Most angling stories involve big fish. For a fish to be literary, it must be immense, moss-backed, storied; for it to attain the level of the classics, it had better be a whale. But in fact, mostly that’s not what we catch. Especially when first learning the sport, we catch little ones, and we continue to catch them even when we gain more skill and know how to find and fish for big ones. In the retelling, the little ones are enlarged, or passed over as if mildly shameful. There’s just something not flattering about the contrast between overequipped us and a trophy that would fit with five others in a King Oscar of Norway Sardines can. You rarely read a story in which the author catches a fish of five inches—it’s as if a fisherman’s numbers don’t go much below twelve. A recent euphemism is “fish of about a pound.” When I hear of a slow day on the river where the angler is catching fish of about a pound, my mind corrects that estimate to “nine inches, tops.”
I’ve told my personal big-fish stories so often to myself and others that now I may remember the stories better than the
events they describe. The little fish I’ve caught remain unglazed by myth, and if I do happen to remember them, they are perhaps in some ways more real than the big ones in my mind. Once, on the Yellowstone River, a pocket-sized rainbow trout startled me by coming clear out of a patch of riffle water to take a dry fly before it landed, when it was still about a toot in the air. Little rainbows are more vivid in color; this had a line like a streak of lipstick on its side. In a rivulet next to a campsite in northern Michigan, a friend and I heard small splashes one night as we sat around the fire. When we investigated with a flashlight, we saw a spring peeper frog swimming on the surface with one leg gone and fingerling brown trout slashing at him from below. Near the campsite ran the Pigeon River, a brushy stream full of browns. During a hendrickson hatch, I waded with great care toward a little sipping rise in a place almost impossible to cast to under tag-alder branches—just the sort of place you’d find an eighteen-inch fish. I hung up a fly or two, and broke them off rather than disturb the water. Finally, miraculously, I laid the fly in the exact spot; a four-inch brown hit so hard that his impetus carried him well up into the alder branches, where he remained, flipping and flapping and complicatedly entangling the line. Once in a river in Siberia reputed to hold farel, a troutlike game fish, I found instead millions of no-name silvery fish about the size of laundry marking pens. They were too small to net, but would take a fly; I caught fifteen or more, and a Russian friend wrapped each one whole in wet pages from her sketchbook and baked them, paper and all, in the campfire coals. We took them out and unwrapped them and ate them steaming hot, with river-temperature Chinese beer.
Little fish make my mouth water, like the mouths of the hungry cave-guys in the movie Quest for Fire when they see a
herd of antelope across the plain. A seine net full of smelt looks delicious, almost as good as a dozen golden deep-fried smelt with lemon wedges on a plate. In Ohio we used to eat little fish by the mess—as in, a mess of bluegill or a mess of perch. My cousin and I used to catch white bass by the dozens in Lake Erie in the Painesville harbor, right by the docks of the Diamond Shamrock Chemical Company, and then take them back to his house for fish fries, which no doubt left certain trace elements that we carry with us to this day. Once, I was fishing for shad in the Delaware River with a friend and somehow snagged a minnow only slightly bigger than the fly itself. I showed it to my friend, examined it, and popped it in my mouth. His face did that special deep wince people do when they watch you eat something gross. But the taste wasn’t bad—sushi, basically, only grittier.
When I went to Florida on a family vacation as a boy, I was disappointed to find that no tackle shop carried hooks small enough for the quarry I had in mind. Like everyone else I went out on the bottom-fishing boats in the deep water over the wrecks and the reefs. I cranked up a cobia longer than my leg, and a man from Cleveland in a scissorbill cap caught a shark which the captain finally had to shoot with a handgun. On later trips I remembered to bring small hooks and a spinning rod light enough to cast morsels of shrimp with no sinkers. In the quiet shade beneath the new overpass at the Key West charter-boat basin I fished for triggerfish, Frisbee-shaped fish with sharp dorsal spines and pursed, tiny mouths. They fought hard, turning sideways to the line and soaring among the pieces of rock and the mossy bases of the pilings. From the boardwalks of docks and next to highway bridges I fished for mangrove snappers, grunts, porgies, and unidentified fish with colors luminous as an expansion team’s. At a
boat canal near our motel I spent hours casting to needlefish, little bolts of quicksilver on the surface that struck the bait viciously again and again without ever getting themselves hooked. If I happened to be near deeper water, sometimes the dark shape of a barracuda would materialize, approaching a little fish I’d hooked and then palming it like a giant hand. The moment the rod folded with his weight, the ease with which the line parted, the speed with which the rod snapped back were as much of the monster as I wanted to know.
At times, catching even a single little fish has been far preferable to catching no fish at all. Often I have landed my first with relief, knowing that at least now I can say I caught something. One afternoon four friends and I rented boats to fish a Michigan pond supposedly full of bluegills and large-mouth bass. In twenty man-hours of determined fishing, between us we did not catch or see a fish. One of us, however, drifting bait on the bottom, did catch a clam. About the size of a fifty-cent piece, the bivalve had closed over the hook so tightly that it required needle-nosed pliers to dislodge. Of course it was of no use to us other than as a curiosity, and did not dispel the gloom with which we rowed back to the jeering locals at the boat-rental dock. But it did reveal its usefulness later when we reported to friends and family about the day. They asked how we did, and we said, “Well, we caught a clam.” Such a statement will always set non-fishermen back on their heels (You caught a clam? Is that good?) and defangs the scorn that awaits the fishless angler’s return.
I look for fish in any likely water I see—harbors, rivers, irrigation ditches, hotel-lobby fountains. Every decade, maybe, I spot a long snook lurking in the shadow of a docked sailboat somebody’s trying to sell, or a tail among the reeds at the edge of a pond that connects itself to a body that connects itself to
a head improbably far away, or a leviathan back and dorsal fin breaching just once in the Mississippi that even today I can’t believe I saw. More often, I see nothing, or little fish. The two are not so different; if a big fish is like the heart of a watershed, little fish are like the water itself. I’ve taken just-caught little fish and put them in the hands of children watching me from the bank, and the fish gyrate and writhe and flop their way instantly from the hands back to the water, not so much a living thing as the force that makes things live. I’ve spotted little fish in trickles I could step across, in basin-sized pools beneath culverts in dusty Wyoming pastures, in puddles in the woods connected to no inlet or outlet I could see—fish originally planted, I’m told, in the form of fish eggs on the feet of visiting ducks. One of the commonplaces of modern life is the body of water by the gravel pit or warehouse district where you know for a fact not even a minnow lives. The sight of just one healthy little brook trout, say, testifies for the character of the water all around, redeems it, raises it far up in our estimation.
Near where I used to live in Montana was a brush-filled creek that ran brown with snowmelt every spring, then dwindled in the summer until it resembled a bucket of water poured on a woodpile. I never thought to look in it, or even could, until one winter when I noticed a wide part, not quite a pool, by a culvert under an old logging road. Thick ice as clear and flawed as frontier window glass covered the pool, and through the ice I saw movement. I got down on my knees in the snow and looked more closely; above the dregs of dark leaves and bark fragments on the creek bottom, two small brook trout were holding in the current. Perhaps because of the ice between us, they did not flinch when I came so near I could see the black-and-olive vermiculate markings on their
backs, the pink of their gills when they breathed, the tiny red spots with blue halos on their sides. They were doing nothing but holding there; once in a while they would minutely adjust their position with a movement like a gentle furling down their lengths. Self-possessed as any storied lunker, they waited out the winter in their shallow lie, ennobling this humble flow to a trout stream.
(1996)