A River Never Sleeps
400
A River Never Sleeps
400eBook
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Overview
Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea: in January, searching for the steelhead in the dark, cold water; in May, fishing for bright, sea-run cutthroats; and on to the chilly days of October and the majestic run of spawning salmon. All the great joy of angling is here: the thrill of fishing during a thunderstorm, the sight of a river in freshet or a river calm and hushed, the suspense of a skillful campaign to capture some half-glimpsed trout or salmon of extraordinary size, and the excitement of playing and landing a momentous fish.
A River Never Sleeps is one of the enduring classics of angling. It will provide a rich reading experience for all who love fishing or rivers.
Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for fishermen. Our books for anglers include titles that focus on fly fishing, bait fishing, fly-casting, spin casting, deep sea fishing, and surf fishing. Our books offer both practical advice on tackle, techniques, knots, and more, as well as lyrical prose on fishing for bass, trout, salmon, crappie, baitfish, catfish, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781632201096 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2014 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 223,222 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Nick Lyons is a former English professor and book publisher, as well as the author and editor of many books on various topics. He lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
JANUARY
IT is easy to forget about the river in winter, particularly if you are a trout fisherman and live in town. Even when you live in the country, close beside it, a river seems to hold you off a little in winter, closing itself into the murky opacity of freshet or slipping past ice-fringed banks in shrunken, silent flow. The weather and the season have their effect on the observer too, closing him into himself, allowing him to glance only quickly with a careless, almost hostile, eye at the runs and pools that give summer delight. And probably his eyes are on the sky for flight of ducks or geese or turned landward on the work of his dogs. Unless he is a winter fisherman, he is not likely to feel the intimate, probing, summer concern with what is happening below the surface.
In the south of England our school holidays might have been planned to emphasize this break in interests. The Easter and summer holidays were times when the duns and sedges hatched and trout rose in every favorite holt of the quiet chalk streams. The Christmas holidays left us free for a full two thirds of each January, but trout rods were stored away and we hoped that tact and good behavior might win us permission to go out with shotguns. Fortunately — it seems now — the center of things, the pheasant-stocked coverts on the downs, the windy stubbles and root fields where partridges were wild and wise as geese, was kept for our elders and betters; the easiest-won permission was for a day in the water meadows after snipe and ducks, with the exciting chance of an old cock pheasant in any one of a dozen cropped and tended willow beds. They were good for many things, those winter days in the frost-browned water meadows. Plentiful game never yet made a good hunter, and we walked all day to spend a dozen shells. We learned where to look for snipe, how to walk them, and how to drive them. We learned where the ducks fed and when, how to test the wind and stalk them cautiously, how to hide ourselves along a line of flight at dusk or dawn. And we learned in sharp surprise that the duns hatched and the trout rose even in midwinter, even in the January frosts that brought the snipe south to us.
Perhaps the knowledge was profitless to us — certainly we could not turn back to the trout rods then, for trout were always left free to attend to their own affairs between October and April in those good waters. But the upright float of pale — winged flies on the winter-dark water and the heavy suck of a rising trout spreading on an overfast run were somehow even more thrilling and enticing to the mind than they were in summer. In the happy misery of cold and wet — for we were often cold and nearly always wet — under the gray skies and leafless trees of soaking or frost-brown meadows, one felt an affinity with the rising fish, a bond of hardihood that permitted one a share in this secret off-season life of his. In spring or summer he rose expectedly, and other fishermen watching there might see him and know his ways; probably they would be able to see, not merely the circle of his rise but his long, thick body also, poised close to the surface and waiting the float of the duns. In this winter water he was unseen, of a size only to be judged from the manner of his rise to an unknown hatch; but you judged him big, bigger perhaps than any fish you had ever seen in the river, a winter wanderer from the dark depths of some deep weir hole half a mile farther down. And you wondered about him: Did the roiled water seem good to him? Had he spawned and was he now growing back to condition for April? Did he feel the rain and the heavy sky as you did? Would he wander farther or find a summer holt near where you had seen his rise?
