Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

I love otter

Under a muskrat:

I love muskrat

Beaver:

I love beaver

I walked past the tower in the dark. The path through the brush absorbed and gave back the light from the Milky Way and was clear in its windings. I walked over the target spot, over a black staining that was not the shadow of the sage. I did not shudder or feel much of anything. I felt the wind. It was west down from the mountains and it should have been cold-snow cold, but it was warm and smelled of earth, and of the cedar on the lower slopes and the spruce higher up. Like rock emerging from ice. Lichen and moss. I thought it did. It smelled like spring.

Too early in mid-April for a real thaw, but anymore the old seasonal benchmarks were mostly nostalgia. We had snow in the mountains this winter but there were two years running where the peaks were dry holding almost nothing. This scared me more than attacks or disease.

Losing the trout was bad. Losing the creek is another thing altogether.

I still fished in the mountains. The trout were gone because the streams got too warm, but I fished suckers and carp, nymphing the bottom like before, and overcoming the revulsion when I got a sucker, the sluggish resistance that couldn’t be called a fight, and the distended lips and the scales. I made myself get used to the taste and the bones. Now that the trout were gone the carp had learned to occupy the niche and feed more and more on the surface, so I even sometimes fished dry flies. Never brought them back for Bangley because he wouldn’t have understood. The hours spent. The danger in being so absorbed along a stream which was the thoroughfare for both animals and wanderers.

But I did. He would have called it Recreating, which he called with scorn anything that didn’t directly involve our direct survival, or killing, or planning to kill which amounted to the same thing. Christ Hig we’re not Recreating here are we? Good goddamn . Deer hunting was one thing. The amount of quality protein in one successful trip divided by the risk. The fact that I wanted to go, that I needed it—to get up there, to get away, to breathe that air—he overlooked. Had I hated it, he would have liked that better. Same with flying. He knew that flying for me was life somehow and yet he couldn’t count on two hands the times we were arguably saved by the intelligence from some patrol.

He wasn’t my boss and I did what I did, but he made sure his disapproval grated hard, and after a while it was easier to not put this stuff in his face. A matter of keeping the needle in the green day to day.

I fished. I’d set down my pack against a still green tree. The kayak sled. My rifle. I passed up the beetle kill, the standing dead trees that broke and fell in a hard wind, and walked further into the green. I always fished a stretch of woods that had not died, or that was coming back. I set down the pack and breathed the smell of running water, of cold stone, of fir and spruce, like the sachets my mother used to keep in a sock drawer. I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was still before when we were young and many things still lived.

I listened to the creek, and to the wind and watched it move the heavy dark boughs. In a pool below me the dark surface was dusted with green pollen. The roots of a tree exposed in the bank snaked over the water and in their spaces old spiderweb swayed in the wind and glimmered along the threads with its rhythm.

I took out the four pieces of the rod wrapped in flannel and snugged them together, sighting along the guides and twisting the shining metal loops so they lined up true. It was a Sage pack rod, a little number four I’d had since high school. My father gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday just after I came to live with him. He died of pancreatic cancer the next year before he could ever show me how to use it, but I ended up teaching myself and learning from Uncle Pete.

I pulled out the Orvis reel he had given me with the rod, which I’d kept cleaned and oiled when no other part of my life was working smoothly if at all. I slid the tang of the reel foot into the aluminum slot in the top of the cork handle and tightened down the nut. The nut went around the whole rod and rod seat and was stamped with a deep diamond pattern that made it easy for the thumb and forefinger to grab. It turned easily and locked down tight.

All of this, these motions, the sequence, the quiet, the rill and gulp, the riffle of the stream and the wind soughing the needles of the tall trees. As I strung the rod. I had known it all hundreds, probably now thousands of times. It was ritual that required no thought. Like putting on socks. Except this ritual put me in touch with something that felt very pure. Meaning that in fishing I had always all my life brought the best of myself. My attention and carefulness, my willingness to risk, and my love. Patience. Whatever else was going on. I began fishing just after Pop died and I tried to fish the way I thought he would. Which is a little weird thinking about it now: trying to emulate a man I had never seen wield a rod, and with the fierceness of a son this man had never had much of a chance to father.

When I lost my high school girlfriend, I fished. When in a fit of frustration and despair I quit writing anything, I fished. I fished when I met Melissa and barely dared to hope that I had found someone I could love in a way that surpassed anything I had known. I fished and fished and fished. When the trout got hit with disease, I fished. And when the flu finally took her in an Elks Hall converted to a hospital and crammed with the cots of the dying not five hundred yards from our house, I fished.

I was not allowed to bury her. She was incinerated with the rest. I fished. In the increasing chaos of dwindling supplies and longer gas lines and riots, I fished. By then I was nymph fishing for carp just to get away and follow a stretch of creek, the curves and moods of which I knew as well as I had known the body of my dead wife.

In all the years at the airport I kept bringing my rod into the mountains. I’d set down the pack and put together the rod and breathe and Jasper would take his cue and lie down on the bank where he could get a good view of the action. I put on the light wading shoes which were like hi-tops with sticky rubber on the soles, and stepped down to the smooth stones that were dusty and gray in air and stepped into the water. As soon as these riverbed rocks were wet and covered they came alive with color, greens and russets and blues. I did too. Felt like that. Soon as the cold shocked my feet and pressed my shins.

Never used waders anymore. I just liked the feel of cold running water against my legs.

I was thinking, remembering this as I followed the path toward the mountains and I thought how I hadn’t fished in over a year, not at all last summer, and wondered why, and wished now that I had the rod and Jasper, just a pack for a day and no gun and fuck Bangley I wasn’t even going to pretend I was going hunting. But I didn’t. Have any of it. I’d been walking for as much time as it took Orion to decline over the mountains, probably an hour and a half, and I stopped. I breathed and looked around me for the first time and realized I was very close to the first trees of the mountain front. And I was alone. I came out of reverie and almost called out for Jasper and realized that for the first time I could remember he wasn’t with me. An icy fear contracted my guts and I turned and trotted all the way back to the airport.

It warmed fast. Spring gave way without resistance. Two weeks earlier than last by the calendar I had scrawled onto a board in the hangar. I judged the threat of night frost over and furrowed and strung the rows of the garden, and drilled and planted under a benign sun which warmed the back of my neck and turned the fur of Jasper’s back pleasantly hot under my hands.