Fly-Fishing the 41st (31 page)

We put our things inside. The small door, which I had to duck to get through, was ornately carved and brightly painted. On the table was a plate of dried cheese, salt tea, and fermented milk. Though the
ger
was insulated with felt and wool, you could hear the breeze blowing through the poplar trees in the grove by the river, and the gurgling currents of the Orhon Gol.

A P
ERFECT
D
AY

T
he next morning I was awakened by Gambatar, breaking sticks and crumpling paper to feed the woodstove. It was cold enough that I could see my breath. He lit the stove and warmth from the fire quickly spread through the
ger.
The heat reddened my face, the only part of me not wrapped in thick wool blankets.

When my eyes adjusted to the light spilling in through the open
door I noticed that it was snowing outside. I must be dreaming, I thought.

I put on my shoes and lumbered outside to see. A wet snow was indeed falling, accumulating lightly on the ground. It was still early and dark enough that you could see Venus near the horizon. I went back into the
ger
and unpacked my waders and fishing gear. I put on warm clothes and the waders and stuffed my fishing tackle in a small backpack. Johannes and Ida were still asleep when I left to go fishing.

Judging by the large bars of exposed gravel I walked over, the water level of the river was low. Beyond the river was a broad expanse of reddish hills. The falling snow melted on my cap and against my face. My breath curled up before me in the cold air like cigarette smoke. Not far upstream from the
ger
camp were two Mongolian men fishing a good-sized pool.

The fishermen used long rods with big spinning reels and a hook with a maggot hanging below a bobber. They cast the whole rig to the head of the pool and let it drift to the end with the current as a natural insect might. At the end of the drift they swung their rigs to the head of the pool and made the drift again.

On the bank at their feet were thirty to forty fish, mostly arctic grayling and lenok, and in their large backpacks were several dozen more. I approached the fishermen's kill like a scavenger. I had never seen a lenok and was extremely curious to have a closer look. Their sides were a mottled brick rose and they were covered with oblong black spots. Their tails were forked, their mouths more snoutish than the grayling beside them, though both were suited for bottom feeding, as their upper jaws extended over their lower. The grayling were equally beautiful, their sides covered with reddish and cerulean blue sides. Hints of buttercup yellow gleamed also, like flecks of gold in a stream bottom. The most magnificent feature of the grayling were the large sail-like dorsal fins spread like a jeweled fan. The fish flopped on the gravel until they lay dead and snow collected on their scales.

I waited there, watching, until the two fishermen reeled in their lines, filled their backpacks to overflowing, and left. Then I approached the water, rigged my fly rod, and took my time to tie on a small caddis larvae imitation. I let the pool rest a few moments and looked around in all directions. There was little to interrupt one's vision all the way to the horizon.

I cast the fly up to the head of the pool in the same manner that the fishermen had. Even though the two fishermen had taken in excess of a hundred fish from the pool, I immediately started to catch fish—first a grayling and then a lenok—and was elated. My enthusiasm warmed me as I began to see the redness of the sun envelop the clouds and the reddish hills.

Back at camp I entered the darkness of the
ger
again. I warmed my hands on the dry heat from the stove. Pungent wood smoke and that from burning dung tickled my nostrils. Johannes looked up from sleep, his eyes glinting in the light that spilled in from where the stovepipe exited. I held two fish close enough to his face that he might smell them.

“Oh, you have caught a lenok,” he called, jumping out of the warm blankets and groping on the floor for his glasses. “Is it live? I must photograph it in the tank!”

“It was snowing this morning,” I said, “where were you?”

“It must be cold out, then.” Johannes found his camera and was about to walk outside when he realized he'd forgotten to put his pants on. We walked outside to observe the one grayling and one lenok I had kept. He photographed them as they lay dead in the low grass outside the
ger.

“We need live ones,” Johannes said. “Can you catch more?”

“I'm pretty sure I can,” I said. “The river is full of them.”