On those snipe-shooting days I marked down many good trout that I found later on fishing days, and it was borne in upon me that the life of the river is only slightly less full through the winter months. Inevitably this suggested winter fishing. But our Dorset river, unlike most south of England chalk streams, had no pike or grayling in it where we fished — a virtue that I regretted at the enthusiastic age of twelve or thirteen, though it probably made for better trout fishing. Pike, certainly, are a menace to a trout stream, and they seldom grow large enough in such water to make really interesting fishing; but grayling are another matter altogether. True, they compete with trout for the available food and so presumably reduce the river's yield of trout and the average size, but they are noble fish themselves and really test a fly-fisherman. Further, their competition is limited by somewhat different feeding habits, so it is likely that the total yield of the stream is increased, even though its yield of trout may be reduced. If you admire and respect grayling and if you want late fly-fishing when the trout have turned to spawning, you are better off with them in the stream; if you want only trout, presumably you are worse off, except that all the finest south-country trout streams have them. Anyhow, I was sorry that we had no grayling, and I still am because I am quite sure I should have learned a lot by fishing for them.
Apart from trout, the best fish we had in our river were the dace. Dace are little fish, seldom as large as a pound, never larger than a pound and a half, but they are bright, cheerful, quick little fish — the name is from the Old English dare or dart — and they spawn in April, so they were in prime condition during the Christmas holidays. And to make matters better still, we acquired merit by catching them because grandfather reckoned them as evil as other trout-stream owners reckon the grayling.
Most of our dace spent their days feeding over a long reach of shallow water between a big pool we called the Hatch Hole and a lesser pool known as the Trough Bridge for a wooden trough that crossed it to carry water to the meadows. They did not school as closely as I believe dace do in the Thames and other rivers but scattered out over the gravel and worked a slow way upstream, not independently, but in spaced formations of seldom more than five or six individuals. Each formation had its favorite beat of ten or fifteen yards and would work slowly up it, feeding steadily, then swim back down and start again.
Dace like worms and grubs and bottom feed of all kinds, and probably I should have done well with them had I been expert with such baits. But they also rose to surface flies, not steadily and regularly as trout do, but often enough, so I stayed with what I knew, and there were several winter days when I caught six or eight of them on a small dry fly. They are pretty fish with their big tight scales, bright silver on belly and lower sides, faintly olive or lemon gold on their backs, and they fought well when they were hooked. Fishing for them I learned many things. They would take a dragged fly that would have scared the wits out of a sensible trout, yet they were fussy risers, often coming up in important, satisfying dimples that left the fly to float away untouched. A strike to such a rise did not send them scurrying away in instant flight; the effect was far more irritating and educational. The little group that a moment before had seemed so friendly, accommodating and unsuspicious suddenly became aloof and contemptuous; it fed on in its own way, perhaps rising to surface flies less often, certainly disregarding anything I could offer.
Under the Trough Bridge one winter day I caught a dace that weighed fifteen ounces. That was the largest, though I suspect there may have been larger ones there. Sometimes as I fished for them in January, a good trout rose within reach and the temptation was too great; occasionally I made an honest mistake and covered a trout where I thought there was only a dace. Faithfully and always I turned such fish back, but they taught me that some of the trout whose rises we saw on snipe shooting days were clean and bright and hard in winter as they ever were in summer.
The dace introduced me to winter fishing and confirmed me as a winter fisherman. From them I learned that fishing is pleasant and the river worth knowing even when water from the line forms ice in the rings of the rod; and the lesson made me look for other winter fishing. In The Fishing Gazette I read often of the great Scottish salmon rivers where twenty- and thirty-pounders run in January and strong men go out in breast waders to catch them on huge flies thrown by sixteen- or eighteen-foot rods. I dreamed of those fish and that fishing and should still like my chance at it one day. It is difficult to imagine a stronger fishing experience than that of handling a big rod against the drive of wind and snow and hooking a thirty-pounder on the fly amid the fierce tumble of a great January river. But Scotland was far away, and I knew of no one who would ask me to fish such a river, so I thought again of pike and grayling.
