The Longest Silence (31 page)

The boat dropped me off at the top of the most beautiful steelhead run I had ever seen. I had a quiet moment to look the water over and tie on my favorite steelhead fly, the October Caddis. There was a sparkling chute of white, boulder-strewn water at the head that quickly dissipated in the deep, flowing pool. Across from me was a high rock wall covered with lichen. A ribbon falls descended its face and made a circle of bubbles in the water below. The tailout was a shoal of small stones where the entire Dean River rushed toward the sea, accompanied by impossibly rare music.

I began casting, swept away by the radiance of this place and by the high sense of possibility this handsome water suggested to the angler. Very early on, a steelhead rose, took my fly lightly, released it and disappeared. I felt a bit sunk but went on casting in case the fish
had not been touched and might move to my fly once more. Four casts later and the fish rose under the sparkling wake of the October Caddis, backed down a yard with it and vanished.

This was too much, and now almost technically hopeless, but since steelhead will come several times before they really line up on the fly, I kept casting. I tried to make the turnovers of the cast such that the fly always landed with a dead straight leader, and this turned out to be the right play because on what must have been close to my last cast, the fish instantly rose and sucked down the fly. I set the hook against a surge of power as the fish fought its way across the pool. It felt so strong that I recognized my chances of landing it weren’t particularly good. About halfway down the pool, the fish made a greyhounding jump and scared me with its size. I remember thinking it was like a picture of a jumping steelhead in some old-fashioned fishing book: parallel to the water, amazingly high against the dripping rock wall at the far side of the stream. By the time we reached the tailout, I had to make a stand. If the fish got into the rapids, it was gone. I raised the pressure until the rod was bent into the cork handle. The steelhead held in the pool for several long moments, then yielded. I felt it turn and then miraculously come my way. In a short while, I slid the fish into a small cove and tailed her, for it was a great big hen of about eighteen pounds, a beautiful slab of silver with a cloud of rose down her side. I removed the barbless hook and sent her on her way, daring to believe that I had received absolution.

I
HAD AS MY GUIDE
that day a young man who was perhaps retarded, and whom we shall call “Alfred.” He lived on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence River where he crabbed, lobstered, fished for cod, and assisted in the building of pretty lapped strake inshore skiffs of about twenty feet. Each December, Alfred told me, he set out for a week or two in the black spruce forest with a sled, a twelve-gauge pump shotgun and several hundred rounds of shells. He traveled in the snowy forest until the ammunition ran out and the sled was piled high with grouse, which he trailed home for his mother to cook and can for the winter. His companion was a small Indian dog of a kind that fascinated me, as they were distributed mostly among the Montaignais who bred them carefully and held on to them against all odds, including the offer of significant monies. These dogs were small and mean, particolored, and loyal only to their owners. Anyone else who came near them, they bit. The Indians believed if they weren’t mean, they weren’t any good. They were too small to do much harm: in fact, as will be seen, they did much good.

The North Shore grouse woods are so densely forested that to blunder around in them hunting grouse is futile. So the hunter who has surmounted the terrific difficulty required in obtaining an Indian dog walks the old loggers’ traces while the dog, well out of sight in the forest, hunts. Upon finding a grouse, the little dog flushes him up a tree, then sits at its base barking until the hunter finds him and shoots
the bird. On they go, for long days. They are subsistence hunters. The fates of dog and hunter are intertwined, and there is something terrific about the way they work together in order to survive. The little dog never lets the Indian out of his sight and the Indian, though impoverished, will not sell the dog to anyone.

My reason for remembering Alfred is more succinct. Every time I hooked a fish—not so often by the way—he would tilt his head back and shout in that North Shore accent which sounds like and might well be Cockney, “Fuck, what sport!” Or as pronounced by him, “Fook, wot spawt!” I don’t know who taught him to talk like this, but he put a lot of lung to it while conveying extraordinary merriment and victory. More disconcerting was when I managed to put a fish in the boat and he thundered around in his drooping hip boots, baying
“Blood!”
I picture myself with a genial smile, rod crossed on my lap, waiting for Alfred’s fervor to pass, as it soon did, restoring my gifted boatman. I had never seen anyone quite so bonded to his environment, alert to the movement of birds and game, the movements of water, to the possible arrival and positioning of new fish in the river. I imagined I could see his entire life at a glance, steadily weathering in the sometimes terrible seasons of this rind of the North Atlantic to one day disappear into the very minerals of its decaying rock. I could imagine him at the very end, staring into the abyss: “Fook, wot spawt!”

One of our group, who later would try to burn our camp down, stood on the float wearing a blue blazer and a polka dot bow tie, waiting to board the great, battered seaplane. The rest of the group displayed the usual plumage of a fishing party, excepting only the Aussie Akubra hat sometimes seen on spring creeks these days and the cracker camo-jumpsuit of the angler-predator.

On the dock was an old friend of my companions. We reviewed the quality of fishing he’d just had, a usual mood-setting pretrip information plunge. He told us equitably about his catch, about good flies, water levels, the usual. Then he added that this trip, after a couple decades of regular visitation, would be his last. He was dying, he said, and would be gone by the New Year. “Tight lines,” he said, without a trace of irony, and boarded his outbound floatplane.

