We were ready, but no fish rose. The sky went from blue to lavender to pale blue to gray to black.
“Watch for rings,” Parley Finger said. “They come up quieter than daydreams.”
Two hours passed. No rises. I dug a thermos out of my day pack and poured coffee for Angus. “Nothing,” I said.
“Patience,” Angus said. “Man like this wouldn’t bring us if there wasn’t something. Learn to trust people, son. Enjoy the stars.”
Silence virtually in the middle of the city. The steel rubble blocked sound or absorbed it.
Parley Finger made his way around the pool of stars at our feet. “Soon,” he whispered when he passed us.
Then it began.
Soft rises.
Whisper sips.
Rings expanding, crossing others. Stars jumped on the mirror, changing shapes, moving inward, shimmering, retreating, dancing.
Parley Finger squatted and patted his hat. “Every man for hisself,” he called over to us.
I watched him make a short roll cast. There was a small splash. His pole bent and stayed that way. I heard the drag clicking like an angry cicada, watched him strip it in, heard him crank, heard the line go out again. Five minutes turned to twenty. Angus poked me. “What’s taking him so long?’
“Big fish maybe?”
“In this spitwad?”
After another fifteen minutes Parley knelt at the water’s edge, dipped his hand into the stars, and stood up.
“What was it?” Angus called across.
“What we come here for, a fish,” our host said. He sat down. “Your turn.”
Fish were still rising.
“Age before youth,” I told Angus.
“Can you swim, sonny?”
We both laughed, but he stepped up, stripped out some line, and threw a short cast. The fly landed without a trace. Then a plop. Angus set the hook. The little rod arched.
“Jesus H.,” he said. His reel clacked and screeched. “Jesus H.,” he said again.
I sat down and lit a cigarette. Thirty minutes passed. “My arm may fall plumb off,” Angus said through gritted teeth. I had fished with him enough by then to know he wouldn’t quit. It was more than forty minutes before the fish gave in. We both knelt. I had a penlight in my shirt pocket and aimed the beam into the water.
“Horse,” Angus said.
It was more than two feet long with shoulders as wide as the back of my fist. I caught the fish’s tail and turned it on its side. “Brown.”
“Female,” Angus said. “Look at her belly. Weight?”
“Seven, eight, maybe more.”
“Jesus H. This magnificent creature, from a spitwad in an Ohio dump.”
When the fish swam away, Angus sank heavily beside me. There were more ripples on the surface.
“Thick with them,” Angus said. “Horses.”
My fish wasn’t quite as large as his, but it hit just as various fireworks exploded around the city, splashing our pond with reflected color.
We stayed at it into the morning and when the stars went away and the eastern sky showed milky gray, the fish stopped and the water glassed over and we trekked stiff-legged back through the rust hills to Parley’s truck.
We had coffee in his filthy workshop. “Whaddya think?” our host asked.
“We can’t write it,” I said.
“I thought that was the idea.”
“If we write it, somebody will figure it out, and pretty soon you’ll have people all over the place.”
“Probably right,” Parley Finger said. “At least you fellas had some good fishin’.”
“Where’d these fish come from?” Angus asked.
“Brood stock come down from Wisconsin. They was to close a hatchery up there. I had this pal and he got me some. I studied up, got the temperature just right, alkalinity, you name it. Perfect.”
“How old?” This from Angus.
“Some big mamas pushing twenty,” Parley Finger said.
Angus blinked. “Are you sure?”
“I oughtta be. I put ’em here myself.”
On the way to the airport Angus was uncommunicative. We flew coach, and each had a beer.
“Twenty years,” he said, fumbling with a pack of beer nuts. “Twice the age what most books and science say.”
“Controlled conditions. No stress.”
“Still,” he said. “That’s one of the things about trout. About the time you think you know it all and have seen it all, you see something else and the whole damn shebang gets discombobulated. Trout aren’t supposed to live that long, junkyard nirvana or not.”
“You’ve seen.”
“Sometimes seeing ain’t enough for believing. What’s the biggest brown you’ve ever seen?”
“Twenty-eight pounds. Hanging on the wall of a fish market in northern Michigan.”
“Lake Michigan fish?”
“Yep.”
“Not twenty years old, though. Ten max. Big lake, unlimited chow. Big water grows big fish. Small water, lives and fish are shorter. Nature’s way, son.”
“They’ve taken bigger in the White River.”
“Big, deep water. Rule holds. Eight, ten years. Odd one might go a bit older. Genes and habitat set the limits. Hard ceilings.”
We were silent for a moment.
“Rathead,” I said.
Angus stared at me.
“Hannah showed me. We only know what we know. We don’t know what we don’t know.”
“I were you,” he said, “I’d stay off the road of what we don’t know.”
“Snowflies?” I asked.
“Think I’ll grab some shut-eye,” he said, abruptly ending the conversation.
We flew to Minneapolis, where we took a boat up the Mississippi and caught small rainbows in a deep river hole using canned corn kernels.