To hear the owners of trout and salmon rivers talk of pike and grayling, you might well suppose that they would turn out the butler and a couple of footmen and welcome with open arms anyone who expressed a desire to catch either of those fish in their waters. This isn't exactly what happens, but one can usually get permission in the end through an introduction or a distant connection or something of that sort. Sometimes the permission is given very graciously, sometimes suspiciously; usually in my case it was given suspiciously, because a teen-age boy is not unreasonably expected to be about as dangerous as a good-sized pike on a closely preserved trout water. I think that for this reason I never had a really good winter grayling day — I was always limited to some minor stretch of water or to times that did not give me a real chance. The pike fishing was better, and I have had January days in private lakes and in the slow, heavy water of salmon rivers that I should hesitate to trade for anything short of a really fine chance of salmon.
It was January when I came with a rod to my first river in North America — the Pilchuck near Snohomish in Washington. My good friend Ed Dunn took me there, and we caught nothing, at least partly because neither of us knew very much about the fish we were after; but I cannot forget the day, because it was the first day and it started me thinking of steelhead — a habit I haven't grown out of yet. Two or three days later we went to the Stillaguamish, and I remember that day too, though the river was roaring down in tawny flood and I suppose we hadn't a chance of a fish even if we had known all there was to know. But there were dead salmon along the banks, and I saw and loved a fine Pacific coast river, so that day also is remembered.
And now, if all goes well and the Campbell, on whose bank I live, does not rise in full freshet, I know January for the best of all winter steelhead months. The fish have come in in good numbers by that time, but they are still fresh and silver and clean. There may be snow on the ground, two feet of it or more; and if so, the river will be flowing darkly and slowly, the running water below freezing but not ice, just flowing more slowly, as though it meant to thicken into ice — which it never does. Steelhead fishing can be good then, and there is a strange satisfaction in the life of the river flowing through the quiet, dead world. On the bank the maples and alders are stark and bare, drawn into themselves against the cold. The swamp robin moves among them, tame and almost bold for once, and perhaps an arctic owl hunts through them in heavy flight whose softness presses the air until the ear almost feels it. On the open water of the river are mergansers and mallards, blue-bills, butterballs, perhaps even geese and teal. Under it and under the gravel, the eggs of the salmon are eyed now; the earliest of the cutthroat trout are beginning their spawning, and the lives of a thousand other creatures — May flies, stone flies, deer flies, dragonflies, sedges, gnats, water snails and all the myriad forms of plankton — are slowly stirring and growing and multiplying. But the steelhead, with the brightness of the sea still on him, is livest of all the river's life. When you have made your cast for him, you are no longer a careless observer. As you mend the cast and work your fly well down to him through the cold water, your whole mind is with it, picturing its drift, guiding its swing, holding it where you know he will be. And when the shock of his take jars through to your forearms and you lift the rod to its bend, you know that in a moment the strength of his leaping body will shatter the water to brilliance, however dark the day.
ABOUT STEELHEAD
I CANNOT remember now what I expected of steelhead before I ever saw one. The name almost certainly gave me a mental picture of a fish whose back was a polished blue-gray like steel and whose strength was all that steel implies. One could do a lot worse than that. Cobb says the name probably comes from the hardness of the steelhead's skull, which forces the net fishermen to use several blows of a club to kill him when they bring him into the boat; and a steelhead fresh from the sea has a blued-steel back whose color is deepened by a brightness of silver below the lateral line. Matching his skull, all the bones of a steelhead are thicker and harder and stronger than the bones of Pacific salmon, and perhaps his strength is greater for that.
