Troutsmith (2 page)

Carefully he brought the fish in for release, admiring its clean, bright form and vivid colors for a moment before it squirted away back into the pool. He fished until darkness came on from the east. Woodcock buzzed from the willow thickets as he reeled up for the day, and the first bats of the season flitted about the dim sky as he hiked back downstream to the truck. The warm glow of many lights in many windows shone out into the night as he walked along, and he wondered if the good people of the village knew the power of the wildness that lurked just outside their doors, down by the little creek, or if that was something only an angler would know.

English Run pulls itself together from a series of busy limestone springs that pour out from the base of a tall bluff, somewhere in what used to be called the lead mining district of southwest Wisconsin. The water is clear as air and icy cold in that first half-mile of stream, channeled with watercress and bordered with jewelweed and deep blue forget-me-nots. As the settled hot weather of summer finally reaches Wisconsin, brown trout begin to nose their way up English Run in search of cooler water. One of them survived an attack by a great blue heron to become a legendary fish.

I met the black trout of English Run many seasons ago. It was the middle of a dry, dusty summer when afternoon temperatures routinely hit the century mark in Wisconsin, a state that might see less than two weeks of ninety-degree weather in a normal year. Like many anglers I continued fishing right through the drought, and I began to notice that the search for cool water and trout brought fisherfolk together in ways not seen during a wet year. Herons, osprey, kingfishers, otter, and mink became my daily companions, all of us thrown together in the last shadowy oases where trout could be found.

It was the herons that led me to English Run. Each morning at dawn several birds left a rookery in the sloughs and backwaters of the Wisconsin River and flew north, deep into the hills and valleys of rural Crawford County. With each morning's coffee I studied maps and pondered where the birds might be headed. Then I began hiking the country, working my way into the kind of steep, secluded hollows most people would avoid because of rattlesnakes, naturists, and guntoting hermits.

One sultry afternoon I was driven to distraction by searing heat, clouds of biting gnats, and thick, nearly impassable stands of stinging nettle. The breaking point came when a squadron of gnats flew into both ears, both nostrils, and both eyes simultaneously. I screamed, inhaling a half-dozen gnats in the process, choked, slapped my face in a futile attempt to exterminate the swarm of bugs, swore, and plunged down a steep slope without any thought for my own safety. A bed of watercress broke my near fall, and the icy water took my breath away as I stumbled into the little stream at the bottom of the hill. Like many Wisconsin spring creeks, English Run is tiny and nearly invisible from the nearest road.

Once I recovered from my baptism in the stream, I began looking for trout. And trout there were, in odd, subtle places: in runnels between beds of watercress, only inches deep; beneath rocks, the fish sometimes turning sideways and undulating to slide beneath the stones; and on top of bare gravel in the riffles, where the broken water alone was enough to scatter a trout's mottled outline and allow it to disappear in plain sight. In an hour I saw enough good trout to wear a smug look. I'd found a tiny stream with good fish in a place that was hell to get to, and I was fairly sure that even the landowner didn't realize its potential.

I was splashing downstream after my reconnaissance when I found the black trout. I tried to use a mat of watercress as a stepping stone, but my foot went right through it. There was a sucking sound like the pop of a cork as I pulled my boot back out, but just before I extracted it I felt the unmistakable bump of a fish. The tangle of cress heaved a little. Then a black torpedo arrowed downstream over the gravel and slid smoothly beneath another cress bed. At first I wasn't sure it was a trout. But when I poked under the watercress with a stick and spooked the fish back upstream, there was no mistaking it. It certainly was a brown trout, and a hook-jawed old brute, too, something over eighteen inches long and by far the best fish I'd seen all day. But it was black, not truly black, but charcoal black over its whole body including the fins, with solid black spots and not a glimmer of red anywhere, quite different from the bright scarlet dots and crimson edges that light up most spring creek trout.

For the month and a half that remained of the trout season I sweated and slithered down to English Run about twice a week, still cursing the heat, the gnats, and the nettles. I caught trout, fine fat trout, especially on weighted scuds and sow bugs dapped along the edges of the cress beds. Bullet-head cricket imitations provoked slashing strikes when floated next to submerged logs or twitched at the bottom of riffles. I got a thick-shouldered fifteen-inch brown that jumped wildly when it felt the steel and landed flopping on the bank instead of the water. But the black trout still eluded me.

