and crowded with anxious trout battling for position, trying to get ahead of the rest of the pack. Sam felt claustrophobic in the close quarters; worse yet, there was no place to hide. The backs of most of the trout were almost out of the shallow water, and ospreys, raccoons, bears, or any hungry predators could easily grab them. Sam wished he’d possessed the energy and will to hold out against the spawning urge; this was definitely not a place he wanted to be.

  Yet here he was, and with his size—larger than most of the other trout—he was able to fight his way through the squirming, struggling, slippery swarm of fish. His goal was to reach the front of the pack, but after a while he realized there was no front, just more trout as far ahead as he could see, all packed together in the narrow rush of water. Crows and ravens hopped in the tall grass on either side of the stream, picking at the rotting remains of trout already killed by predators. He wondered when it would be his turn.

  Soon he came upon a large, dark, spawned-out trout lying on its side in an eddy, its gills opening and closing spasmodically as it waited for death. He encountered the corpse of another spawned-out trout that had gotten caught in streamside brush, followed by another and another. These constant reminders that spawning coul
d sometimes be fatal to a trout led him to wondering about the paradox of death and procreation being so closely associated. That’s when he remembered it wasn’t really a paradox at all but part of the whole grand scheme of things; the decaying carcasses would cycle nutrients back into the stream to help sustain the tiny, teeming creatures that would become food for the new generation of trout.

  He thought about that as he kept going upstream, recklessly spending the last reserves of his strength. The horde of trout at last began to thin and he entered a stretch of water where he could see spawning already had taken place; that was obvious from the sight of several dead and dying trout stranded in the shallows, and from the bright patches of gravel where they had dug their redds. The stream was a little wider here and the current flowed smoothly and evenly over the gravel, which made it an ideal place for trout to spawn. Just ahead he saw a sizeable female rainbow testing the midstream gravel with strong strokes of her broad tail. Sam stopped to watch.

  The trout saw him but said nothing. What was there to say? She continued digging, churning up algae-covered rocks, turning them over and replacing them with clean stones from underneath. Finally she paused to inspect her work, seemed satisfied, then turned and looked expectantly at Sam.

  Was it just his imagination, or had she winked at him?

  Of course it was his imagination; trout can’t wink! They can’t even close their eyes!

  But the message was unmistakable, and despite his uncertainties, the instinct buried deeply in his trout’s brain propelled him alongside the waiting female. He settled next to her, flank-to-flank until they were touching, though it wasn’t as sensuous as it might sound; to Sam she felt cold and her scales were rough. He was about to ask what he was supposed to do next when everything suddenly just happened. His female partner shuddered, her mouth opened in a great gaping yawn and she began shedding bright orange eggs into the gravel. Sam’s body seemed to respond automatically, duplicating her movements, and he felt as if his very essence was draining away as he spilled milt atop the glowing cargo of her eggs.