Trout Eyes Read online

  The next time a bluegill slashed at her bug, I said, “Set the damn hook.”

  “You don’t need to yell at me,” she said. “I’m having a good time. I’m not an expert like you, you know.”

  I started to say, “I’m no expert,” but I realized that wasn’t her point, so I didn’t.

  A few weeks later, Vicki told me that she’d enrolled in the L. L. Bean fly-fishing school. It was quite sweet, the way she explained that she thought it would work better if someone other than I taught her, and I was pleased that she wanted to learn and that I hadn’t already ruined it for her.

  She came back from the school with an efficient casting stroke, the ability to tie a few knots, a solid, if rudimentary, understanding of fish behavior and aquatic entomology, and a fly-fishing outfit of her own.

  For the rest of that summer, we spent many happy hours in my canoe casting panfish poppers toward lily pads and fallen timber and overhanging bushes. Vicki tied on her own flies, cast smoothly, set the hook gently but firmly, landed, unhooked, and released her bluegills, paused often to watch herons and ducks and muskrats, and insisted on taking her turn with the paddle.

  For my part, I did my best to keep my mouth shut.

  Once when she had the paddle, a four-pound largemouth engulfed the bluegill bug I was casting.

  When I landed it and held it up, she said, “That was so cool, seeing you do that.”

  My thought was: I wish she’d been the one to catch it.

  * * *

  The following winter Vicki announced that she’d signed up for an all-female fly-fishing vacation out West with an outfitter called Reel Women. They were going to float the South Fork of the Snake and camp out on the river.

  “I hope you’re not doing this for me,” I said.

  She frowned. Her expression said: “Are you nuts?”

  “I mean,” I blustered, “I have a lot of fly-fishing friends whose wives don’t fish, and it seems to work fine for them.”

  “I’m doing this,” she said, “for me.”

  That summer, after her third day in Idaho, Vicki called me. “Hey,” she said. “I caught a big one.” Enthusiasm bubbled in her voice. “She was a cutt, almost nineteen inches. I spotted her rising at the tail of a riffle, and when I finally got a decent drift over her, she ate it. I did it all, except the guide netted her. It was way awesome.” She paused. “I couldn’t wait to tell you.”

  “That’s terrific,” I said. “What’d you catch her on?”

  “Is it important?”

  “Not really. It’s just one of those fly-fishing questions.”

  “It happened to be a PMD parachute, size sixteen. Pale Morning Dun. A pretty name for a pretty insect.” She took a breath. “I’ve made some wonderful friends. We laugh all the time. Yesterday we got caught in a hailstorm. Do you know where they got the name Grand Tetons?”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “She did, and we both laughed.

  “So are you having any fun?” I said.

  “What do you think?”

  Vicki has been taking a week-long vacation with her lady fly-fishing friends to various destinations in the Rocky Mountain West every summer since that one. There are countless long winter telephone calls as she and the friends she made on that first adventure on the South Fork lay plans for next summer’s trip. I’ve overheard Vicki’s end of some of those conversations. They talk about their children and spouses and pets and jobs and homes, and sometimes about where and when they should go fishing.

  * * *

  Last summer marked the tenth anniversary of the trip when Vicki and her fly-fishing gang of women first met. They arranged to hook up with Reel Women again for a float-and-camp reprise on the South Fork where it all began.

  To honor this occasion in Vicki’s fly-fishing life—and in our relationship—I decided to tie her an assortment of flies, all the flies she’d ever need for a two-day drift down the South Fork. I wanted her to be able to say to her guide: “Oh, I’ve got my own flies. My sweetie tied them for me. See?”

  I consulted Linda Windels, the ringleader of Vicki’s gang. Linda is as passionate and knowledgeable about fly fishing as anybody I know, and she lives close to the South Fork.

  “We’ll need tons of PMDs,” she said. “Sixteens. On the South Fork their bodies are kind of pinkish. Emergers, of course, too. Don’t forget Rusty Spinners. And we might run into some Baetis. Twenties and twenty-twos. Pheasant Tails and Hare’s Ears, of course. All sizes. Um, tan caddis with a greenish body. I use peacock herl on mine. Don’t forget terrestrials. We should see hoppers, and beetles and ants are always important. Woolly Buggers, naturally. What am I leaving out?”

