Fly-Fishing the 41st (35 page)

Last I heard Josh had joined the navy. I spent the night in Provo.

T
HE
C
ABIN

I
'll eat anything that doesn't eat me first,” the man at the market said to me.

I had asked him what the dead rattlesnakes hanging outside his shop were for.

I bought canned beans there, rice, and packaged sliced bread. I enjoyed buying provisions, whether it was in a supermarket before a snowstorm or a country store before a camping trip.

The backcountry cabin Greg owned was nestled in a private spot in the center of BLM land in northeast Colorado. It was an old homesteader's cabin on a hundred acres, which he hoped to one day expand on and winterize. For the time being it was a nice place to crash on hiking and fishing trips or to offer to his friends.

I followed Greg's directions off Route 40 to a dirt road, by the hunched bodies of charcoal-colored bison. Some way down the road I saw several elk and began to think I was on a safari. At the end of Greg's directions, on top of a small rise, dark against the golden grasses of autumn, was a cabin.

The cabin was made of lodgepole pine and the interior, even after I had found the key, gone in, and opened the shutters, was dark. There were two beds in one room beside a wood-burning stove and in the other, smaller room there was a wood-burning cooking stove and a shelf with two cooking pans.

“There's split wood out back to burn in the stove,” I remembered Greg telling me. Nailed to the inside of the kitchen door, I'm sure from a previous owner, was a note:

Two out of three promises had not been kept. There was no food and no fresh sheets. I hoped there were trout in the creek.

Toward dusk, when I had settled in, I sat on the front porch of the cabin in my underwear and heard a coyote yapping; then several more yelped with the first. I scanned the hills, now a deep rose color, and in the last light of day I saw them racing in formation.

It took some effort to find matches to light the gas lamp.

“Shshsh hississississ shshsh shshsh Jamesamesj mesja esjam sjame sh sh sh,” it said. It seemed to speak to me, and I took some whiskey that I'd brought and drank it, and that helped me hear. Maybe I wasn't alone. And because it was dark outside and the only light for miles around was emanating from the interior of my cabin, I had ignited a beacon for all predators. I feared to attract attention, I feared the voice, and I shut the flame from its fuel source.

Darkness pervaded the room.

I found my bed and the cold sleeping bag. I should have worn my flannels, I thought. I'll keep the flashlight by my bed and my knife too. My head was on the pillow, there was a pillow, the bedsprings creaking as I settled in; the smell of sage carried in a cold air through the open window where I had placed a screen to keep out the bugs. I could hear the creek below me, could imagine reflections swirling in its currents, and then I heard a noise. What was that noise? What the hell was that noise! It was a mouse scuttling—no. It was not “ta ta ta ta ta ta,” it was “
thump,
drag,
thump,
drag,
thump,
drag,” and it sounded as though it were on the floor of my cabin, approaching my bed.

If you were to judge an animal's gait and size by the interval between its steps—long—this animal was large. Had it come
through the only open window? If so I didn't hear the screen fall to the floor. I'll reach down for my flashlight and lie still, I thought, holding my knife at the ready. I expected to see large yellow eyes reflecting in the light when I turned it on, but there was nothing, the sound had stopped. I got out of bed and went into the kitchen to pull the screen out of the open window and close it shut, but nothing was there. I put my head out and looked up at the stars. They were prominent and bright. It was not until I got back into bed and listened for the steps to start again that I realized the sound was coming from above me, in the attic. I dared not open the hatch to the attic and look, so I went to sleep, thinking the animal would not open it either.

When morning came, after sleeping the dark hours to dawn, I lit the woodstove with the summer stock-market tables. The heat produced from capitalism burning expanded the stovepipe and made a percussive boom. On the face of the stove was written
COLE MFG
.
CO
.

CHICAGO ILL
.