Twice a day, two days a week, for six weeks I tried for it. The trout was always in the same place, finning placidly just under the cress bed where I'd spooked it the first time. It seemed detached, even listless compared with the other trout in the stream. I never saw it rise or root for scuds and caddis larvae along the bottom. I could crouch down directly to one side of the trout and watch it for minutes at a time. I could even stand boldly on the bank, fully revealed to the fish at a distance of six or eight feet, and still it wouldn't spook or bolt downstream unless I kicked up ripples by wading. The first day I tried a Hare's Ear Scud fished upstream, and then a tiny Woolly Bugger as I was walking back down. The second day I tried a Shell-back Sow Bug fished upstream and a small Black-nosed Dace streamer downstream. The third day I tried a Pheasant Tail Nymph fished upstream and, in a moment of desperation, a bright orange Mickey Finn cast downstream. Still I got no reaction from the fish. Crickets, 'hoppers, Pass Lakes, Muddlers; short casts, long casts, curve casts, pile casts. Nothing I tried caused even the barest flicker of interest to ripple over the fish where it lay carved in onyx beneath the watercress.

The Black Trout (I'd capitalized him in my mind by now; a sure sign of a deep-seated mania) began to haunt my dreams. I couldn't give up. Every time I fished English Run I tried to catch him, once on the way upstream and again on the way down. And every time I failed.

The maples on the slopes of the steep-walled valley were showing orange highlights and the pastures were yellow with goldenrod as I trekked over to English Run for one last session with the wild spring creek trout. Several of the browns I caught that day blazed with spawning colors, and some of the bigger fish displayed the hooked kypes that mark the male trout during the courting season. But sure enough, when I came around a little bend in the creek, there was the Black Trout, far larger than any fish I'd caught in the stream, laying up beneath the cress bed, still as death, as unperturbed and unimpressed as ever with my fly-fishing skills. There were only a few flies left in my boxes that I hadn't yet shown to the trout, and most of these were big, ugly bass flies that I'd normally have used for smallmouth. With the resignation that comes with the admission of defeat, I cut the leader back to at least 15-pound test monofilament and tied on a multicolored monster of a bass fly. It featured a cupped, spun deer-hair head, rubber legs, and large plastic eyes that rattled like a bag of bones. Slowly and ever so carefully I moved within ten feet of the big brown. The heavily weighted streamer kerplunked into the water about three feet below the Black Trout, and I started stripping in line to effect a noisy, chug-a-chug retrieve that would pull the fly past the trout's toothy maw. English Run exploded.

The Black Trout was not a fish to be taken by conventional methods. As the first ripples of disturbance from the streamer touched its lateral line, the trout whirled around and smashed it fairly, savagely, its scissored jaws snapping for the kill. I've fished for more than forty years, and I have yet to see another trout take a fly as viciously as the Black Trout did when it crashed that streamer. It seemed like all the water would splash out of the creek. Still, it wasn't a fair fight. There was nowhere for the trout to go, and all I had to do was hang on tight and wait until it stopped flopping. It took a few tries, but I finally scooped the fish into my net and waded ashore. The fly had come out during the process, so it wasn't until I tried to lay the twenty-one-inch carbonized beauty on top of the cress bed for a picture that I got a good look at it. What I saw shocked me, and then I understood. What I'd thought were just dark spots or bruises on top of the Black Trout's head were really old heron scars, long since healed. All that was left of the trout's eyes were heavily damaged stumps of tissue at the bottom of mostly empty sockets. It was blind. At last I understood what the Black Trout had been telling me for weeks: that if I keep getting the wrong answer, I should ask a different question.