  “That sounds like a good start,” I said.

  After several weeks of feverish tying, I got an email from Linda. “I forgot to mention Yellow Sallies and Golden Stones,” it said. “Toward evening there’s also sometimes a little dark lowprofile caddis, size 18, on the water.”

  The flies I tied filled two large boxes. I gave them to Vicki the night before she left for Idaho.

  She opened the boxes and poked around with her finger, naming them. PMD. BWO. Caddis pupa. Midge larva. PT nymph. Yellow Sally. Sparkle dun. Hopper

  Ten years ago she didn’t know what a dry fly was.

  “They’re gorgeous,” she said. She hugged me. “That’s a lot of work. Thank you.”

  “I like the idea of you catching trout on flies I tied for you,” I said.

  “Me, too.”

  * * *

  “It was great,” Vicki said when she got back. “We laughed all the time. I fell out of the boat. The guides were terrific. Amazing food. I’d forgotten how spectacular that canyon is. It rained the whole first day and we got soaked. We saw loads of eagles and a pair of moose . . .”

  “And how,” I said when she stopped for a breath, “was the fishing?”

  “Oh,” she said, “it was pretty good. The water was a little high and off-color after the rain. The PMDs came off in the afternoon, but the fish weren’t really up on them. I got a few nice ones, though, casting from the driftboat, hitting the seams and foamlines.”

  “What’d you catch ’em on?”

  “Chernobyl Ants.” She touched my cheek. “I wanted to use your flies, but Lori Ann thought . . .”

  “Always listen to your guide,” I said.

  “I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.”

  I shook my head. “If you’ve got to choose between feelings and trout,” I said, “go for the trout.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You taught me that.”

  5

  The Truth About Dry-Fly Fishing

  Behold the dry-fly purist, with his form-fitting neoprene waders, bulging vest, expensive graphite rod, and fancy English reel. He speaks Latin fluently and spends more time studying insects than casting to trout.

  He’ll be happy to bore you with the hoary traditions of dryfly fishing, its ancient and honored roots in England where it all began nearly 400 years ago, where they’re called “anglers,” not “fisherman,” and where his counterparts still wear tweed jackets and old school ties and plus-fours and fish by the strict rules of the river: Upstream dry flies only, and only to rising trout. The sporting way.

  He’s proud of his skill, the years it took him to master the delicate art of the fly rod. He loves the beauty of those graceful loops his line makes as it rolls out over the water.

  The purist insists he doesn’t care about actually catching trout. He’s above all that. He’d rather get skunked than demean himself by using anything but a dry fly. He’s the Ultimate Sportsman, you see. It’s all about the scent of clean air, the gurgle of rushing water, the symphony of birdsong. He loves dry-fly fishing for its ambiance, its roots, its difficulty.

  For its purity.

  Go ahead. Snicker. Say what you’re thinking: “Pretentious,” “effete,” “condescending,” “smug.”

  The stereotype persists. The dry-fly purist has heard it all. It doesn’t both
er him.

  Actually, he’s snickering himself.

  * * *

  The truth is, we dry-fly fishermen dress and talk and behave the way we do for the benefit of others. We aim to promote the image, perpetuate the myth. If the name-callers buy into it we’re happy, because we’ve got a delicious secret and we don’t want too many people to know it.

  However, at the risk of getting booted out of the Fellowship of Purists, I’ll expose our secret: We dry-fly snobs like to catch fish as much as anybody. Sportsmanship, tradition, artfulness, and aesthetic values have nothing to do with it

  We happen to know that dry-fly fishing is the easiest way to catch trout. That’s why we like it.

  Sure, there are times—early in the season, usually, when the water is cold and high and discolored—when trout sulk on the bottom of the stream and, if they eat anything, it’s a worm or a flashy spinner or a weighted nymph, fished deep and slow.