I heated some water to make oatmeal and hot chocolate and pretended I was a frontiersman. The heat from the stove became oppressive and I had to back off from it. Maybe I was in a
ger
camp again on the fringe of the Gobi Desert. The driver Gambatar had already come into the low dark tent to light the stove. Or I was a soldier then in the army of Genghis Khan somewhere on the desolate steppes, fighting for an empire in a desert. Empires were just illusions. Battles had been fought in places where rivers ran and cows grazed; at the battles' ends, such places were peaceful again—Gettysburg, Normandy, a beet field on the Elbe. What about “the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings, going on in the peaceful woods, and smiling fields” that Darwin wrote about in his journal in 1839.

I stepped out on the porch in my long underwear to survey the yellow hills. My breath drew out in a smoky plume and I embraced myself in the cold. It was that precise time in the morning when the stars begin to disappear and a blueness pervades from horizon to
horizon. Before me the sun was rising but its warmth had not yet reached the ground. I turned around and looked at the cabin, its front door glowing in the soft light, and then looked above the door to the small triangle of attic space beneath the wood-shingled roof.

Thinking the attic was too small to accommodate the animal I had heard the night before, I walked around the cabin to see if there was a hole somewhere big enough to justify my creature's entry. Finding there was not, I reasoned that the animal had found its way in as an infant and grown up there, which of course was absurd. During the four nights I spent in the cabin, I never heard it stir as long as the sun was out, but after dark, without fail, it began to move. Was it a bat? If so it was porcupine-sized at least.

Soon the western sun, the same sun I'd seen everywhere else, was high and warm and my early fire in the stove burned to embers. I was standing on the porch preparing my fly rod, thinking about where I should start my fishing. The scene before me was close to my mental images, as I had never been, of the African savannah. From anywhere amidst the tall grasses, dry and golden, I was prepared to see the sandy shoulder of a lioness.

Down in the meadow sloughs of Upper Blacktail Creek, as the creek was called, there were water buffalo, though really they were bison, and on the hills above were scavenging hyenas, though really they were coyotes. The roads along which moose and elk can sometimes be seen were beyond sight, no trails led to this spot. I was alone, in my khaki fatigues, bracing my over and under, smiling and squinting in the dry sun, taking my emerging mustache with thumb and forefinger, contemplating the creek winding through the willows and sage.

As soon as I walked off the porch into the grasses, I noticed that every plant had its unique way of hitching seeds to my pant legs, socks, and boot laces. I carried them some distance up Blacktail Creek and then circled toward where the sun had risen and walked up a hill from where I could see much of the area, and my cabin. At
the crest of the hill there was a massive boulder that must have been ten feet high. I wanted to be on top of it, so I sank my fingers into the rock and pulled myself up. I lay facing the sky, watching the sun emerge from and disappear behind large white clouds. After a while, the wind picked up and two small raindrops fell on my cheek. The air became cool and I was very hungry, as I had eaten only a bit of oatmeal that morning. I got down from the boulder and returned to the creek to fish.

I have always found it difficult to fish on an empty stomach, and the wind was making it difficult for me to cast the fly in the water and not in the grass. After fishing four bends in the creek with a dry fly, I had not seen or caught anything. Then I came to a large pool with a small cascade at the head of it. In that pool were many brook trout, and before long I had two strung through the gills on a willow stick. It was early afternoon and I returned to the cabin to cook them.

They were females, and each had a pair of golden masses of roe. Still speckled, like the nighttime sky, I laid them on the kitchen table, filled a skillet with oil, and lit the woodstove. After about half an hour I found I could not get the stove hot enough to cook on, so I lit a small open fire behind the cabin and roasted the trout on willow skewers like marshmallows. I ate them like a cob of corn; their flesh was sweet, as if they had been marinated in sugar water. I licked the willow stick clean and put out the fire. Then I took out a book and read on the porch with a glass of whiskey. I sampled the book and sipped the whiskey until the light grew dim and the first star (probably a planet) showed in the sky. By and by, the creature walked again in the attic.

I still could offer no explanation for it and crept slowly to my bed. Shortly, I fell to sleep.