From Minneapolis it was on to South Dakota, where we fished with a mother and daughter using nymphs made of old pantyhose.
In Elko, Nevada, we visited a sporting ranch where hookers had built a trout pond and fished between johns. Some customers were there only to fish.
In Merced, California, we caught small cutthroats from a large ditch that ran through fields of produce. A man named Jesus was our guide. His wife and five kids wintered in Texas and summered in California and he made fly rods out of small willows glued together and taught his kids about hatches. They lived in a trailer and worked migrant camps. Jesus made flies out of those materials he could get, cheap and easy stuff from ducks, chicks, songbirds, yarns, threads. They were works of art. The column I wrote about him helped him launch a mail-order business, which is now run by his sons.
I called Grand Marais from Fresno and talked to Fred Ciz. The club was going well. Karla Capo was seeing a dentist from Munising. Father Buzz had made his way through a bout of pneumonia, but was out and about again. Janey Pelkinnen was doing a “bang-up” job managing the club. Fred said they all wanted to know when I was coming home, but the best I could say was not soon. Home: I was taken by surprise by the emotions the word provoked.
Hannah met Angus and me in Tucson. It was hot beyond words and she was wearing a halter top, gauze skirt, and gold sandals.
“You go out in public like that?” Angus asked her.
“Daddy, I went butt-naked on a beach down the Baja one time,” she said. “I like being looked at.”
“I didn’t hear that,” he said, opening the tailgate of the jeep to stash his gear.
“You heard.” She planted a kiss on my cheek and patted my left buttock. “How was the trip?”
“Exhausting,” I said. “I don’t know how he does it and I’m not even half his age.”
“It’s because he can sleep between two thoughts,” she said.
Which Angus promptly did before we were out
of short-term parking. “I rest my case,” she said. “How long are you back?”
“A week, give or take.”
I spent the first three days catching up, writing columns. Yetter called. “Great stuff, migrant making flies outta horsefeathers.”
I laughed.
“See, I told you this would work out.”
“You never said that.”
“But I knew it. You okay?”
“Terrific.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
Angus read the stories and was a solid editor. Hannah was gone, guiding. The days were unbearably hot, the nights cool.
Hannah returned on Thursday. We ate steaks with Angus, then the two of us retired to the porch with gin and tonics.
“Got a lake I’d like to show you,” she said. “Spend the night?”
“Fish?”
“That too,” she said with a come-hither grin. She liked to flirt and I liked it too.
•••
Ten-Glass Lake was four hours northeast of the ranch, deep into a small mountain range. We parked at a forest service line shack in a saddle at seven thousand feet and hiked a thousand feet or more down to the lake. It was horseshoe shaped and small, bent around a huge, gently tapered black rock outcrop. There were small, gnarled Ponderosas around the shore and a lot of timber under the clear water.
“Should’ve brought tubes,” I said.
“Don’t need them.”
We had nine-foot six-weight rods.
“Dries?” I asked.
“I’ve never seen a hatch here,” she said. “Try streamers and short leaders. Two or three feet long, and no longer. Work the outer edge of the timber.”
“For what?”
“You’ll see.”
On new water it made sense to first watch somebody else. I sat down, but Hannah shook a finger. “No way, cowboy. This is just for you.”
I made several casts and stripped in the retrieve. Nothing moved. “Are you sure there’s fish in here?”
“There’s fish, all right. The question is, can you catch them?”
“What is this, a competition?”
“Not between us,” she said, smiling.
I went back to work but still got no strikes, not even a follow. I walked back to Hannah to change flies.
“Your fly is fine. They’ll hit any streamer.”
“Ghost trout?” I said.
“They’re all ghosts if you can’t figure them out.”
“You’re a fountain of information.”
“You’re supposed to be the expert.”
After two more hours, I still did not have a hit. I had tried several places. “I surrender,” I said.
Hannah grinned. “Varying your retrieve?”
I had done everything I could think of. “Yep.”
“Do something you’ve never done before.”
“You mean with the fish?”
She shook her head. “Maybe you gotta earn your way, cowboy.”
“This isn’t a lot of laughs.”
“ ’Course not. It’s work.”
Do something I had never done before? I cast out, let the line carry the fly to the bottom, and let it lie. After a few seconds, I gave the tiniest twitch on the line, just enough to make the fly move a fraction forward and up. I did this every few seconds with no results. Then I stood and retrieved the fly with a series of bounces, like a bass jig. Still no takes. I let the line sink to different depths on the next few casts and pulled the fly back quickly. Still nothing.
“You’re getting there,” Hannah said from behind me. I ignored her. She had said streamers, meaning we wanted to mimic minnows. She had said to work the outer edge of the timber. I studied the water. The lake became dark where it dropped off at the edge of the sunken trees. The fish, if there were any—and at that point I had no reason to believe there were—had shown no interest at any depth or retrieve speed. I walked along the edge of the lake, turning over stones, lifting drowned timber and rocks. Nothing. No insects, no crustaceans. I waded in the shallows looking for minnows. None in sight. From the other side of the lake I saw Hannah put down a large towel and lie down.