  But trout are mainly insect eaters. They’re most vulnerable when they’re gorging on bugs at the surface, as they do at least part of virtually every day of the season under normal conditions. At those times, worms and spinners and even weighted nymphs are almost useless, but anybody with modest skill and a dry fly that even vaguely resembles the insect the trout are eating can catch them easily.

  * * *

  The singular advantage that we dry-fly fishermen have over everybody else is that we can see what’s going on. There’s no hidden, subsurface mystery to guess at.

  Consider:

  1. When they feed off the surface, trout betray themselves and their precise locations. We dry-fly fishermen know when we’re casting to a hungry trout. This knowledge gives us the confidence, patience, and persistence to concentrate on our goal: To catch that trout.

  2. We know that when trout are at the surface, their range of vision is limited. Because we can locate our targets, we can stalk them and, by approaching them from downstream, creep close to them so we can make short, accurate casts without spooking them.

  3. When trout are eating bugs off the surface, there’s little guesswork to selecting the right fly. We can see what they’re eating simply by observing what floats past our waders. We don’t need any Latin to choose an imitation, and we know that a general approximation is usually close enough. If they’re feeding on big cream-colored mayflies, we simply tie on a big cream-colored dry fly.

  4. We can see how our line, leader and fly drift on the water, so our mistakes are visible. If the fly fails to pass directly over the fish, our cast was inaccurate. If it drags unnaturally across the surface, that tells us why he didn’t eat it. Whatever we did wrong, we can make the obvious corrections until we see that we’ve got it right.

  5. We can observe and analyze how the trout responds to our fly. If he sticks up his nose and sucks it in, we lift our rod, set the hook, and bring him in. Simple, efficient, fun. Foolproof, really. If he refuses a fly that floats directly over him without drag a few times, we know we must change flies or change tactics.

  6. Even when trout aren’t actively rising, they’re usually happy to eat a dry fly. Drifting a bushy white-winged floater through riffles and pocket water is about as easy as trout fishing gets.

  * * *

  So the next time you encounter one of those dry-fly purists on the stream, tell him you’re not impressed. You know his secret.

  The fact is, if you’re not fishing with dry flies, you’re the true sportsman. You’re the one who’s doing it the hard way.

  6

  Last Call

  When Joe called, I’d just come in from working Burt, my bird dog, on hand and whistle signals in the field beside the house. Burt was pretty rusty, and neither of us was yet in hunting shape. But the poplars and birches were turning yellow, and the swamp maples had already started to drop their leaves. Two days earlier I’d awakened to frost on the lawn.

  “Let’s go fishing,” Joe said.

  I found myself shrugging. “Yeah, well, I don’t know . . .”

  “Secret river,” he said. “You’ll love it. Full of big brown trout, and they’re hungry and aggressive right now. Got a pair of twenty-inchers this morning on my way to work. This river’s full of ’em, and nobody knows about it except me and a couple other guys.”

  Burt was sitting beside me with his head cocked, listening to my end of the conversation. I fingered a burr on his ear and pulled it off. “Twenty-inchers, huh?” I said to Joe.

  “Yep. Busted off another one, looked bigger. You want to catch a twenty-inch brown trout, this is the place.” He hesitated. “So whaddya say?”

  “I guess so. Sure. Sounds good.”

  Burt rolled his eyes at me, then plodded over to his dog bed in the corner, turned around three times, and lay down with his back to me.

  On the other end of the line, Joe was silent for a minute. Then he said, “What’s this I’m hearing? Something the matter with you? Don’t you want to go fishing?”

  * * *

  For the first half of my angling life, I lived in a state where the trout season closed on the last day of September and opened on the third Saturday of April. The idea was to protect fall-spawning brookies, the only species of trout native to our local waters.

  It had been that way since the turn of the century, when they decided fishing had better be regulated before it was too late, and even though native brookies were virtually extinct in my state by the time I was born, the fishing season remained closed for half of the year.

