Lines on the Water (15 page)

The next afternoon, Doug Underhill phoned to say he had found my clippers.

THERE WAS ONE MORE
time I used a spin cast. It was that year and Peg and I were staying at her mom’s, close by the Bartibog River. The trout were coming in, and I wanted to try my hand. But I wanted Peg to fish with me.

She had run the Bartibog River in the canoe the previous summer with me, and I decided that I would encourage this.

“Let’s get out tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll take the rowboat and just go above the bridge. I’ll dig some worms and we’ll get some trout.”

“Sure,” Peg said, who was playing crib with her sister and
having a few beer. It seemed like a great idea at that instant.

So I went out in the evening and got some worms, took my spin cast, and searched about for a rod for Peg. Above the rafters in the cellar was an old bamboo rod—not much good for anything, with an old manual reel, and the line all crinkled—that someone put away before they travelled to Ontario to make their fortune.

“That’s a good rod for Peg,” I said.

Peg was still having some crib and beer when I got it ready, went down to check the oar locks and anchor on the rowboat, looked at the grand and gracious Bartibog.

What a beautiful river, I thought, this little tributary that runs into the main Miramichi just before it widens out into a saltwater bay. I looked out to where we would fish, and decided where I would drop anchor the next morning.

When I went home Peg was still playing cribbage. So I went up to the bedroom and set the clock. Setting a clock for someone else, you become something like—God Almighty. I set it for 5:00, and then thought I would give her a few more minutes sleep, so I set it for 5:15. Then I felt that perhaps I could give her a few more minutes to snooze. So I set it finally for 5:30.

Peg came upstairs about one o’clock, worn out from cribbage, and crawled into bed.

“Fishing tomorrow,” I said.

“Herumpph,” she answered.

Then I sang that old Bartibog refrain:

Then with my wonderful baritone, I began a beat like the military drum:
“Baroomp boomp bom—baroomp boomp boom.”

“Herumpph,” she answered.

I was up before the alarm went off and got some molasses sandwiches ready, along with a thermos of tea. I got my fishing rod ready and my vest, looked through my wondrous swivels and lures, put my second- or third-best hook and a small sinker on Peg’s line, and went to wake her.

The alarm clock was ringing, and her hand was reaching out and her fingers grasping at the air trying to turn it off. She
had the covers over her head, but her feet were bare. I sat on the end of the bed and began to tickle them.

“Time to get up and go fishing,” I said.
“Baroomp boomp bom—baroomp bomp bom.”

“Sllleeep,” she said.

I gingerly hauled her by the ankles and she plopped on the floor. Then I went downstairs again. When I came up she was curled in a ball beside the bed.

I lifted her by the arms and dragged her into the next bedroom where there was a sink.

“Little water for you,” I said, taking one of the sponges and ever so lightly mashing it into her face.

“Ga-gurgle,” she said.

“You see how much fun we can have,” I said. “Fishing is what
makes
a marriage. Nicki fishes with Peter.” I lied. “Ellen fishes with Tony.” I lied.

Finally unable to go back to sleep Peggy got dressed, had a bowl of cereal. When she picked up her sixth spoonful of Rice Krispies I couldn’t stand the munch sound any more and I took her bowl away.

“That’s enough of that,” I said.

Out we went towards the Bartibog, me carrying my box of lures and high-tech fishing equipment and Peg dragging her bamboo pole.

“Me using my rod, and you using your pole,” I said. “We’ll bamboozle them.”

For some reason she wasn’t speaking to me.

She sat at the back of the little twelve-foot rowboat and out we went to the middle of the river.

My rod ready, I let go an enormous cast and began to reel in slowly, then quickly, while Peg was trying to put a worm on the hook I had provided.

“My hook’s all bent up, rusted and crooked,” she said.

“Now, now,” I cautioned. “Don’t start complaining, it’s such a wonderful morning.”

