All Fishermen Are Liars (9 page)

Even with the provocation of a couple of trout being caught, it takes some of us another hour to get fed, suited up and on the water. Corey and I planned to air out our spey rods that day. We’d swing weighted streamers through the big runs, and if that didn’t work we’d rest the water and come back with nymphs. I’d never fished a nymph with a spey rod, but I’d heard about it and wanted to try it. If nothing else, the reach of a 13
½
-foot rod would be a tremendous advantage. The fishing had been slow, but not dead, and I had big plans for that Girdle Bug.

In the mean time, Vince had crawled out of his tent blinking and yawning and I’d all but finished the coffee, so I poured him the dregs and started a fresh pot. I’d come to fish and I’d get around to it eventually, but the real reason for the trip was simply to get out of the house in the winter and there I was, so there was no rush.

9

TREE RIVER

The weather was deteriorating the morning we flew to the Tree River. The vintage de Havilland Otter—loaded with nine fishermen, two guides and a breathtaking pile of fishing tackle—cruised at an altitude of around 100 feet, midway between stark tundra and a low, drizzling overcast. The air was unstable, and although I’ve had bumpier trips than this one in floatplanes, there was still the sense of taking a long ride in a defective elevator. I’d had a big breakfast before leaving camp—pancakes, eggs, sausages and at least a quart
of coffee—and although I wasn’t exactly queasy, I did notice that the airsick bag compartment was empty.

Back at the dock, the pilot, Wes, had joked us out of any misgivings we might have had about the weather. After running down a few basic safety procedures, he added, “And remember, whatever else happens, save the pilot at any cost,” inducing the kind of nervous laughter that doesn’t exactly make you brave, but at least helps you keep breakfast down. Although I’d met Wes only the day before, I’d already come to know him as one of those guys who puts a fresh cigar in his mouth every morning, but never quite gets around to smoking it. He seemed like a man you could trust.

I’m not normally a white-knuckle flier and I’m actually more comfortable in small planes than in big ones, even though the odds lean in the other direction. But as pleasant as it was to fly low and look for wildlife, I couldn’t help remembering the adage that altitude is the bush pilot’s best friend because the higher you are, the more time you have to work out any problems that might come up. On the other hand, I’d been hoping to see musk ox and I did. From the air they look like hair balls, and if they weren’t running, you wouldn’t be able to tell one end from the other.

I was going to this particular river in the Canadian Arctic for the simple reason that Plummer’s Great Bear Lake Lodge, which operates the only fishing camp there, blatantly advertises it as “The best arctic char river in the world.” Of course, extravagant claims are common in the outfitting business and some of them strain credulity, but this one was more verifiable than most. The all-tackle world-record Arctic char—thirty-two pounds, nine ounces—was caught in the Tree River in 1981, and since the early 1990s the river has accounted for every fly-rod tippet-class record between 4- and 20-pound test. A world record could be a fluke (most are, almost by definition), but six other record-book fish in the space of a decade and a half seemed pretty convincing.

I wasn’t after a record myself and frankly have some doubts about that whole enterprise. At its best, maximum fish size is of some interest to scientists as well as fishermen and establishing a tippet-class record amounts to nothing more than some harmless competitive bragging. But at its worst, I’ve seen people lose fish after fish trying to land them on tackle that was too light for the job or, worse yet, get thoroughly pissed off at what should have been the catch of a lifetime because it fell two ounces short of going down in history.

So in my self-consciously modest way, I was just hoping to catch a few, and since these were sea-run fish, I assumed they’d be bigger and tougher than the landlocked char I’d caught in Alaska and Labrador. Of course, all those records were tantalizing, but they weren’t a guarantee of success, by any means. Anyone who’s gone after anadromous fish that have run into freshwater rivers to spawn understands that, like salmon and steelhead, they’ll bite or not for reasons of their own.

The Tree River is in the Kitikmeot region of the Inuit-governed territory of Nunavut—an enormous, sparsely inhabited area lying north of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, east of the Northwest Territories and west of Baffin Bay. If Nunavut isn’t on your map of Canada, it’s because your map was printed prior to 1999 when the territory was carved out of the old Northwest Territories to settle ongoing Inuit land claims. Nunavut covers 777,000 square miles, or 20 percent of the Canadian landmass. Estimates of its population usually come in at around 30,000—mostly native people who can trace their ancestry back to the last ice age. The way we see it, almost all of it is uninhabited, although an Inuit fisherman might point out that you can “inhabit” a place without stringing barbed wire and posting
NO TRESPASSING
” signs.