“Got one,” I called over to her.
“Liar,” she answered.
By the time I got to her she had cream on her nose to keep the sun off.
“Frustrated?” she asked. “The fish are there, Bowie. I promise. What haven’t you tried?”
“Dynamite.”
She stuck her tongue out at me. “Spoilsport.”
I tried to think. Most fish struck for food and out of anger or aggressiveness. Bass fishermen sometimes pulled their lures quickly across the surface, what they called buzzing. You could do this with a caddisfly to make it look like an emerger with a problem as well. But bass lures were mostly downsized to look like minnows and other small fish and would no way look like an insect. Why a small fish would skitter across the surface was beyond me. I knew that bluefish would circle baits and drive them in schools onto sandy beaches to escape. But here in a mountain lake? A trout wasn’t a bluefish. Could I buzz a streamer? More important, why would I?
I loaded the rod and shot the line no more than twenty feet out and started hauling almost before the streamer landed, and the water almost immediately turned into a boil. I felt several bumps and raw flashes of bright red, but nothing took.
“Damn,” I said.
Hannah was beside me, talking calmly. “Make a longer cast,” she said. “They need time to track it and line it up.”
I made the cast and after the fly traveled ten feet I had a fish, an arm-long slab of muscle that came out of the water and skipped along on its tail, angrily and desperately shaking its head before it sounded. It was a big fish and when it went airborne I lowered the tip to provide slack, and when I felt the weight again I pulled the tip sideways and buried the hook deeper and the fish began to take line, but I knew I had it, and if the leader and my knots held, it was only a matter of time.
When the fish was finally in the net, I could only stare at it. The head was dark green, the body scarlet. No markings. There was little doubt it was a trout, but what kind?
“It’s a red,” Hannah said.
I let it go and we sat on her towel.
“Weird,” I said.
“A fisheries guy showed Dad this place a long time ago. They have no idea where these trout came from, or even what they are. There’s a small team at Arizona State studying them. There may be more lakes with them, but they only hit streamers the way you fished them. The biologists can’t explain any of it.”
“But they are here.”
“Exactly, and you figured it out first time. Dad came here twenty times before he solved it.”
“I had help,” I said. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Because I wanted you to see this. There are a lot of places with fish that nobody can catch. There are a lot of fish living in small, delicate habitats that nobody knows about. Freaks of nature, maybe. Evolutionary leftovers. Dad says any fish can be caught if the time is right and you know what you’re doing. Dad says you have the gift. I guess I wanted to see that for myself.”
“There’s no gift, just luck.”
“Real cowboys make their own luck,” Hannah said. “You thought your way through the problem, step by step. Dad’s job let him see a lot of remarkable things. It will do the same for you. Dad told me about Cincinnati. He was real proud of you. He says you understand how precious all this is. He says you understand the responsibility. I think he can retire now and be happy.”
“What’re you trying to say, Hannah?”
“There’s more of this kind of thing than most people can imagine. For the few that know, it can become a disease.”
“M. J. Key,” I said.
She poked my chest
. “You’re purty quick, cowboy. Key had the gift, but he couldn’t control it.”
I thought of Fireheart.
“How do you know this?”
“Dad told me about Key.”
“He knew Key?”
“I don’t know.”
“Key was a headhunter.”
“Exactly. He made sure people knew what he was after and what he got.”
“But he also made a lot of important contributions to the sport.”
“Early on, yes, he did.”
“Did Angus know Key?” I asked again.
“I honestly don’t know, Bowie,” she said. “Logically, I’d say no. Key must’ve been dead before Dad could’ve known him.”
“But you’re not sure.”
She shook her head. “Maybe there never was an M. J. Key,” she said.
“And maybe he’s immortal,” I said, making a joke.
She smiled, but her tone was serious. “Some people believe that. They say he gave his soul to the devil, that he would live until he got whatever it was that he was after. Lotta hogwash, I’d say, but there’s no doubt there’s an aura around his name. I guess people need their gods,” she added. “Large and small, real and imagined, and they always get the gods they deserve.”
Darkness fell as we climbed back to the line shack. We spent the night while wolves barked and howled outside and I wondered if their voices were intended for me.
16
Angus had a stroke in late August. He was at the ranch and had gotten up in the middle of the night to take a leak and, instead of going into the bathroom, had wandered onto the front porch. A niece found him the next morning at the foot of the steps, still clutching his penis. Hannah called me in Crow Loop, Nebraska, where I was interviewing an alfalfa farmer who had built an eight-foot-deep trout pond in his tavern. I drove to Omaha to catch a flight, but there were thunderstorms all across the Great Plains and air traffic control centers were holding all flights. The terminal was overrun with angry passengers and surly airline employees and I did not get out until the next morning.
Hannah met me at the airport in Tucson. “How is he?” I asked.
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