I was casting away. The water was still, the sun sparkling on it, the trees in the distance lighting up. Peggy dropped her line over the side of the boat. I watched her pathetic worm drop down, turning in circles like a sinking piece of metal, and I sighed.

“Oh—oh—oh,” she said, and her rod bowed, and just as quick as that she had a trout about one and a half pounds in the boat.

“Nicely done,” I said.

And I cast my line again.

She took the trout off the hook, replaced the worm, and deployed her line in the same place, looking down into the water, with her arms tensed ready to haul another fish up. I smiled.

“I think you’ll probably have to cast out further, my dear.” And I showed her how well, how expertly I could cast. Then I reeled my line in.

“Oh—oh—oh,” Peg said, and she riffed another fish aboard. It was larger than the first one.

“Nice too,” I said.

Again she got ready and again she tensed up, her shoulders moving back and forth, ready for the fish to strike.

“Oh—oh—oh,” she said. This fish though she couldn’t just riff in. It was too big. It ran and jumped and played upon the water, went under the boat, and then finally she hauled it over the side. It weighed about two and a half pounds.

I left the boat later and walked up to the corner to fish in peace. I took my swivel, my eggs, my lures off and put them away. I tried to find the oldest hook I could find.

Then I went back to the boat.

Peg was still hauling in fish. She had a string of about eight or nine. They lay all about her feet, and at various parts of the rowboat.

“How’s your luck been?” she asked innocently.

I sat as close to her as I could, and let my line sink as close to her line as possible. So I wouldn’t foul her I kept pushing her rod slightly away, towards the back of the boat. But the
unfortunate fish didn’t know what they were doing. Peg’s old rod bent again.

To make matters worse she was munching on a molasses sandwich as she hauled this fish aboard, holding the sandwich in her teeth with her little jar of Red Rose tea beside her.

After a while she said, “David, I’m tired of catching trout.”

I insisted in gentlemanly graciousness that I carry the string of eleven trout up the road for her, waving them in the air as I passed people.

FISHING SEASON GAVE
way to hunting again that year. Once you could smell the frost in the air, the wind spoiling through the old henhouse and down along the beach where the rocks were cold and the bay was black, it was time to put away the rod and take the rifle out.

I have known great fishermen in my life. Most of them are also hunters. If a man or woman is to eat flesh, he or she is morally obligated at a
certain
time to kill that which they eat. This is what I believe to be true, even though it is perhaps as disgraced an opinion now as any opinion was. However it
shouldn’t be, for there are still butchers and slaughterhouses aplenty.

Tolstoy, making the same comment in
War and Peace
, spoke about the man or woman who would sentimentally decry hunting while cutting into a steak with gusto.

It is a terrible fact that there is no
thinking
that can’t reduce and won’t reduce truth, if knowledge is not applied.

I became for a while as passionately an advocate of hunting as I was of fishing. (Or maybe even more so, because it was the more beset upon tradition.) I suppose it is because both rest in my consciousness as being part of the same experience, of town or rural living, that the decision makers in the cities have tried to thwart. Mr. Simms wore a bush jacket and chewed plug. He had never travelled any further than Moncton, and that was when he went to the hospital near the very end of his life. He was as conscious of the world about him as few people are, and was as kind as anyone. Perhaps then my defence is for him.

The urban ideals have crept upon us, much like an army, and instilled our lives with other reflections, from pop culture to McDonald’s, so that we have been occupied by the ideas of people who never having lived one day like us, feel nothing in holding us in contempt. The Miramichi and the Ozarks are often compared at a point of smug, vastly ignorant superiority.

So certain people from the Miramichi (and the Ozarks) continually try to prove that they are the same as the urbans. That they too can fly in planes and go to see musicals such as
The Phantom of the Opera
. That they too loathe the rustics.

So too many of the people I know from here, who have joined this common ground, have done so in a way, I suppose, to survive. And the old way—such as it was, of people I admired like Mr. Simms—is disappearing entirely not only from our landscape but our heritage. It is looked upon with embarrassment, made fun of in novels (which pretend to adore it), and is laughed at by the very children of those men.

