Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

I rested the fish, an interval which for me amounts to a painful refusal to make another cast for as long as I can bear it. Others have borne this same trying experience before me and described the pause as one full cigarette, counting to such-and-such a number, saying rosaries, et cetera. And some good anglers go straight back with the experience-hardened take-it-or-leave-it attitude of tired shopkeepers. No one knows for sure if you should rest the fish. For example, what if the fish moves upriver during the “rest”? All things considered, I think the pause clears the air a bit, freshens the salmon’s mind for another look. When you do resume, there is new pressure to make a good cast and a heightened alertness about what could happen. Once the mend has been made, I hold the rod by my side, sometimes circling thumb and forefinger in front of the grip so that the rod swings freely as it tracks the line. I try not to hold my rod in a striking position in case my resolve gets overpowered by a violent and visible take. I am in no position to make a reactive strike. Few things in life are more painful than taking a fly out of the mouth of a salmon or steelhead, especially, as is sometimes the case, after days of fruitless casting. Suddenly the angler is tired of living. If a fish takes, there will be ample opportunity for the tightening and securing lift. In fast, wild, broken rivers with great races of fish like those of the Whale, things will soon enough be out of control; the angler mustn’t add to that.

I removed the size 6 Rusty Rat, replaced it with a size 8 Green Highlander, and kept the original length of line. Then it was just a matter of a roll, a pickup, and a cast before I was swinging through the slot again. This time the refusal was slow and considered, amazingly so in view of the current speed. I could more clearly see the size of the fish and knew it much bigger than the typical twelve-pound fish of the Whale. While these salmon are not large, their strength is such that they could drag the twenty-pounders of other rivers to death. In this kind of situation, you are aware that you have unsuccessfully played another card and that the number of remaining cards is uncertain but not unlimited. I made another cast with the Green Highlander and saw no sign of the fish.

I took my time tying on another fly, a Black Bear Green Butt, the fly I would fish if I were reduced to a single pattern, another number 8. While smoking down the imaginary cigarette, I thought about our host Stanley Karbosky, a member of Darby’s Rangers who had fought the Nazis virtually hand-to-hand everywhere they went, finally getting machine-gunned himself in Italy. After a long recovery he came to Labrador as a professional explorer. And it was Stanley who discovered the salmon fishery of the Whale. Such thoughts made my fish-resting lull feel both brief and painless.

I had absolute faith, close to a hunch, in the latest change of fly. I tracked it toward the salmon’s lie with hypnotic attention and was expecting the sight of the fish, which came as a leisurely inspection and refusal. The fly trailed on past the fish into the slow water against the bank before I picked it up and held its soggy shape between my thumb and forefinger, feeling that this dismissal was perhaps final. When I tried it again the fish’s nonappearance seemed emphatic.

For the first time in this episode I gave in to impatience and a kind of annoyance at my fortunes, and promptly marched through six more fly changes, all the Rats and a small black General Practitioner, without getting another response. My attempts to engage the mind of this fish to my advantage had failed utterly. Using my own tackle, this simple creature had turned the tables and driven me crazy. When I looked out at the river and imagined beginning another long search for a fish, I was discouraged. So, like an old and chronic sinner gazing into his Bible in hopes of a last-minute reconsideration by God, I once more opened my fly book and peered within. It was a phenomenal mess of used and replaced flies, a week’s worth of arguing with fate, flies once in neat rows now pointing every which way, some with bits of leader still attached or riffle knots embedded at their throats, heads once lacquer bright now milky and dull, hair-and-feather brainstorms from Norway, Russia, Ireland, Iceland, Scotland, and Canada. All I wanted was one fish to bite one fly!

I took off the ten-pound tippet and tied on a six pound, determined to break out of the chain of logic that was causing me to miss this fish. My next challenge to the fish was to say, “Here’s one that’s way too small for your feeble eyes.” My inspiration was a tiny Blue Charm, an insectlike speck of wizardry on a single hook. I tied it to the tippet with a loop to assure maximum wiggle and cast it much closer to the lie than I’d been doing, so as to subject my small offering to fewer vagaries of current and fewer needs to be mended, fewer chances of refusal.

The fish went straight to it in a deep-bodied swirl. The line tightened on the water before me and I felt the weight in my left hand. I lifted the rod and the fish was hooked. I remember only my conviction that things were completely out of control. I had waded deep among large, submerged boulders, then wedged my feet for the long time I had been casting. Behind me was a high bank. It was not possible to get to better ground where I could control the angles. The fish controlled the angles. I had to just stand there during the violent runs and ferocious, heedless jumps. It seemed marvelous that all the quasi-reasoning behind the fly changes, the fussiness over the line mending and the constant revision of my views as the fish and I moved toward closure would end in such an uproar. Though we were well inland here, this struggle had the power of the northern ocean. I wanted to cry out, Fook! Wot spawt!

Finally I worked the tired fish toward me, leading it through boulders and finally to the beach and the net. She was a powerful, heavy hen not long out of the sea, with subdued black dots on gunmetal and silver. I held her around the tail into the current, feeling the deep curve of belly and fat shoulders, running a finger over the small wonderfully shaped head. When I released her, she picked her way out among the boulders in an unhurried progress to deep water. I found myself at a great altitude yet with all of my life in which to come down. Indeed, as I write this years later, those moments are inescapable and vivid. What a thing to own.

ONE OF THE CHARMS of any trip to the Whale was the annual evening of ghost stories in which the anglers tried to frighten the staff with accounts of the supernatural. Many of the people helping things to go ’round are inhabitants of tiny, unchanged towns on the rocky North Shore of the St. Lawrence. Their traditions and innocence are remarkably preserved, if overlaid by information and images that fly through the air into their TVs and radios. But their culture allows them, it seems, an astonishing ability to suspend disbelief and enjoy stories told them, no matter how implausible. My observation was that all the stories were implausible and yet absorbed with a kind of thrilled and grateful credulity. Jackie, one of our country’s most outstanding architects, delivered a dizzily mechanical version of the old chestnut Skyborg , which had the staff screaming with terror. When our host, who insists on being called “the Benevolent One,” came to tell his story, I noted that it was entirely plotless. Clearly the Benevolent One had little in mind when he set out, but in the growing awareness that he had an expectant audience he rather desperately, I thought, began to punch up the plot details of his feeble narrative with the sinisterly intoned repetition of the word “evil.” The staff, having listened to his maunderings in wild surmise, now invested all their energy into irrationally reacting to the repitition of this disconnected word. “Evil,” came the muttered imprecation, and the kitchen girls, guides, and cook screamed in terror. Few noticed that the Benevolent One had nowhere to go from here and indeed revealed, even through his mutterings, a look of hangdog creative defeat. “Evil,” he croaked once more to manifest success.