It's the Sweet of the Year...
…a time when I should be standing in a trout stream. Alas, I am not—but a guy can dream, can’t he? And if he can dream it, can’t he write it? Here’s this morning’s day dream:
A Fly in the Face of Reason
or, Pointless Speculation
It’s a perfect day—like many May days in the Catskills—when Charles steps carefully into the riffle at the tail of a long pool, trying not to disturb the cobbled streambed, or make any splashing noise. He stands perfectly still for a few minutes, just watching the surface of the pool before him. The sun shines brightly on his face, but he’s chosen the spot so his shadow doesn’t fall on the water in front of him.
After a while, rings appear on the slick surface of the pool. Trout have resumed picking mayflies from the surface of the tea-colored stream. He watches an Ephemerella subvaria drift along the edge of the pool, flapping its sail-like wings in a struggle to break free of the water’s surface tension. Its fluttering effort attracts a small trout who rushes over to suck it down.
“Time to match wits with Salmo trutta,” he whispers to no one.
These trout, even on streams that are not famous, are notoriously shy. One might even suspect that they are very sophisticated about the wiles of fishermen. Charles doesn’t think so. After all, trout that have been caught are less likely to still be in the stream—and, since trout are not a schooling species, they are not likely to be educating each other. Charles laughs at the silliness of the very idea of a piscine classroom.
He takes an old Wheatley box from a vest pocket, and flips open the transparent lid of a small chamber filled with #14 Hendricksons and Red Quills. The classic patterns imitate male and female Ephemerella subvaria mayflies. Trout might not have human smarts, but they live in a place where insects of a certain size and coloration appear during certain times of the year. They learn to recognize and quickly respond to that changing food source. What fishermen might think are trout’s mental abilities are probably no more than a conditioned response to a stimulus. What’s frustrating to anglers is the trout’s non-responsiveness to anything that doesn’t perfectly align with its gastronomic expectations. If the fly doesn’t match a trout’s preconceptions, it will be ignored.
Oh sure, there are times when Charles could cast any old thing—even a pattern that doesn’t resemble any fly wrought by nature (for example: the ridiculously garish Royal Coachman, a fly he’s convinced was only designed to fool fisherman into parting with their money). If those patterns ever work, it’s probably because nothing is hatching, and the trout might be desperate, looking for any opportune mouthful. Once there’s a hatch in progress, an angler would be wise to forget about casting anything but his best attempt at matching it.
Charles ties a Red Quill on the end of an 8x tippet, and looks up to see cedar waxwings swooping over the water, picking off any mayflies that manage to evade the trout from below. He flips a short cast to the tail of the pool and quickly catches a small trout. He briefly considers keeping it—so he could examine its stomach’s contents—but he’s already sure that he’d find Ephemerella subvaria and not much else. He slips the trout directly from his net into the current behind him. He’s careful not to touch it with his dry hand; disturbing the fine mucus of the trout’s skin could lead to a fungus infection that could kill it.
He dries the Red Quill, and dips it into some home-made floatant that he made by dissolving candlewax in lighter fluid. A few quickcasts and backcasts, and the line shoots out toward a boulder at the head of the pool. At the last second, he raises the tip of his rod—causing the line to bounce back a little. The fly and leader straighten out, dropping just upstream from the lichen-covered boulder, but some slack line lands in the current—allowing the fly to drift, drag-free over a pocket beneath the boulder.
He’s chosen that exact spot because he thinks he knows how a big trout would think. But there are other explanations.
If a trout lives long enough to become large, it’s because it did something that kept it safe from predators all its life. It rarely lingered out in the open, or in the brightly-lit shallows. It would have preferred—whether it knew why or not—a deep, dark, and protected spot.
Like the undercut downstream side of a boulder.
For it to have grown large, it would need to have easy access to food—and not risk exposing itself to predators while feeding. It would need a feeding lane where the current would deliver food right past a good hiding place.
Like the little tongue of a waterfall beside the undercut downstream side of a boulder.
Charles has cast his fly to exactly the right spot—but he’s mistaken in believing that he’s been in a duel of wits with the wily old trout he hopes to be there. He might be using his wits, but the trout is just doing what has always protected it—without ever knowing why. For the fish, it’s been nothing more than a lifetime of reflexive responses to foods rushing by in the current, and the good luck of never being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No trout has a need for thoughts, wily or otherwise, or ever has.
Charles watches the little Red Quill bounce down the swift bright current, and holds his breath as it passes the boulder. The trout darts up from the darkness and opens its mouth to engulf the Red Quill. Charles sees the white inside of the big trout’s mouth and snaps the rod tip up to set the hook. But he’s too fast. The trout hasn’t even had a chance to close its mouth yet, and the fly whizzes past Charles’ right ear, never having touched the fish.
The trout, who had—over the years—occasionally missed his prey, simply returns to the depths to wait for another Ephemerella subvaria to float by. It does so without even knowing that it had matched wits in a dangerous liaison with Homo sapiens, and submerged victorious.
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