A young woman who tended the
ger
camp prepared our breakfast, hunks of bread and dry hard cheese and a bowl of mutton and potato soup with noodles. The woman also cleaned and cooked the fish I had kept, which made Johannes happy. The grayling was
sweet and fine textured, more savory than the lenok, whose flesh was somewhat grainy.

The snow had long stopped and now the sky opened up and a hot sun beamed. The air became warm and I took off most of the layers of clothes I had worn that morning. The sky was alive with cottony clouds dancing at the fringe of the racing front. All signs forecasted a perfect day.

 

After breakfast, I took Johannes upstream, past the pool where I had caught the fish that morning. Ida came with us part of the way and then returned to camp because her feet were hurting.

The farther we walked the greener and more lush the grasses became. Here and there was a stand of blooming irises, the grass around them clipped neatly to their bases by brown sheep grazing in the meadows.

A mile upstream of camp I began casting. It was not long before I hooked and landed a lenok, which Johannes put in a plastic bag of water so he could bring it to camp and photograph it alive in his tank.

“Hey, look over there,” Johannes said, pointing to the opposite bank of the river. A single boy stood watching us, and after a few moments he waded through a shallow riffle of the cold water to our side.

The boy followed us as we continued past a small pen of piebald goats. He was small and had trouble walking because his big black cowboy boots were twice his proper size. His hands were hidden in the sleeves of an oversized man's jacket, which swung like an elephant's trunk on either side of his hips. A red rag held this robe together around his waist and his short-cropped hair was mostly concealed by a fur cap, partially shadowing his parched and windswept cheeks.

The three of us came to a long pool, the kind an Atlantic salmon fisherman would recognize as perfect, a steady even riffle tailing out
to a deep-throated hole. There were so many fish I began catching one on every cast. Johannes stood beside me for some time looking impatient.

“Okay,” he said, “you have caught enough? I have one of each for photographing and an extra for dinner. Shouldn't we go back to the camp and check on Ida?”

“You can,” I retorted. “I'm going to stay awhile. We're always running around sampling all these rivers at your frantic pace. I've got this one all to myself now, there's plenty of fish, and I'm not leaving.” I realized I was just short of stomping my foot like a reluctant child. Both Johannes and the boy were staring at me. “It's a perfect day,” I said calmly.

“Okay then,” Johannes said. “I'll go back.”

I and the strangely dressed boy continued across the barren land, stopping as I fished pools that looked promising. The boy picked up a long slender stem from a scrublike bush to mimick my casting, then he chased some grazing horses with it. Several times when I hooked a fish I handed the rod to the boy and he reeled it in. Occasionally he would rest nearby like a fragile prince, lying flat on the ground beneath the incessant wind.

After a while I said to the boy, “That looks like the end of it.” The river had become wider and flatter and there were no longer any deep pools holding fish.

He began to sing.

I sang also and the boy seemed amused. Then I whistled and he wrinkled his brow to show that he was annoyed. He indicated he wished to challenge me to a race, so we began running. As we ran, we came closer and closer to the spot where we had met. I stopped running when it looked like he might trip from his oversize boots.

“I'm out of breath,” I said to the boy, panting. He began to walk away from me.

When we were some distance apart and he was just an object
kicking dust, I looked back and saw him waving. I had no idea where he was going.

 

Back in the
ger,
Ida was reading a book, a fire was burning in the woodstove. She didn't say much to me, nor did Johannes.

At dinner we spoke a lot, but mostly about how good the fish tasted. We ate plates of fried grayling; the flesh was golden orange, sweet and delicious. For dessert we were given some yogurt with wild berries.

 

The next day Gambatar drove us over the open and roadless land. He proved a helpful and amiable travel companion. My only complaint was that he played the same tape of Boney M songs over and over on the radio. Shortly, I knew the lyrics to all of them: “Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen. Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine.”

At another section of the Orhon Gol, we came upon some men fishing with hand lines baited with whole dead lemmings.