I held the Black Trout upright in the water by the thick wrist of its tail until it kicked away and glided back to its lair beneath the cress bed. I never saw it again. Sometimes it seems to me that wild trout are so fragile that they don't have much of a future in our all-consuming age. But trout have been honed and hardened by natural selection, asking no quarter and giving none in their endless struggle to survive and reproduce. Given just half a chance, wild trout will improvise, adapt, and overcome many difficulties, sometimes flourishing when we would least expect them to. This is one of many qualities that trout fishers admire and respect in their quarry, one of the mystic cords that bind the spirits of true anglers to the great fish they pursue.

Snow is flying with a vengeance today, and school was canceled before I let Onyx out for his morning constitutional. The big black Lab doesn't like to be out in rain or snow. He comes back quickly, snorting, snuffling, and shaking his disapproval of the impertinent weather. We don't know it yet, but more than 120 inches of the white stuff will bury us in Durwards Glen this winter before the April sun finally melts the cold winter away. I dry Onyx off with a thick towel, his favorite part of the proceedings. The colossal dog wiggles and waggles furiously, his otter tail thumping the walls on either side of us like a kettle-drummer. Well, if Teresa wasn't awake before, she is now. I pour a mug of steaming coffee, and the dog and I patter down the hall to the study for a morning of fishing in print.

Arnold Gingrich, fanatic trout fisher and longtime editor of
Esquire
magazine, once wrote that “the best fishing is done not in water, but in print.” Personally I wouldn't go so far, but sporting books and magazines have certainly helped me through some tough periods in my life when I couldn't get outdoors anywhere near as often as I wanted to. In my early teens I began collecting and archiving fishing books and periodicals. When I started hunting in my mid-thirties, hunting books and magazines started to join the ranks of fishing books on my sagging shelves. Today my fishing collection has over four hundred titles. More than half are about trout fishing, but all fish species and methods are represented and the geography spans the globe. Supplementing the books are hundreds of pounds of magazines, including a complete run of
Hunting and Fishing
from 1931 and '32, a couple issues of
Sports Afield
and
Field & Stream
from the early 1940s through the late '60s, and back issues of
Fly Fisherman
from the early 1970s. Twenty years of
Gray's Sporting Journal
fill several shelves. A few catalog gems have been preserved too, including a 1976 Herter's catalog, H. L. Leonard catalogs from 1975 and '76, and some of the earliest Thomas & Thomas catalogs. At first my collecting was something to fill the long days between fishing trips, but as the years passed I began to realize that my keen interest in sporting history was influencing my success and enjoyment on the water and in the field.

Imagine that two experienced anglers step into a demanding, technical midwestern spring creek in pursuit of cagy, hard-fished brown trout. The first angler has the benefit of several recent issues of
Fly Fisherman
,
Fly Rod & Reel
, or the
Drake Magazine
to draw on for guidance, and these are excellent publications that help people catch fish all across America on a wide variety of waters. But the second angler has studied hundreds of sporting books and periodicals that reach all the way back to Roman times. Assuming that both anglers are roughly equal in most other respects, the second angler has quite an edge in terms of experiences to draw upon. Even if both anglers turn out to be equally successful in catching fish, the second will probably have more fun and a greater appreciation for the richness of the fishing experience, because he or she can place what they're doing into a historical context. There is history in rods, lines, leaders, knots, the flies themselves, and all the accoutrements that brand us as anglers. There is history in the way we approach the stream; whether we throw flies upstream, down, or across; how we cast; and what we do when we happen to catch a fish. All of our rituals on the water illustrate the steady evolution of the angler's art over thousands of years.

Once we're in the study, I open the curtains to watch the snow while Onyx curls up in the darkness beneath the massive Arts and Crafts–style desk. I set my coffee down on the blotter and settle into a comfortable leather chair that rolls smoothly over to a glass-fronted Amish bookcase. This is the treasure chest containing the jewels of my collection. I open the case and pull out the oldest fishing book I have, an 1859 edition of
Frank Forester's Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provinces of North America
, which first appeared in 1849 and went through several reprints. Although not a first edition, my copy is a notable example because it retains its original binding in very good condition. The olive brown cover is embossed and features a gilt still life of a trio of British coarse fish laid out along a grassy bank. “Frank Forester” was the pen name of Henry W. Herbert (1807–58), who was born in the United Kingdom, and the cover art may be an allusion to the author's birthplace.