When I woke the sun had already risen. I lit the woodstove and sat by it. The sun beamed strongly, and I moved a chair out onto the porch to sit and listen to the creek. When the sun was high enough
to reach the water, I undressed and walked barefoot through the sage to bathe in a deep pool of the creek where I had caught the fish. There the water was deep enough to cover my body. I could not take the cold water for very long and I stood up, climbing onto the grassy bank, returning to the cabin to dry off. I put on jeans, and my khaki safari shirt, and sat in a chair on the porch.

I tromped again that day through the golden hills and valleys. At dark, the nameless creature walked in the attic.

V
ISITING
D
R
. B
EHNKE

O
n October third I drove along Route 40 toward Fort Collins, Colorado. Groves of aspen, nestled in the crooks of hills, were changing to yellow and orange like bowls of ripening mangoes. Eastward toward the Continental Divide there was not a breath of wind. Just before dark every lake was still. The pristine reflections of the changing aspen were disturbed only by the rings of rising trout.

At Rabbit Ears Pass I drove in minutes from the drainage of the Colorado River and the Pacific to that of the North Platte and the Atlantic. Night came completely as there was no moon, but I could hear the rushing currents of the Cache la Poudre River out of my open window. I saw no sign of anyone on the narrow road until I came to a roadside bar and heard music. It was filled with college students from the state university. Some miles beyond I came to the town of Fort Collins.

Behnke lived with his wife, Peggy, in a modest ranch house on East Prospect Street, just outside of town and the campus of Colorado State University. I arrived there the next morning and was
greeted by Bob Behnke at the door. He smelled of sweet pipe smoke. “Oh, James, come in,” he said in a slim, nasally voice. “Did you have any trouble finding my place?”

In the living room, the first room on the left, there was nothing that resembled fish, but the hallway was stuffed with renderings of trout in all media. There were more paintings of trout one floor below in the television room, and in the adjacent kitchen. It was a well-used kitchen with full spice racks, dried sage, rosemary, and flowers hanging from a beam, liqueurs with sticky bottles, some blackened pots, and a gas stove. I sensed that if Behnke were the true
Schwarzfischer
I expected him to be, he would hold cooking, eating, and drinking wine on a level with his fishing.

We exited the house by a door in the kitchen and Behnke showed me his yard. Beside the house was a red barn where he kept a mule, and beyond the mule was the garden where he and his wife grew tomatoes and peppers, squash, sage, rosemary, and several varieties of mint. Beside the garden were small fruit trees, and on some there were ripe apples. The yard sloped down behind the garden to a pair of small ponds thickly lined with willow and cottonwood. Three white geese honked at us and the mule by the barn brayed in response. Behnke stared into the ponds.

“Before these willows and Russian olive grew up and sucked all the water out, I had trout in this spring hole—some Snake River cutthroats up to twenty-three inches.” Behnke talked continuously in his nasally voice, as if he were trying to share everything he knew. He touched his touseled reddish hair. “The Russian olive is a pretty tree,” he said, looking at one, touching its leaves and taking out his pipe. “It's introduced but I like them, they provide a lot of cover for the birds.” He paused to stuff tobacco in his pipe and light it. “I've got a special spot for us to fish this afternoon,” he said.

Later that morning, Peggy joined Behnke and me on a pond near the town of Nederland, east of and above Boulder. The pond was a sort of fishing club that Behnke and some friends had organ
ized and stocked with greenback cutthroat trout. The greenback cutthroat, native to headwaters of the North Platte and Poudre rivers, was thought to have been extinct by the late 1960s, but Behnke did not believe that to be so. As a scientist-angler he set out to survey some very remote streams with a fly rod hoping to find some. He did and was instrumental in establishing a recovery program, reintroducing greenbacks to much of their native range.

We fished in the pond at Nederland from an aluminum boat while Peggy sat on shore. Behnke stripped streamer flies quickly through the clear water, catching several greenback trout and pointing out their distinguishing characteristics. He held the fish as if it were the first he had seen and then let it go. He stopped to stuff his pipe and then suggested we return to the bank to eat.