“I'd like to see the fish that eats that,” Johannes said.

“Maybe we should dive in the pool and see what's down there. It should be taimen.”

“I think we'll wait until they leave,” Johannes said, but the fishermen stayed longer than we did.

Two days later we fished some rivers flowing to the Gobi Desert that could have been inhabited by Littledale's elusive long-toothed grayling. The most promising of these watersheds was Ongijn Gol, a cold and clear stream, fertile with aquatic insects and a suitable habitat for grayling. But our efforts produced only a few diminutive loach, which Johannes caught in a hand net.

Ida seemed more weary than usual of our fish concerns and incessant obsession with the long-toothed grayling. Her stout and corpulent body was taxed riding over very rough terrain. She held
her lower back with both hands, her face sweating and her mascara running. I noticed after a while that tears were streaming down her face and she leaned over to me, as we were sitting beside each other in the backseat, and spoke in my ear.

“I am deeply sad,” she said to me. “Johannes is not an easy man to be with.”

I put my hand on Ida's shoulder. There was enough noise from the engine that Johannes could not hear us.

“What can I do, Ida?” I said. “I wish I could do something. He is a crazy man, but what you hate about him makes him interesting to me.”

“There is no question he is interesting,” Ida said defensively. “Johannes is very smart, you know. He is incredible with languages, he's just not an easy man.”

 

Johannes, Gambatar, and I spent the early evening in front of a hotel in the village of Arvajheer, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, while Ida rested her back in the room we'd checked into. My radar detected the voice of an American.

He wore a turtleneck that read Denver Broncos on the collar. Johannes and I heard every word of what he was saying to the small Mongolian man with whom he spoke. After a time, he spotted us as Westerners and bought us a drink. He was from the International Republican Institute, visiting local officials and consulting them on how to run a proper democracy. It seemed the locals of Arvajheer liked him. They were throwing him a party.

“What's the primary occupation of Mongolians?” I asked him over our drinks.

“Herders, they're nomads,” he said. “There's no economy.”

“That seems all right,” I said.

“You can't have a democracy without capitalism,” he said.

“What about tourism?” I asked.

“There's stuff to see but no infrastructure. The roads suck, I'm sure you've seen—you can't get anywhere if you don't have a chopper. Have you taken any of the domestic flights?”

“We are tomorrow,” Johannes said. “We're flying to the western Altai, to the town of Hovd.”

“God bless you,” he said, laughing. “Keep in mind when you're boarding that they dropped seven out of eleven planes in the past three weeks, four emergency landings and three crash landings. The parts are made in New Jersey, assembled in China, and Miat Airlines flies them, that's a bad recipe. God bless you,” he said again. “It's okay, they're being extra careful this week, there's a lot of foreign dignitaries in town.”

Ida never showed up for dinner—she must have fallen asleep in the hotel room—so Johannes and I and Gambatar forgot to eat as well. Gambatar went to sleep in the van and Johannes and I continued to drink until two in the morning. Then we returned to our room with its two beds. I slept on the floor between them.

I was about to fall asleep when I heard Ida, first whimpering, then sobbing. Johannes did not cross the room to console her; he pretended he was asleep. I decided to leave the room.

I sat in the hallway listening. Ida began to scream at Johannes in German. He did not reply. About ten minutes later she came out of the room and found me sitting on the floor in the dark hall. She had brought her cigarettes and wanted me to share the time with her.

“
Ven conmigo,
” she said, still crying.

I gave her my hand and led her down the marble stairs, chipped and decrepit, until we were outside.

“Johannes has a girlfriend,” she said. “He doesn't like me because I'm fat. He likes thin women.”

“Oh, Ida,” I said, “you're beautiful. What do you need Johannes for? You have your children.”

“We have been married twenty-two years but Hannes doesn't care about anything except trout. He gets worse every year. It's a craziness.”

Ida wet my shoulder with her tears. “He works when I sleep. And the rest of the time he spends in the bar.”