When I first went to the Northwest Territories to fish in the 1970s, talks with the Canadian government about an Inuit homeland were just beginning. The prevailing opinion among guides and
fishermen in the camp was that this was a doomed idealistic exercise. I reluctantly agreed—if only because in America, with our appalling history in those matters, it would have been—so I was especially delighted to come back twenty-some years later and shell out $15.75 Canadian for an official Nunavut fishing license.

The Tree River camp itself lies roughly 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 3 miles upriver (that is, south) of the Arctic Ocean at Amundsen Bay. Parts of the riverbank are choked with nearly impenetrable knee-high wolf willow, but the country for a thousand square miles around is tundra where the diversity of plants is astonishing, but nothing grows much higher than the sole of a boot. No one in camp knew for sure why it was called the Tree River, but the best guess was that it was named ironically by Europeans vainly searching for firewood a hundred miles from the nearest tree.

On a normal fly-out to the river from the main lodge at Great Bear Lake, you get an afternoon and a morning of fishing with an overnight in a snug little fisherman’s hooch with plywood walls, a canvas roof and a cranky oil heater. It may be possible to wangle another full day if the next group in is short a man or to luck into one if the weather turns sour and the Otter can’t fly. But even if you can stretch it, there’s the knowledge that cracking this new fishery could take more time than you have. You firmly believe that once you get the right corner worked loose you can peel the whole thing open, but on previous trips to other rivers that’s taken the better part of a week or more, much of it spent waiting for the weather or the fish’s mood to change. Still, you remind yourself that the trick to fishing well is not to rush, because hurrying only makes things go wrong.

My guide, Craig Blackie, ferried me across the river in one of the boats they keep above the first rapids for that purpose and hiked me a mile upriver on a muddy trail to an unimpressive-looking notch in the bank. It was a small, bumpy side current not much bigger than a couple of parking spaces lying alongside a dangerous-looking rip.
I’m not good at judging stream flow on big water, but this was clearly in the thousands of cubic feet per second, and along this bank it was tipped and squeezed into a torrent. It reminded me of the speeding freight trains I liked to watch as a kid and of my parents telling me I’d be sucked under the wheels if I got too close.

It was a tricky drift in conflicting currents and there were jumbled rocks on the bottom that snagged my weighted streamer twice in a dozen casts. Then there was a thump I thought was another rock until it shook its head ponderously. The fish bulldogged in the side current for a minute or so, just long enough for me to innocently think I might be able to land it there. Then it rolled out into the white water and took me far into the backing in a matter of seconds. I felt as if I’d foul-hooked a piano.

After one failed try where the current was still too fast, we finally got it to the net in a narrow slick ten minutes later and a hundred yards downstream. It was a hen about thirty-five inches long that Blackie guessed at thirteen pounds. I was delighted to have landed her, but I was even happier about getting my fly line back. I’d brought a spare, but it was an hour’s round-trip walk away, back in camp.

Farther upstream we fished the Presidential Pool, named for the elder President Bush, who’d fished it some years ago. This was the most luxurious pool I saw on the Tree, a big, brawling river where most of the good reachable holding water is small enough to be fished out while one stands in one spot. It was seventy-five or eighty yards long and channeled roughly a third of the river’s volume into a swift current tight to the near bank with a slower slick farther out. The successful cast was a long reach to the head of the slick with a hard upstream mend and a high-stick swing designed to keep the line from bellying. It was a long cast and a hard drift, but I managed it and felt like I was on my game, although it would be just as true to say that the fish were biting. I was fishing a 13
½
-foot 9-weight spey rod with a short sinking tip, a stubby fifteen-pound leader, several
hundred yards of backing and a size 1/0 white streamer. Through trial and error, the guides have arrived at white as the hands-down favorite fly color.