  It didn’t occur to me to question this arrangement—certainly not to resent it. Even before I was old enough to venture into the outdoors, my father’s comings and goings taught me that the sportsman’s year turned according to logical and comfortable rhythms. To everything there was a season, and Dad took whatever the season offered. Landlocked salmon at ice-out. Trout as the days lengthened and the trees leafed out. Bass and panfish in the hot summer months. Grouse and woodcock in the fall. Ducks and rabbits in December and January. In the coldest, darkest months he tied flies and waited for the ice to go out again.

  I learned those seasonal rhythms from my father, and they became my own.

  Or maybe I didn’t learn them. Maybe they were embedded in my DNA . . . or maybe even in the collective unconscious of my species. Those rhythms felt—still feel—utterly innate. I never believed that Opening Day needed to be legislated. The third Saturday in April and the last day in September were not arbitrary. Those dates came just about when they were supposed to come in the natural order of things.

  Thirty-odd years ago my home state, acknowledging that there were no longer spawning native brook trout to protect, changed the regulations. No more Opening Day, no more closed season. Suddenly, you could go trout fishing whenever you wanted.

  I barely noticed.

  I still fish for trout from April through June when the streams flow cold and clear and the mayflies hatch. On summer evenings I paddle around my ponds, casting deerhair bass bugs among the lily pads and against the fallen timber, while bullfrogs grump and mosquitoes buzz and night birds swoop close to the water. As the days begin shortening in September, my thoughts turn to bird hunting. I spend more time working my bird dog. I hunt grouse and woodcock and pheasants in October and November while the leaves color up, turn brown, and fall. I set out decoys for waterfowl in the ice and snow of December. During the frozen winter months, I tie flies and daydream.

  Then sometime in March, when the snow begins to melt and the earth to thaw and new buds are coloring the willows and maples, my thoughts turn to Opening Day of the trout season.

  * * *

  I didn’t try to explain any of this to Joe. He’s too young to remember when we had an Opening Day.

  Anyway, I had to admit that I was kind of intrigued by the possibility of big autumn brown trout in a secret river.

  We agreed to meet on Friday, still a few days before the birdhunting season opened.

  Thursday evening Burt followed me down to my tackle room in the basement. He sa
t there with his ears cocked and a hopeful look on his face. Bird dogs have a strong sense of how the seasons turn. Burt knew that his favorite time of year had arrived. When he saw me sorting through my fly boxes, he turned around and shuffled back upstairs. Burt knows the difference between a box of woolly buggers and a box of shotgun shells.

  When I left on Friday morning, he didn’t even follow me to the door.

  It was a two-hour drive over back roads to our rendezvous at Joe’s river. Along the way I found myself studying the woods. In the low areas, the leaves had started to drop from the alders and, on the hillsides, the poplars were ablaze. Chipmunks scampered along the stone walls. I made mental notes of brushy stream bottoms and overgrown apple orchards and tangly field edges—places where in just a few days a man with a good bird dog might find a few grouse or a flight of migrating woodcock.

  I wasn’t thinking much about trout.

  * * *

  Joe was waiting at the end of the dirt road. We dragged his canoe to the edge of the river, then I followed him so he could leave his truck at the place where we’d take out. In my car on the way back to the put-in, he told me that his river took an eight-mile loop through the woods, a stretch of water completely inaccessible except by a long hike through swamp and forest. “A long time ago they stocked it with brown trout,” he said. “But you can only get at it with a canoe, and I guess not enough people fished it to make it worth continuing to stock, so they stopped. You won’t find it on any of the lists the state publishes. Hardly anybody knows about it. The trout have thrived here. You’ll see.”

  I thought about autumn brown trout in their spawning regalia. Buttery yellow bellies, blaze orange flanks, blood-red spots. The colors of October foliage in New England. The colors of the woods when you’re hunting birds.

  Back at the canoe we pulled on our waders and strung our rods and debated woolly-bugger colors. Joe said that for the past few weeks the water temps had been dropping about a degree every day. Pretty soon it would be too cold for good fishing.

  We launched the canoe, and instantly we were surrounded by the silence of the river. No hum of traffic, no barking dogs, no clank of machinery. Just the soft breeze in the hemlocks and willows that lined the banks and the gurgle of water flowing over gravel and around boulders.