5
The One-Rod Method

When Harold had tied about a dozen flies and they’d both knocked back two Scotches, it was time to fish.

“We take one rod tonight,” Harold said as he donned a very complicated-looking vest with dozens of bulging pockets. “It’s too prime out there tonight for instruction. Just pay attention to what I’m doing. Tomorrow morning you’ll get a rod too.”

Maggie put on the decrepit pair of sneakers Harold gave her for wading in the river. She felt like a clown. He also insisted that she put on a sweater, though it was a warm evening. The sun had dipped into the treetops and a gold-tinted twilight was under way that would persist for a good hour.

They waded through some emerald bracken along the riverbank to the water’s edge and Maggie followed Harold into the stream. It was like leaving one world behind and plunging into an entirely different one. The water was shockingly cold, though not much more than calf deep. When she’d caught her breath, Maggie was glad Harold had made her wear a sweater. The footing was good on the stream’s gravel bottom. The current made a slight burbling sound and left a trail of bubbles where it swirled around her bare legs. The golden air was full of bobbing motes. Among them but less numerous were the large, fluffy mayflies winging up into the forest canopy.

“The green drakes are out,” Harold said.

Cedar waxwings swooped across the tunnel-like stream corridor picking them delicately out of the air. Sometimes they’d hang suspended in place for a moment like large hummingbirds, feeding on more than one bug at a swoop.

“Beautiful,” Maggie said, goggling at the spectacle of it all. The Scotch in her bloodstream was casting an additional patina over the scene.

“Stay on my left,” Harold whispered.

She followed him upstream.

He halted at the tail of a riffled pool and began manually stripping line off his reel, very businesslike. The reel emitted an insectile screech with every pull. Then, he was whipping the supple rod back and forth until the heavy line was in the air in a big loop, going forward and back, rhythmically. At every back-cast he yanked more line off the reel until the loop was flying out a good fifteen yards. Finally, he hurled the loop forward until all the line paid out. The leader unrolled like a red carpet and deposited the fly at the head of the pool like a little foreign dignitary landing in a new country. The fly bobbled swiftly downstream in the surface tension, its cream-colored hackle and light deer-hair wings making it easy to track against the dark water. A liquid hump swelled behind it and then there was a little splash, like a mousetrap springing just under the surface. The rod tip jerked visibly.

“Got one?”

“Yeah.”

He stripped in the line with his left hand dragging the fish closer until, with a deft motion, he reached down into the water and brought up a smallish trout, holding its lower jaw between his thumb and forefinger.

“A tiddler,” he remarked.

“A what?”

“We throw back anything under twelve inches.”

“Well, of course,” Maggie said.

“Did you watch what I was doing.”

“Oh, yes. It looks rather difficult.”

“It is. You’ll find out tomorrow.”

Harold tossed the little trout back into the stream and it streaked under a rock. They moved forward skirting the edge of the pool to get to the next riffle ahead. There Harold laid out a cast just to the side of a piano-size rock. In fact, the fly bounced off the rock’s face before it landed in the water with a little plop.

“Did you do that on purpose?” Maggie asked.

“Of course.”

The fly jiggered gaily down the current for a few seconds. Then the water exploded under it and the reel whined as a much larger trout ran off upstream with the fly. Harold slowed down the run by palming the spool until the line stopped paying out. The rod tip darted at the water as the fish chugged around. When it broke water about thirty feet away trying to throw the hook, it looked like an airborne wriggling gold ingot. Then the line went slack for a while as the fish drifted with the current. Harold appeared to anticipate the move and took in the slack until the rod tip was darting again. The fish ran upstream twice more, and the third time it floated down on the current, exhausted, Harold slipped the fatal net under it.

“Now, this is a fish,” he said, fastidiously extracting the hook with a surgical hemostat.

The fish had jewel-like red spots on its side and a bright yellow belly. It gasped and tried futilely to wriggle free from Harold’s grip. When the hook was out, he took the trout up in both hands and, in a motion that seemed well practiced, bent back the trout’s head until its spine snapped. Maggie recoiled.

“What did you just do?”

“I killed it quickly and mercifully,” he said.

“Good Lord …”

“You understand we intend to catch our supper?”

“Yes, but …”

“Therefore, we have to kill them.”

“I know, but …”

“It’s either this or they suffocate slowly in the creel. Which would you prefer?”

“Quick and merciful,” Maggie glumly agreed.

“It’s not as though you were a vegetarian.”

“No.”

“Nature is red in fang and claw, my dear.”

“Sure. I’ll be okay.”

Harold seemed satisfied. He nodded slightly and made a barely audible harrumphing sound. Then he swiftly had a knife out and slit the trout’s belly from its anal vent to its throat. He tore out the gills and tossed them aside, pulled the viscera loose from the body cavity, and squeezed the trout’s fibrous stomach so that a paste of partly digested insects came out of it like black toothpaste from a tube.

“What in God’s name are you doing now?”

“I’m examining the stomach contents to see what kind of bugs it’s been eating.”

“Oh.”

“It’s been feasting on these drakes, all right. Ants, too. I try to get the guts and the gills out as soon as possible. Spoils the meat otherwise.”

He pulled some ferns off the nearby bank, lined the bottom of his wicker creel with them like bedding in a casket, and slipped in the gutted fish. He appeared to admire it a moment before closing the lid. Then he took a silver flask from one of the innumerable pockets of his fishing vest and presented it to Maggie.

“Drink?”

“Yes. I think so.” She unscrewed the top and took a stiff slug.

“Nature red in fang and claw,” he repeated jovially and took a swallow himself.

Harold lost a trout in the next pool and threw back another tiddler in the one after. By now Maggie had recovered her emotions and, influenced by the slug of Scotch, regained an interest in what Harold was doing.

“Can I try a cast?”

“I told you, tomorrow.”

“Aw come on. Don’t be so rigid.”

“All right,” Harold said. “Go ahead and try.” He handed Maggie the rod.

“I’ve been watching you very carefully.”

“Uh-huh. And what if you actually hook a fish?”

“I’ll, uh … take care of it.”

Harold gestured toward the riffle ahead and said, “Have at her, pal.” He moved gingerly around to Maggie’s left to get out of the way of her casting arm.

“Gosh, this rod’s light as a feather,” she noted.

“You’re holding a thousand bucks worth of graphite.”

“Golly!”

“And if you break it, you have to buy me a new one.”

She shot him a worried glance.

“Just kidding. It’s practically indestructible.”

Maggie prepared to imitate what she’d seen Harold do. The rod felt altogether alien in her grip, though Harold had made the procedure seem so simple and straightforward. It is fair to say that she did not come close to approximating the correct method of casting. She immediately snagged the fly in an overhanging willow branch some twenty feet behind her.

“Oops,” she said.

“Not as easy as you thought, is it?”

“No. You were right. It’s rather difficult.”

“Takes practice.”

She sheepishly handed the rod back to Harold. He had to break off the leader and reattach all the terminal tackle—tappet, blood knot, and everything. It took a good ten minutes, during which Maggie sat on a rock, like a wood nymph being punished by the river god. On his second cast to the riffle ahead, just above a downed log, Harold hooked on to a fourteen-incher. And that was all they needed for supper.