Troutsmith (18 page)

It's a mistake to think that accomplished anglers of the past were less intelligent or sophisticated than those of today. In many ways they were more skilled and resourceful, more self-reliant and confident of their abilities than we are. At a time when tackle shops were few and synthetic materials unknown, people crafted their own fishing gear with their own hands from whatever materials nature provided. Remember the satisfaction of that first good trout caught with a fly of your own making? Or perhaps the feeling of walking up to your first whitetail buck taken with the whistling flight of an arrow fletched by your own hands, from a bow constructed patiently over many a dark winter night? Folk were fewer in Cotton's day, but more of them knew and loved these things.

With their willowy rods and horsehair lines, seventeenth-century anglers were largely at the mercy of the wind. Whether they fished upstream or down depended on the set of the wind on a given day irrespective of other tactical considerations. Upstream or down, Cotton was well aware of the need to keep trout and grayling from detecting the angler's presence. “To fish fine and far off is the first and principal rule for trout angling,” so Teresa and I moved slowly along the banks of the Dove, watching every piece of likely water for several minutes before making the first cast.

Sometimes we could see trout holding near the surface of the river. Their tails and fins rippled in anticipation of some choice insect coming down to them, either afloat or awash in a bubble line. Dry flies were the obvious choice for these fish. More often we drifted weighted nymphs through the deeper places and struck many a good trout unseen from above.

Large spires and pinnacles of limestone towered over many of the better pools; at eighty-two feet, Ilam Rock was the tallest of these. Again I heard Cotton's voice as I waded the river and cast my flies: “These hills, though high, bleak, and craggy, breed and feed good beef and mutton above ground and afford good store of lead within.” How like our home in southwestern Wisconsin, I thought, right down to the veins of lead permeating the bedrock.

Walton and Cotton seemed closer too. For hundreds of years people have enjoyed wandering the countryside in pursuit of trout, sometimes in their home waters, sometimes farther off. If it were simply a matter of catching trout to eat, very little would be written about fishing. But as Roderick L. Haig-Brown once wrote, “The fishing is far more important than the fish.” There is the fun of anticipation as tackle is prepared. Maps are studied with the intensity of a military campaign, and detailed plans are discussed at length. The experience of traveling to the waterside at dawn, fishing through much of the day, and finally returning home again in the evening immerses the angler in nature and fosters a spirit of contemplation. Sometimes one goes through an entire day without seeing or speaking to another human being. There is satisfaction in the exercise of skill, in casting and fishing well even if no fish are caught. But the excitement of hooking a good fish and fighting it to the net with a rod is an excitement that never fades, no matter how many years have passed since one's first trout was taken. I still quiver like an aspen leaf in a September breeze when I strike a good trout on the fly, just as I did when I was a boy (indeed, perhaps more). The reward is the living jewel of a trout in the hand, the sheen of the river written in its silver scales, golden gravel reflected in its yellow flanks, red dots glowing like fiery coals on its sides. There are things on this good earth that only the angler sees, and one of them is the breathless beauty of a trout emerging from a river. Time passes, but some things endure.

There once was a wise, fat, red-golden brown trout that lived for many years in the River Test where it runs through the village of Whitchurch, in Hampshire. The trout's name was Auld Red and he was the most famous fish in the village. I like to think he lives there still. Auld Red was clearly a Trout of the Cloth, because his favorite haunt was a deep cut just across the lawn from the parish church. Here the wayward Test had undercut the churchyard wall until a part of it collapsed into the river, and the vicar, a man who understood that rivers are the veins of God, was content to leave well enough alone. Besides, everybody in the village, including the vicar and the riverkeeper, liked to sit on the stone bench beside the well-worn footpath and watch the trout and grayling that fed in the deep cut along the ruined wall. And among the many fish that jockeyed for choice positions in the cut, Auld Red reigned like a king among peasants.

Whitchurch is one of those delightful little villages that can still be found in the south of England,
if
one has the courage to drive out of Greater London and explore the countryside. Daily life in Whitchurch hasn't changed much in a thousand years. In February the gates on the Test are opened and the water-meadows submerge in a knee-deep flood of tea-colored water. Once the new grass is green and growing, the gates are closed, the Test clears, the trout retire to the carriers, and the sheep are turned out to feast. Then comes the mayfly interlude, sometimes called the “duffer's fortnight,” when large trout lose some of their native caution and chase the dancing armada of mayflies with reckless abandon. Finally summer comes in, and life in the Test valley takes on a serene, lazy quality; all is green and warm and comfortable.