The char weren’t exactly stacked in this run, but now and then we’d see a wide back roll or, if the chromy light was just right, the flash of a long orange belly under the surface. When hooked, the fish fought hard—occasionally jumping, though mostly bulldogging with their heads down—but for some reason they didn’t want to leave the pool. These were strong, heavy fish, and if any of them had wanted to head for the main river and spool me, there wouldn’t have been much I could have done about it, although God knows I’d have tried.

That evening we all met for supper at the lodge, a garage-sized frame building consisting of a kitchen and three picnic tables in one room. Some of us had caught fish and others hadn’t: the oldest story in the book. There were both fly and gear fishermen in camp and neither method had definitively beaten out the other. A guide named Trevor said the fishing had been okay but not as good as it
can
be, so it had all come down to the usual ineffable confluence of skill and luck, or what the old-timers used to call “holding your mouth right.”

That night I settled into my shack—a word I use affectionately—by stripping off my wet clothes and hanging them to dry around the heater. (My twelve-year-old rain slicker had chosen this trip to start leaking at the shoulder seams.) There was one small window, four cots, a single straight-backed chair, a shaving mirror the size of a book, a wash pan, assorted coat hooks, a clothesline stretched in the low roof peak, a galvanized bucket on the stove for warm, if not actually hot, water and a single bare lightbulb powered by a generator. The river was clearly audible and so was the pattering of rain on the canvas roof. It was the kind of place that would be rustically cozy for a few nights, but that after a month could open the door to suicide if you were alone, or murder if you had roommates.

This was the third week in August with the tundra turning to
autumn colors, caribou migrating south and a full three or four hours of gray dusk that passed for night. The season had started a scant five weeks earlier, and at the end of that week they’d be closing the camp for the year. I sat on a cot and scrolled through my digital camera looking at the photos Blackie had taken of the fish I’d landed that day. Guides get good at taking hero shots of clients with unfamiliar cameras and these were typically good. But with the physical memory still fresh, they looked like what they were: passable proof for the folks back home, but poor copies of the real thing displayed on a two-inch screen. It was still raining, but not very hard. The last thing I did before crawling into the sleeping bag was to put my spare spey line in my pack for tomorrow.

It has always amazed me how quickly you fall into the rhythms of a strange fishing camp, although it’s true there’s not much else to do. The handwritten daily schedule posted in my shack said it all:

7:30 breakfast.

Fish.

7:30 supper.

The weather had cleared a little by the next day. That is, it was still chilly and cloudy, but it wasn’t raining quite as much. In the better part of twelve hours of fishing I landed one small lake trout, got a hard pull from a char, but didn’t sink the hook and broke a ferrule on my spey rod going for a long cast. This was pure operator error. A spey cast generates more than enough torque to work the ferrules loose, and if you don’t remember to periodically reseat them, a break is inevitable. Blackie looked at me with an expression of expectant horror, possibly anticipating a tantrum, but I’ve learned that the proper response to breaking a rod is simply to congratulate yourself for bringing a spare. It was coming up on suppertime and we were within sight of camp. It couldn’t have happened at a better time or place.

Just above camp on the way back, we waded through the flock of willow ptarmigan that had taken up residence there. Ptarmigan never seem like the sharpest tools in the shed and these had become camp pets. We could have easily caught one in a landing net as they waddled ahead of us with all the dignity of barnyard chickens. I examined some shed flank feathers that would have made beautiful soft hackles and asked if these birds were as delicious as the smaller white-tailed ptarmigan we have back in Colorado. I do consider myself a bird-watcher, but I stand out in the usual crowd. While others are authoritatively discussing habitat preferences and migration patterns, I’m more likely to raise eyebrows by contributing fly-tying tips and recipes.

The plan for the next morning was to slip in a few hours of fishing and then hotfoot it back to camp to meet the plane back to Great Bear Lake. But by dawn the thick clouds and steady rain had socked back in and the word by shortwave was that the Otter was grounded. We were told to take our time and wander back around lunchtime to see how the weather was shaping up. I got two more char that morning: a colored-up male that looked like a brook trout in the clown suit and a fifteen-pound female. I won’t try to describe the peculiar combination of olives, golds, oranges, pinks, pale blues and whites on a spawning Arctic char except to say that all fish are beautiful in their own way, but some, like these, are what a photographer friend calls “swimming jewelry.”