Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

“Wait a minute. They take the cat to the vet. He shaves the cat’s whole tail except for the end. The cat looks like a lion. Pretty soon the cat thinks he’s a lion.”

“In what way?”

“Forget it.”

Now the rain was going sideways. You’d cast a fly and it would vanish long before it got to the water. We knew gloom.

Some very small, very stupid trout came upon our flies and ate them. We caught those trout. Of the large smart trout known to live in the lake, we took none. Some hours later we sat around the Air-Tight heater, for all purposes blanked.

We were fishing for rainbows in their original watershed. In such a situation they can be expected to be magnificent fish, quite unlike the hatchery imitations, which have, in effect, besmirched the species. They are strong and fast, and rise freely to a dry-fly. We were, moreover, in an area that produces fish of a rather large average size.

In the spring and early summer the fish here herd and pursue sockeye fry, including the sluggish little alevins, the very young fry, tadpole-shaped, with their still-unconsumed egg sacs. Ideally, the big rainbows are to be found chasing the bait on top, where they can be cast to, rather like pelagic fish. We liked this image. We would cast, fight, land, and release until our arms were tired. The rainbows could also be taken on dry-flies. There were mayflies and grasshoppers to imitate and in the lower stretch, stoneflies.

Though we hadn’t made much of a beginning, our hopes were still running high. The next morning we were fishing by six, hunting feeding rainbows. It is “hunting” if you find something. If you do not, it is driving around the lake in an outboard.

“We should’ve brought the water skis.”

“Oh, come on.”

We continued hunting, as it were. And we didn’t find anything, not one thing. When more of the unseasonable rain blew in from the exaggerated sky, we sat, fly rods in hand, like drowned rats. I began to take an interest in the details of the bilge.

Later, when it had cleared a little, we headed down the lake to an Indian village inhabited by a branch of the Carrier tribe, so named because its widows once carried the charred bones of their husbands around on their backs. The village is situated prettily on a high series of hills and looks out on the lake and river where the two are joined. There are a couple of dozen buildings along a wooden walk and a small Hudson’s Bay store.

When we passed the upper part of the town, a man worked on his outboard while a girl in an aniline-blue miniskirt pulled sockeye salmon from a net. Ravens and gulls screamed and circled overhead, waiting for a chance at the offal from the gutted salmon. There were a hundred thousand or more sockeyes in the river now. Many of them came up out of the wilderness with bearclaw marks on their flanks.

We docked at the lower end in a pounding rain and hurried up the hill to get under the eaves of the wooden schoolhouse. A notice in the window read:

To Whom It May Concern:

During the absence of the schoolteacher, this school building must be closed. It therefore cannot be used for dances, bingo games, or any other social gatherings. Anyone asking permission to use the school will be refused.

R. M. McIntyre,

Superintendent,

Burns Lake Indian Agency

In two or three places on the walls of this wilderness school were dabbed the letters LSD , which did not stand for League of Spiritual Discovery. The letters were put there, doubtless, by someone who spoke English as a second language.

When the weather relented a little, we hiked up the hill to the old cemetery, which was mostly overgrown. The epitaphs were intriguing: “To the sacred memory of our brother killed by a gunshot wound.” I found two old headmen’s graves, “Chief William” and “Chief Agusa,” whose titles were purely titular; the Carriers gave their chiefs little power. The cultural overlay seemed rather bald on the last stone I looked at. Beneath a conventional crucifix it read, “In memory of Ah Whagus. Died 1906. Age 86.” Imagine the fishing when Ah Whagus was a boy.

We walked around the village. The shy people smiled at the ground or stayed inside when we passed. On the boardwalk someone had written “Big Fat Sally Do Your Stuff.” Beyond the LSD graffiti and the noise of a transistor radio playing Dolly Parton—“I’m a lady mule skinner from down ol’ Tennessee way”—black-shawled Indian women were taking the salmon down the river to a lower island and smoking them against a winter that was probably more imminent to them than to us. The older people were locked in some intense dejection, but the children played with familiar, maniacal energy in the deep wet grass with their salmon-fattened dogs.

It had rained enough that our simple cabin with its Air-Tight heater acquired a special and luxurious glamour. When we got good and cold, usually the result of running the boat in one direction while the wind took the rain in another, we would head for the cabin, put some wood in the heater, douse it with coal oil, and throw in the magic match that made everything all better. This was the romance of the heater. We played with the flue, adjusted the draft, and while the logs rumbled and roared inside we tuned the thing like a violin. One afternoon, when a view through any of the windows would have suggested that the cabin was Captain Nemo’s vessel and that we were at the bottom of the sea, Frank leapt to his feet with an expensive Japanese camera in his hands and began to take picture after picture of the tin heater rumbling peacefully, our wet laundry hanging around it in homage.

One of the exhilarations of fishing new places lies in rendering advice into some kind of obtained reality. Cast the fly, you are told, right along the bank and the trout will rise to it. So you cast and you cast until presently you are blue in the face and the appealing syllogism you started with is not always finished. When it does not work, you bring your vanquished person back to the dock, where there is no way to weigh or measure the long face you have brought instead of fish. At the first whiskey, you announce that it has been a trying day. Then someone else says that it is nice just to get out. Irrationally, you wonder how you can get even for that remark.

But once, when the British Columbia sky made one of those spectacular partings we associate with the paintings of Turner or the handing down of stone tablets, we saw what had been described to us in the beginning.

Large fish, their fins showing above the water, were working schools of salmon fry: a setup. We started the engine and ran upwind of them, cut the engine, and started to drift down. We had the goods on them. When in range I false-cast a few times, made a long cast beyond them, and gently retrieved into their midst.

I hooked a fish instantly. After a strong first run, it mysteriously flagged. As I reeled, it came obediently to the boat, where Frank netted it.

“What is that?” he asked. In the net was some kind of giant minnow.

“It looks like Martha Raye,” I said bitterly. Later we learned that it was a squawfish. No one ever caught one on purpose.

Not until almost our last day did the river began to disclose itself. We made a pass along the Indian village, where we were seeing occasional rises. The problem was a river so clouded that the fish were unable to see the fly, a condition blamed on a nearby stump desert the loggers left in their wake.

We began to drift, blind-casting large Wulff flies ahead of us, mending the line to keep the river from bellying it and dragging the fly. In very short order, a bright band appeared beneath my fly, moved downstream with it and inhaled. I lifted and was solid to a very good fish, which was netted some minutes later. It bumped heavily in the bottom of the boat until I could get the fly out and release it.