•  •  •

O
N MY SEVERAL VISITS
to the Whale, I took pictures in my usual haphazard way. My photography has a way of converting the beautiful expanse of wildflowers to a “before” shot from an acne-aid commercial, ocean liners to houseflies, and my daughters’ boyfriends to corpse-feeding zombies of some nonstop nightmare. But with the Whale my failures were different. The point-and-shoot camera seemed to choke on the light, leaving my fish-holding companions suspended in the shining fog of Nowhere, having apparently found their quarry in some astral spare parts depot.

This is a riverscape as from an Ingmar Bergman film, a lowering arctic sky, a braided riverbed, small old trees, and high rocky shores streamlined by the centuries of ice, feeder creeks that trotted noisily out of infinite backcountry to fall into the mighty stream. A head-swinging caribou cow appeared among our tents one morning, out of her mind with wolf bites. Close enough to touch, she never seemed to see us, then threw herself into the river and just kept going. The sun fell soon after and we imagined hearing the wolves move through our camp in the dark, still on her trail.

The Whale has been fished sufficiently to have had some of its pools named, although the process is recent enough that you know the people for whom the pools are namesakes. One time I had an indifferent guide, whose preference was to sit on the bank chain-smoking. I was unhappy with him for carelessly knocking a big male salmon off my line with the end of his net. When I caught another fish, a small grilse, standing on a small stone at the edge of the run, he came out, netted it and, in conciliatory fashion, pointed under my feet and said, “Tom’s Rock.” It looked like every other rock in sight.

M
Y TENTMATE
, Dan, was the most spectacular snorer I’ve ever encountered. Given that there was no pattern or rythmn to his snoring, it was difficult to get used to it and drift off. One minute he sounded like he was sawing wood, the next like he was drowning in
molasses. Each night he said, “Tom, I know I snore. When it gets unbearable, please just wake me up and tell me to roll over.” Each night it became unbearable, and each night I said, “
Dan
, wake up and roll over!”

“Why?”

“Because you’re snoring very loud.”

Each night he took in my claim sleepily and replied, “Oh no, I’m afraid you’re mistaken about that.” And went back to snoring.

A
T PRICE
’
S POOL
you climb down a rocky embankment to where the river drops off immediately, then you must wade out among enormous, deeply submerged boulders to get a bit of casting room. At this rather vigorous range you can reach the mixed slick and broken water at the top of a long break in the river. Between your casting position and this ledge are many submerged rocks and an intricate skein of currents and submerged rips. Salmon will hold right out in this hard water; deep, fast, even broken, it is not too much for them, especially these fierce far-northern fish of the Whale.

I worked methodically through the upper part of this water, as methodically as the broken footing allowed. Sometimes it was necessary to wriggle through the current around a chest-high boulder, then to brace myself against it with one hand and somehow manufacture a cast. The Whale seems to particularly favor the riffled hitch, so it’s not just a matter of making a presentation from an awkward place and fishing it out. You have to make sure the fly continues to behave itself, by which I mean proper fly speed.

Of the many views as to how the riffled fly should be fished, I’m certain that finding a personal comfort level is first among equals, comfort level in this case being whatever produces conviction in the angler. I have a clear picture of what I want to see in order to facilitate the feeling that a take is imminent. I want the fly to be breaking the surface in such a way that it pulls a long, narrow, and serpentine V in the water, the effect of a little water snake making its way toward the shore. It does not sparkle along like a mackeral bait; it does not spit water; it does not sink and reappear. Instead, its movement ought to
be seductive, which requires mending and back mending, line control to keep it working properly in various current speeds. One of my Whale River companions showed me how on my first trip. Nat demonstrated the whole business on a short line in about ten minutes. Though it’s not all that difficult, it does require a high degree of vigilance over long hours to make the most of it. When fishing is slow and one’s daydreaming escalates, it is sometimes more agreeable to return to the more conventional across-and-down presentation, the metronomic, two-step consumption of the river.

I found myself at the end of Price’s, the end I liked best. Here the fish, having come up through wild white water, pause in currents which have slowed enough to clear, forming a rapid slick. I made a cast and watched the progress of the riffled fly as it swung down and crossed this inviting patch. A salmon surged up under it and stopped without taking the fly. The boil appeared with something of the shape of a large fish visible within it, then opened and rolled into the white water.

Now the slick, until recently one of many spots that offered the mild likeliness of potential holding water throughout the river, was water which specifically held an Atlantic salmon. There was a difference. You feel all your senses training on this bit of moving water. There is a kind of anxiety that comes of knowing an interested fish awaits. The general unlikeliness of good hookups becomes theoretical even before you’ve had a take. You sense that fate has spoken: You asked for it, here it is. There is a slight feeling of dread.

Any tightening or interruption in the track of the fly results in a missed fish. This can be so subtle that I now asked myself if this boil might have been a take I had somehow fouled up. In this kind of fishing, as with fishing waking flies for steelhead, there is sometimes entirely too much visual information during the take. If the fish doesn’t come back, there is reason to assume I have been at fault; if it returns, I’m absolved.

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.