It was high summer when I came down to Whitchurch with Duncan Weston. Duncan is a white-haired giant of a Scot who's also a giant among fishing companions. He guides on the chalkstreams by choice, having retired from a notably successful career at IBM some fifteen years ago. We hit it off immediately on the first day we fished together, and by the end of the second day we were a team. Each of us carried a fly rod; one was rigged with a dry fly (usually a #18 Parachute Adams), the other with a nymph (most often a #16 Sawyer Pheasant Tail). Each of us searched the water diligently for hints and indications of trout, since the rules on most of the Test allow casting only to trout that can be seen. And with patient observation, most of the trout told us not only where they were but also how to catch them. Fish grubbing the bottom might vacuum a deep-drifting nymph, while trout looking up with fins aquiver were ideal candidates for the aristocratic dry fly.

Duncan warned me on the drive over from Stockbridge that the fishing wouldn't be easy. “The rod average at Whitchurch is less than four fish per day, trout and grayling taken together,” he said. “But we'll speak to the riverkeeper and have a go!” Chas, the keeper, met us at the Fulling Mill where he and his family lived in the ground-floor rooms. In the United Kingdom, a riverkeeper is both gardener and guardian of his trout stream. Most live right beside the river they work, and a good part of every keeper's day is spent outdoors in all seasons.

On the chalkstreams, riverkeepers selectively cut weeds (to promote fly life and keep silt from building up), check anglers for permits and licenses, survey and manage trout stocks, remove pike, discourage poachers, and do what they can to promote bird and animal life in the valley. Such men develop a bond with the earth that may be unique in our twenty-first-century culture. A keeper knows a river's most intimate secrets, including where the big fish are.

It was a picture-perfect summer's day. I'd come to this reach of the Test in search of many things, trout and grayling among them. My day at Whitchurch was the fulfillment of a life-long dream: to visit the Fulling Mill where Harry Plunket Greene, a famous public singer and author of the fly-fishing classic
Where the Bright Waters Meet
, once rented a flat, and to throw a fly over the renowned River Test in the same reach that Plunket Greene himself had fished nearly a century before.

The July sun was high and bright, but the day was cool, and there was just enough breeze to push land-bred insects onto the water. I have been fortunate to fish many hallowed and famous trout rivers in my time, but I do not hesitate to say that the River Test on that day was the most wonderful river I have ever seen, and probably ever will see.

I stood in the shade of a tall beech tree, on the bank of a crystal-clear chalkstream some sixty feet wide. A grove of ancient beeches towered over the wide turn of the river above the Fulling Mill, their massive limbs reaching clear across from bank to bank. Rich beds of cress, starwort, and water crowfoot waved languidly in the current and split the Test into braided channels teeming with shrimp, mayfly, and caddis larvae. Each channel was floored with golden gravel that glittered and flashed in the dappled light, and in each channel were wild trout and grayling, some big and some small, some rising, some shrimping on the bottom, and others seemingly lulled to sleep by whispering leaves in the summer sunshine. And there we were, Duncan and I, with a whole day before us and nothing to do but fish.

I waded out into the smooth flow of the Test and searched the nearest channel for a target. A shoal of small grayling hovered nervously in the shallow tail-out, but there didn't seem to be anything above. Then, out of the corner of my eye I caught a wavy shimmer hard down among the stones. I waited, and I watched intently. And again there was movement, but this time, by a trick of the light and shadow and a lens of still water, I saw the broad back of a trout as it slithered out from under a weed mat, glided across the bottom of the channel, and vanished again beneath the weeds on the other side. I unhooked the little Pheasant Tail, worked out line, and cast the fly well upstream to the top of the run. The nymph sank quickly out of sight in the thigh-deep channel. I couldn't see the fly at all, but I watched the gravel bottom expectantly. Sure enough, just when I judged that the nymph should be bumping past its holt, the trout slithered out from beneath the weeds and sailed across the gravelly channel once more. I tightened, the rod bent, and a fat two-pound brown trout rose up from the bottom, gills flared, white mouth open wide, shaking its head in a spasm of anger and panic. What followed was a game of chess played out between the weed beds. When hooked, chalkstream trout often dive into the thickest, nastiest weeds they can find. If the fish is badly weeded, it is often possible to wade directly below the fish, pull on the leader by hand and extract the trout along the natural set of the vegetation. Judging by the way it power-dived from one weed bed to the next, this particular trout had won many battles. But not this one. Each time the fish weeded I was able to patiently hand-line him back out into relatively open water, and in the end I got him.