I do remember very well that I had preconceived ideas about fishing for steelhead. All I had heard of them suggested that their habits and life history were almost exactly those of Atlantic salmon — yet, I was told, only salmon eggs would catch them. I didn't know how to use salmon eggs and had the strongest of prejudices against using them, so I easily persuaded myself that ordinary methods of fishing for Atlantic salmon should be successful for steelhead. Perhaps not the fly, I told myself; that would be expecting too much, but certainly minnow or prawn or spoon.
Those two first days on the Pilchuck and the Stillaguamish did nothing to prove my theory, but they did nothing to disprove it either, because I didn't see the salmon eggs catching anything and I had fished out plenty of blank days for Atlantic salmon with minnow or prawn. Soon after that I went up to work at a logging camp near Mount Vernon in Washington, first as a scaler and then as a member of the survey crew. There was plenty of good fishing near camp — for cutthroat trout and largemouthed bass in Lake Cavanaugh — and plenty of steelhead talk. But the steelhead talk was distant; the fish ran in June and July, which were six months away, to Deer Creek, a good many miles away through the woods. The steelhead talk was mixed in with hunting talk of bears and cougars, much of it designed to impress rather than to enlighten. I led with a chin that asked incessant questions about fishing and hunting and got less than I deserved. I am still amazed at the kindness of those men to an immigrant greenhorn — Red Wayne, the scaler who broke me in, Ed Phipps, the timekeeper, Jim Curtis, the bull bucker, Jack Murray, the bridge foreman, Frank Breslich and Johnny O'Leary of the survey crew and a dozen others. Americans generally seem much kinder and more friendly toward an immigrant than my Canadian brothers and sisters, and I think it must be because they are more sure of themselves in their country and yet at the same time more conscious of being themselves immigrants or of immigrant stock. When I had been in camp only a week or two, a little old Irishman whom we called Frank Skagway showed me the strength and passion with which America grips her immigrants. In the bunk-house one evening a few of us were talking of Europe and America and the differences in the life of the two continents. Probably I said my say for Old England — I don't remember now — but being only two or three months away from her, I must have. Frank had been listening without offering a word, but suddenly he looked over at me, his lined and long-jawed Irish face serious as I had never seen it.
"Lad," he asked, "do you know what country this is?"
"No," I said doubtfully.
"It's the land of the free and the home of the brave."
Frank's voice was steady and calm and sure and kind. He wasn't boasting, he wasn't correcting me; he was simply stating a solemn, unshakable fact. Nobody laughed, even though there was white moonshine in the bunkhouse.
The cougar and bear and steelhead stories were kind and gentle as Frank's fine statement of his belief. You can string a greenhorn along and make him pretty miserable if you want — it's an easy sport and not without its attractions I suppose — but no one ever tried to do that to me. The evening after I came down from Camp 10 to Camp 7 to start work with the survey crew, Jack Murray told me, "You'd better watch how you go out to that new bridge tomorrow."
"Why's that?" I asked him.
"They brought in a windfall bucker from up there tonight. Badly scratched up he was — by a cougar. If his partner hadn't been there with an ax, he'd 'a' been killed, likely."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A River Never Sleeps"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Skyhorse Publishing, Inc..
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Table of Contents
JANUARY About Steelhead A Fish for Firmin,
FEBRUARY About Pike "Where to Fish",
MARCH House Hunting Picking Favorites,
APRIL H. M. Greenhill Little Lakes,
MAY Sea-run Cutthroats The Big Salmon Water,
JUNE Lewington's Carrier Pacific Salmon,
JULY Buttle Lake Dark on the Water,
AUGUST Salt Water I Salt Water II,
SEPTEMBER Sachem River Why Fish?,
OCTOBER First Fall Freshet Top, Bottom and Middle,
NOVEMBER The Riddle of the Oxhorn Before I Die,
DECEMBER Fishing Books To Know a River ...,
AFTERWORD A Visit to Roderick Haig-Brown,
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