Of course time itself helps make ghosts of us all.

In defending these disappearing principles, and showing the new ones to be no more worthy of benediction, by rurals who are sometimes ashamed of everything they think has to do with themselves, I have been called a provincial—among those who have adapted themselves to the new world. But I wear this, if I can say, like a badge of honour.

Hunting and fishing were certainly as much a part of the world of my youth as hockey or marbles. And I realize this now more as time goes on—that is, that both have to be defended, not only regulated.

I suppose some will think hunting wrong. But no more so than fishing. And I make the case that until we are all
vegetarians by our own choice, both hunting and fishing in some sense are a philosophical duty. At least once in your life.

I do not like how the world views its hunters, and by proxy its fishermen, and I do not like how the hunters and fishermen at times disrespect themselves and what the intended purpose of a hunt is.

But I rarely listen to a fisherman who tells me about how disgusted he is with hunters. Then I say to them, give up your rod and reel, for you are fishing the king of all fish—a fish so majestic it is a wound in the heart at times to see die. Sometimes they will look at me as if I am a raving lunatic, and sometimes they won’t. Sometimes, of course, they fish with barbless hooks.

Everything one kills somehow alters that species forever, alters it in the most irreparable way—genetically. But to not kill for most humans is to not live. That’s the exceptional dilemma of all people who have entertained both sides.

I often think of this when I think of the desire to fish compared to the actuality of life and death. And often now people let their fish go, or mistake what the purpose of fishing means for the fish.

I would never question anyone about
not
killing something. In this I agree with Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century writer who, letting the housefly go, said: “There is room still in the world for me and
you
.”

Still we are in a predicament with this, and in a moral quandary always. The dilemma rests upon a point in men’s integrity. That which they do has to be acceptable to themselves. That is why it becomes a point for great debate and self-examination. The examination must rest upon the criteria of whether or not this is justified as an act in itself.

Fishing trout years ago with my wife Peggy, on a fertile little brook called McBean, that ran into the Nashwaak River, I was able to pick up some nice trout. The brook was productive, and we camped out in a tent in a field near the stream.

The day we were packing to leave we met a man who had fished behind us that morning, and had taken twenty fish the size of which my wife and I had released. I never forgave him for that because it seemed so bulling and silly. But for himself he felt he had had a grand morning, and was proud of his small shrivelled catch.

Once when I took a fish just at dark, on a small stretch of the Souwest, I killed it, by snapping back its head, and in this way cutting its throat. A person looked at me and said, “Can’t you kill it in a more humane way?”

“You can kill it with a rock,” I answered. “But this is at least as quick if not quicker—and so, as humane.”

I mentioned this the next week when we were fishing trout to another acquaintance. We had taken many nice trout on
small white-and-brown number 10 flies all day and were camped on the Bay du Vin in the evening. The smoke from the fire drifted off to our south, the air was still, and the smell of trout frying in butter and flour mingled with the smell of poplars and the long shadows.

“Imagine—feeling sorry for a fish,” my acquaintance said abruptly, missing the crux of my argument. This is not what I meant. I certainly have felt sorry for fish.

I have in my lifetime killed enough to have made some observances.

What I am saying is that all of these questions are questions which can only be answered by individual experience and observation, by individuals themselves. It is something that will never be regulated.

I suppose the difference comes not in the act, but in the
reason
for the act. The reason
is
everything. That is why any sport fishing or game hunting is at times so hard to defend.

For instance, I know men who guide other men to bear baits. The men wait in the trees with their camouflaged vests and scarves while their guides wait with them—dressed usually in woollen bush jackets as guides here are. The bear comes into the bait and the sport fires an arrow at the thing’s heart. The bear, arrow in it, runs off to claw at it in the bushes. Later when its breathing is rough and uneven, the guide, with
his .308, will go in and finish the thing off. That to me, is play-acting of the worst kind.