Right in the Corner of the Mouth

I was asleep at the reel when the red speckled brown sucked in my egg pattern and exploded into the air. The trout tumbled back into the river and shot down stream toward me, taking full advantage of the slack line. He then wrapped the leader around the dabbling toes of an exposed tree root and snapped it. I was left holding a limp line. It was a fuck-me-with-a-hot-poker moment.

Until this point I had pounded the river for the better part of the afternoon. I started with a black wooly bugger, then switched to a sculpin, followed by a worm and finally to a prince nymph trailing an egg. I probed likely pools and riffles getting only the occasional rock strike. Along the way my mind had gone numb; I was mind-dead from watching the fly line flow with the current over the last couple of hours.

I laced on a new leader, tied on a number ten bead-head prince nymph and trailed an egg behind it; the identical rig as before. I stepped back into the run, waved the bamboo rod a couple of times and shot the egg up and across where I had hooked the bull. The egg drifted, maybe a few feet, when the bull’s twin sucked it in. The same antics occurred. The fish bolted three feet above the surface, nose-dived and torpedoed downstream. This time I was not an empty fishing vest. I managed the slack and the bamboo rod flexed deep into the handle, allowing me to control the fish’s tantrum.

The bull was wearing the deep colors of the spawn. When I picked him up a white ribbon of sperm squirted from his rear hole and his stomach hung heavy, full and mottled like a game winning bag of marbles. One moment he had been fertilizing eggs and in the next, feasting on the dislodged caviar that was drifting in the current. There is a symmetry here that I appreciate.

A dinner fish I decided. A glass of claret, some potatoes and onions, and a green salad would round out the meal. I smacked the brown on top of the head with my folded Swiss Army knife, opened the blade and gutted him. The fish dripped blood on my waders like ketchup from an overstuffed ballpark hot dog. I pawed through the guts, found the stomach and unzipped it with the point of my knife. A harvest of iridescent coral colored fish eggs spilled out. Had these eggs escaped the bull, they probably would have drifted into slack water, settling into a bog of silt or moss where they would have smothered and decayed.

The bull’s carnivorous act is done without guilt or guile. It’s done out of necessity, the need to gain sustenance. The abundance of summer is over. The large hatches of aquatic insects are gone, and the terrestrials have disappeared as well. The stream bed in late fall offers relatively little easy pickins. Shortly the water temperature will plummet, forcing the trout into a drowsy dormancy. This is the trout’s last feast of the season. He has to take advantage of it to survive the coming winter.

I teased the spawners for the better part of an hour, landing fish after fish. Not wanting to exhaust the run, I reeled up, walked over to a fallen log overlooking the run and benched myself. I watched the spawning bed, but could not see a single fish, nor could I distinguish the spawning bed from the surrounding river bottom. The water simply slipped over the top of the bed, glittering and gurgling, not offering a clue. I had Forrest Gumped my way into the spawning bed.

Deciding I had tormented these fish long enough, I walked up to another pool. I drifted the egg through the hole a dozen times or more, but no explosion. What was so special about the hole before? The cogs in my head spun. I walked back to the spawning bed, sat on the bench and watched the river caress it. Slowly I pieced together a subtle, pockmarked pattern in the river bed that had camouflaged itself under the shimmer of the current. Then in an oh-shit epiphany I saw the spawning bed in its entirety. I realized I had only tapped the head of the bed.

I walked downstream, well below the foot of the bed and probed with a dozen casts – Nothing… Zilch… Zippo. When I checked out the foot of the bed, ker-slam-mo! A brown lunched on the egg and registered his protest by romping downstream. I released the spawner, reeled up and humped it upstream. I was a man on a mission. I ranged a good couple of hundred yards until I saw the same subtle pockmarked structure. First cast into the suspected spawning bed rendered a bucking, hook jawed bull, whose head filled the palm of my hand, from the crescent of his gill to the crook at the tip of his lower jaw. The action was again fast and furious. Once I worked my way through the bed then silence. My theory was confirmed, case closed.

The river had given me a gift that day; a right of trespass into a trout’s mating sanctuary. I probably will never share this gift. It is my fear that so called fishing guides will squat on these beds and plop their well-heeled clients in the middle of the runs, where they will torment the spawners well past exhaustion, devastating the spawning bed for the sake of a buck. You see this scenario unfold on all of the West’s popular fishing destinations. The profit motive, combined with a mutated sense of entitlement and a need for instant gratification, plagues the fly fisherman of this country.

Is this attitude towards guides and their clients hypocritical on my part? Not in my mind. Fly fishing for me is more about discovery than the simple hook-and-fight contest. The discovery process places me in intimate contact with the river, her bed and the populations she supports. It is the unraveling of the river’s web of life that enriches my fishing.
However, I am not above gloating or bragging. In fact, I seem to prefer doing both at the same time. And yes, I told my fishing cronies about this fishing. When they asked where I caught those fish, my sardonic sense of humor flowered. I formed my index finger into a hook, snagged the inside of my lower lip, grinned a smartass grin and quipped: “Right in the corner of the mouth.” My compadres have known me long enough to know my answer, but ask they must and howl with laughter I must. I just kill myself sometimes.

Copyright Stephan Fowler 2008. All rights reserved.