Lines on the Water (20 page)

“Oh God—you were right,” Peter had said bending over with laughter.

So, I had lost my laces to my sneakers that day. The only thing we had left to tie my sneakers with was a bit of chain from Peter’s compass. That didn’t hold and I ended up walking barefoot back to the truck, over rocks and stumps, while Peter managed to make it down to a pool and hook a grilse. It
reminded me again of my very first time fishing, at four years old, when I walked home with my socks in my pockets.

Today we will haul the canoe down to Three Minute Pool and fish it, and make it to White Birch by evening. Then we will sit out under the stars, and tomorrow we will make it down to the narrows where my truck is parked.

We pull up at Three Minute Pool and rest. I sit on a boulder in the sun and look at the water, dark and swift flowing against the cliff, and the trees’ shade and shadow upon it. It has been almost twenty years since I first saw this pool.

“What are you using?” I ask Peter.

He doesn’t answer. He steps out at the top of the pool, and the second cast he has a nice grilse. The grilse runs into the middle and sulks, butting his rod. Peter looks at me and starts to back in, but holds his ground as the grilse runs and jumps.

There is always a moment when I look away when a fish is having the life played from it.

The grilse turns along the ledge, and then cuts to its right, as if it wants to go over the rapids at the top of the pool. Then it turns back towards the centre but finds itself in shallow water, digging with all its strength to try to get back into the pool. It jumps again, and comes down in a rainbow just out from me, and Peter is to my right, and backs in and lands it.

He looks about.

“You know I have no picture of this pool, and I hardly have a picture of me on this river. Some day in winter, when I’m old, I’ll try to remember what it all looked like. I’ll have to come in here some day and get a picture.”

I suppose I can say this, that the men I have been fortunate enough to know on the Miramichi generally do what they say they are going to do. There is no greater or finer gift in human nature than this. The men I admire the most are those who are most direct and unassuming about this. So then you should never tell a Miramichier you are going to kill him, because often as not he’ll take you at your word.

I get some blades of grass and wet them to place over the grilse, and we move out.

It is late afternoon and there is only a little ways—five or six more turns—to White Birch. I look across the river and see myself walking up along the bank, up to my shoulders in grass, twenty years before. Peter, thinking this, says, “We must have been in awful good shape back then.”

“And awful crazy.”

We walked from White Birch all the way up to Two Mile Pool or beyond, and then would start back—and did this every day.

“And now we can afford the luxury of a canoe,” Peter laughs.

The one thing about the Coleman canoe I own, it never minds how many rocks it goes over. And if you are on the south branch of the Sevogle River, you’d have to be blind not to hit a rock.

White Birch comes in view, and is calm and familiar in the evening air. The bugs are bad; the bugs are always bad so there is no use in mentioning it too much. We pull the canoe up on the beach, and begin to set up the tent. We light a small fire that is still transparent in the evening, and the smoke dissipates in the cooling air. I am shivering in my soaking jeans.

“Are we having that fish?” Peter says.

“No, no—you keep it.”

Peter shrugs and starts to get it ready to cook.

I look through my fly box. There are some wonderful flies in it now. Undertakers, Squirrel Tails and Hairy Marys and bugs and Black Ghosts and more bugs—all will take fish. And I look and see the yellowish feather and black body and black hackle of my uncle Richard Adams favourite fly. The Black Dose. Something attracts me to it. And I try to remember where this fly came from and though, like most fishermen, I can remember pretty well where I got every fly (since to my shame I don’t and can’t tie my own), I could not remember this fly. But it
looks
right, and when I pick it up and hold it between my thumb and forefinger,
it feels
right as well.

I put it on. I begin to move my way down the pool, watching in the falling sunlight the fly disappearing under the surface, and when picked up looking entirely black, but when it made its arc, looking splendidly regal.

Suddenly, quite soon after I begin to fish, my line tightens, so automatically that it startles me, and in the twilight I have a salmon on.

“That’s one,” Peter said.

And we wait.