Fishing, like shooting, golf, and many other athletic pursuits, can be streaky. Some days we can't buy a fish, while on other days we can't seem to keep them from jumping into our nets. Thankfully my day at Whitchurch was one of the latter, and by lunchtime I'd already caught the “rod average” several times over. When we returned to the river after lunch, Duncan sent me upstream on my own for the better part of an hour while he and Chas visited back at the Mill. As Duncan told me later, Chas asked the usual questions about how the fishing was, whether we had seen trout or grayling in this place or that, and finally how I was doing with the notoriously fussy wild fish on the Fulling Mill beat of the Test. “That Yank's a bloody genius,” Duncan replied. “A buggerin' bloody genius! Especially with a nymph.” Chas sneered at that. Riverkeepers watch more people fish in a month than most fishermen do in a decade and they've heard every fish story a thousand times over, so I couldn't blame Chas for taking a jaded view. Besides, nearly all of all of my success was due to a string of lucky breaks coupled with Duncan's exceptional ability as a guide. “Well,” said Chas with a rise of his bushy eyebrows, “if 'e's a
buggerin'
bloody genius, take 'im up to the cut boy the churchyard woll an' see if 'e can have Auld Red out. That bloody trout ain't so much as looked at a fly in a month o' Sundays!”

I was in the act of kissing a beautiful three-pound grayling (by far the largest I'd ever caught) when Duncan reappeared on the riverbank, his Scot's eyes shining and a positively wicked grin on his grizzled face. “You've been given a challenge, son!” he said. “Put yon carp back in the river; we're goin' up to the churchyard woll!” I waded over, and with one arm Duncan pulled me out of the water and right to the very top of the bank. Then he explained the situation as we walked upstream on the well-worn footpath beside the Test.

I abhor competition in my fishing, always and everywhere. And yet . . . I hadn't sought this challenge. It was also clear that Duncan viewed the situation as a personal challenge to himself, as guide, and woe unto him who challenges a Scot in a matter of honor, be he riverkeeper or no. I accepted the challenge.

We reached the stone bench beside the footpath and scanned the cut along the fallen churchyard wall. Just where a clump of willow stems leaned out over the river, in the very best lie at the very top of the cut, was Auld Red. His attitude seemed to be one of portly beneficence as he wallowed there in the slow eddy near the wall. Frankly, Auld Red was morbidly obese. He seemed ancient; the bottom of his tail was worn away from years of sculling against the gravel, and he had a hooked kype at the tip of his lower jaw that completely missed the V-notch at the tip of his upper jaw and gave him a cheesy, out-of-balance grin that, on a trout, looked silly. But he was feeding; a sparse hatch of iron blue duns had broken out and Auld Red was putting on a clinic for “How to Be a Selective Trout.” He'd let each dun drift around the eddy at the tip of his nose, and if the fly made a complete circle without lifting off and flying away, Auld Red would tip his fins imperceptibly and somehow take the dun with his bent-scissors jaws. We saw that Auld Red was locked on to “cripples,” which was fortunate. As Duncan said while looking over my box of oh-so-carefully tied dries: “Bollocks, Kev—all yer flies are cripples!”

With my best “cripple” affixed to a long 6x leader I waded out to tilt with Auld Red for bragging rights on the Test. Eddies are tricky; experienced trout know very well that drag protects them, and they have a maddening habit of balancing the fly on their nose (without taking it), and then turning away with an “I-told-you-so” look once the fly drags and their suspicions are confirmed. Auld Red was no exception. I did my best imitation of a pile cast (so easy to do when I don't want to; so difficult to pull off when I do), and hoped for the best. I can still see it in my mind's eye: the leader landing in a heap on the water, then the “feathered Judas” floating down the eddy, flush in the surface film, then Auld Red coming to the fly, smiling that goofy, odd-ball smile . . . smiling . . . smiling . . . the fly reaching its limit of drift . . . drag just about to set in . . . and then Auld Red sucking in the fly, completely duped. The spotted son-of-a-gun won by flabbergasting me. Fully expecting a refusal, I came completely unhinged when Auld Red took the fly on the very first cast. Duncan leaped to his feet and let out a highland yell. I struck hard enough to cross the eyes of a billfish, but unfortunately I was fishing 6x nylon on the clear waters of the River Test and not a wire cable in the blue Pacific. I didn't even feel the tippet pop.