Down it goes, this majestic fish, and sulks and Peter watches from the beach, and then as if trying to make some assessment of me, it moves slowly upriver, pulling the line from my reel.

I reel until again I can feel the pressure. It was no grilse.

There is a moment when fighting a grilse a man or women will think they are in a fight—and I don’t deny that they are. But this was a salmon, and the pressure on my rod, and on my arm, was seven times as great.

“David—come in, come in,” Peter says, who could never stop his instruction or his teaching.

“It don’t matter,” I say, “because it’s going to run.”

And just then the salmon goes, and takes me with it, down almost out of the pool, zigging crazily from one side of the pool to the other, and then just as suddenly turning and coming back towards the rock, and jumping high in the air. Then
it goes down and stays there. At this point I can feel the butt on my line.

The salmon was butting its head against the bottom, just beyond the rock, to loosen the fly’s grip in its mouth. And then it comes up and jumps again.

“Well, they’re still here,” Peter says.

And down it goes again, this time out of the pool, and I run with it along the shore.

I have it hooked now about ten minutes.

The water is reddish and splendid in the darkening air, and I have no Polaroids on, and can’t tell where exactly my fish is. Then it runs again. And my arm is aching. I’m not prepared and it almost straightens my rod out. Sensing it might have a chance at this it jumps high, a great fish, and comes down with the line sagging, and then tightening.

“Its got the leader tangled about its head,” I say, noticing it moving sideways and butting its head once more. Then it runs again.

Now it is down, almost to the bend, and my backing, in a pocket between two rocks, and again it has taken to butting its head, to loosen my fly, and again an osprey flies high overhead, and again it is darkening.

I manage to wait on it, and reel my line in slowly, and follow it down.

Peter comes down with the net that was in the canoe most of the summer and hardly used, because so often we beach our fish. Now the salmon is taking small runs and stopping. My line moves over the water as if it is a slender magnet attached to some great being, going here and there, searching for a way out of something it does not understand.

I can’t see it. But it is tiring, and coming to me now. And then suddenly it runs again, and I have to go into the water and follow it, as if I am on a slope in winter and trying to dig myself in.

Here it jumps, and starts to come back towards me, and I reel slowly, and then hold my rod crooked in my right arm again and back towards shore. After a few minutes I can see it, its tail moving slightly in the rapids, and Peter goes down below it, and comes up behind it.

“Here it is,” he says.

After he nets it, he keeps it in the water.

“You don’t have a camera do you?” he asks.

“No.”

It is a great female filled with eggs. No wonder she fought so hard.

I held her by the tail and under the head, for five minutes or more, until I felt movement come back, and felt her get stronger in my grip, and I released her into the night, in a rip below
White Birch on the south branch of the Sevogle in late July of 1995, under an overhanging spruce tree, beside the flat red rock.

And we turned and walked back to the tent.

I thought of the salmon Richard Adams brought to my grandmother forty years before, and how I told her that some day I would travel along a river and hook a salmon as well. I did not know then that a Black Dose would make me think of that conversation forty years later, almost to the day, as I bit the fly off with my teeth and looked at its barb, still none the worse for wear. Then I remembered it was Dave Savage who had given me that fly one night long ago, before he travelled to the Restigouche.

And, too, it seemed only a moment had passed since Richard Adams had carried me down to his canoe where I sat in the stern for the picture that was later misplaced, and stared at the great train trestle and the silent, shadowed, and splendid green water.

“It’s too bad we don’t have a camera,” Peter said. “An underwater camera,” he said. “We’ll have one when we go bone fishing in Florida.”

The reason bone fishing attracted Peter was that it looked so esoteric and required patience, and you could see the tails of the fish, as they sulked about the large inlets. I knew he would be very good at bone fishing—or tuna fishing, or any other kind.

But I doubted if we’d ever get enough money to get there.

But maybe we would go fishing trout in Labrador, or over to the Restigouche again.

I changed into sweatpants, and cut up some onions and peeled some potatoes. The stove was going, and tea was brewing. We boiled the potatoes and the grilse in the same pot, and had the onions on a small pan next to the tea.

He told me a story, and I felt saddened by it. Gordon, my nemesis, and the golden boy of fishing, had taken to poaching, and had been caught, spearing fish in a pool with a spear-gun and a snorkel. He lost his truck and was fined. I never cared for Gordon. Still and all I felt sad about it. Felt sad for his father. Felt sad for the great river, and the fish. And yet it seemed to be as predictable in hindsight as anything else. It seemed as if this was what his look and his objections about me always seemed to signify—just as his trying to get the best deal in trading his hockey and baseball cards did.

Then it got dark enough not to see anything. The trees behind us, the water in front of us, were unified in blackness. And then the stars came out, thousands of them.

It was now 1995. My brothers and I were building another camp, on a hill, beyond those very darkened trees by about eight miles. It stood as a testament to my brother John’s great love of the woods, though he didn’t fish and rarely hunted, and his
love of canoeing. And it stood as a testament to my love of those same woods, and our family of brothers who never had a camp as children. And it stood also as testament that I would come back to fish again, no matter where I travelled or where I lived. For it was
here
where I lived. It was here where I wrote, and thought of how complete and uncomplicated life was meant to be.

So our camp, which was in the process of being built that summer, was the guardian of all of that. Its roof was angled, its shadows warm, while our camp log brought over from our first camp lay on the table.

I hoped to travel the whole river the next summer. I hoped. I was born without great physical ability, yet I had tested the physical life in the best way I could. I had tested it now for twenty years. This river I had walked a dozen times, and had taken fish in almost every pool. I had done after a fashion, filled with as many false starts and failures as one could imagine, what I had set out to do. And I turned it into my art and wrote about it in one way or another my entire life. This is not a great accomplishment by any means, but it is an accomplishment for me. So then I had told my grandmother the truth that day. I had resurrected from my past life of much uncertainty and clumsiness the fish that I stared at in my grandmother’s kitchen when I was four years old. Perhaps my
grandmother knew this. Perhaps she too was watching. Perhaps I remembered that night, or a little later, that that fly, the Black Dose, was given to me by David Savage.

We heard a splash as a deer crossed the river and went up into the hills just below us, near where I had released the salmon, and towards the place Peter had fallen on the bear when he was not much older than his oldest girl is now.

I took out my after-dinner close-to-bedtime chew of plug and put it in, and had a spit as Peter lighted a cigarette. And then I knew it was time to tell the story.

“Once at an old camp,” I began, “a friend of ours came in for a fish. He was a Mr. Simms, and this was a long, long time ago. He had owned the camp when he was young and had built the camp too, but when he went away his cousins had taken it from him. Stole it really and were even proud of the fact that he didn’t complain too much.

“Now that he was back they told him he could fish if he wanted but he could not be a partner or make any claim to it. Mr. Simms who had owned this camp and had built it as well thought that this was rather cold of them.

“So they went down the river in a canoe and all the way into the narrows, and all got fish except him, who was a very wise friend and a very good and quite patient fisherman. But he had no luck that day. And so they all teased him.

“ ‘You can’t fish,’ they said, ‘so what do you need a camp for?’

“And he told them he was using a wonderful little fly the name of I don’t remember. And that he would get the fish he really wanted, the fish everyone was looking for. It was a fly called Patience and Perseverance and Integrity.

“So the four of them went back to the camp, and they sat up late at night and played cards and drank, and talked about how wonderful their camp was, and said they wished Mr. Simms had made this certain part different or that a little different, or one angle wasn’t quite right, or it wasn’t flush in just one place. And he sat there very patiently and listened as they complained about his handiwork.

“ ‘We should get you to rebuild it,’ they said.

“And just before they went to bed he said he had to leave, and he added, as an afterthought, and as if he was just remembering it, that he had hidden a quart of Black Diamond rum in the camp when he was young, the year he had built it. But that he couldn’t exactly remember where.”