Gray's Sporting Journal

Gray’s Sporting Journal VOLUME FORTY-FOUR

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ISSUE 3

JULY 2019

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Features VOLUME FORTY-FOUR ISSUE 3 • JULY 2019

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Buddha of the Burlington Northern

by Parker Bauer Freight hopper, logger, banjo picker, folk doctor, and trout Moses to wanderers on the Flathead.

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16 High Cotton by Brian Grossenbacher A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNAL

Circles Unbroken

by O. Victor Miller A posthumous introduction.

32

Bird Dog

by Erin Block Flushing grouse, as in childhood, with that same twist in the gut but grayer.

42

Spooky Fish

by C. R. Beideman Haunted by big fish.

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36 Earning It! by Nick Trehearne A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNAL

Bounty Hunters

by H. William Rice Raccoons are smart—at least smart enough to separate the faithful dogs from the faithless.

92 EXPEDITIONS Roadside Reds

by Zach Matthews A DIY trip in the heart of bayou country.

52 FRONT COVER: Adirondack Camping, by Peter Corbin

pencil on paper • 9 × 12 inches

Steel Waters by Adam Tavender A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNAL

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Columns & Departments VOLUME FORTY-FOUR ISSUE 3 • JULY 2019

JOURNAL 66 4Largemouth

by Russ Lumpkin

What’s not to love?

58 TRADITIONS A Wise Ol’ Cat

by George V. Triplett Edited by Will Ryan

On desperate battles with the biggest fish of your life.

70

by Brooke Chilvers

The miller’s son who became Sir Alfred James Munnings, KVCO, PRA.

78 EATING Halibut

by Martin Mallet Flat-out delicious.

106 BOOKS

by Scott Sadil

by Chris Camuto

Juan & John

A fraternity, regardless.

Cross-Training

by Terry Wieland

It works for athletes. It also works for shooters.

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Equestrian Artist A. J. Munnings

66 ANGLING 70 SHOOTING

74

74 ART

Summer Lit

108 POEM

The Politics of the Mad Angler

by Michael Delp

64 Gear Guide 84 People, Places, & Equipment 100 The Listing

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Gray’s Sporting Journal Group Publisher John Lunn A s s o c i at e P u b l i s h e r Michael Floyd

706-823-3739 / mike.floyd@morris.com

Editorial Russ Lumpkin, Editor Wayne Knight, Art Director Terry Wieland, Shooting Editor Scott Sadil, Angling Editor Seth Fields, Digital Content Manager 770-696-7619 / seth.fields@morris.com

Nina Eastman, Advertising Production Coordinator Contributing Editors R. Valentine Atkinson Barry & Cathy Beck Denver Bryan Christopher Camuto Brooke Chilvers Pete Fromm

Brian Grossenbacher Martin Mallet Will Ryan Dale C. Spartas E. Donnall Thomas Jr.

Advertising Sales Northeast ~ Scott Buchmayr 978-462-6335 / buchmayrscott@gmail.com Midwest / Southeast ~ Amos Crowley 216-378-9811 / amos@crowleymedia.us.com West ~ Scott J. Cherek 307-635-8899 / cherekgroup@bresan.net Stone Wallace Communications 512-799-1045 / jimkstone@gmail.com Write to the Editor

editor@grayssportingjournal.com C i r c u l at i o n ProCirc: 3191 Coral Way, Suite 510, Miami, FL Kolin Rankin, Consumer Marketing Director, ProCirc Mike Bernardin, Circulation Coordinator, ProCirc Retailers: To carry GSJ, call (646) 307-7765.

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A Publication of MCC Magazines, LLC a division of Morris Communications Company, LLC 735 Broad St., Augusta, GA 30901

Donna Kessler, President Patty Tiberg, Vice President Scott Ferguson, Director of Circulation Donald Horton, Director of Manufacturing Karen Fralick, Director of Publishing Services Morris Communications Company, LLC William S. Morris III, Chairman William S. Morris IV, President & CEO ©2019 by MCC Magazines, LLC. All rights reserved.

Gray’s Sporting Journal (ISSN 0273-6691) is published seven times a year in March/April, May/June, July, August, September/October, November/December and January/Expeditions issues by MCC Magazines, LLC, 643 Broad St., Augusta, GA 30901. Subscriptions are $39.95 for one year, $68 for two years. Canada and Mexico add $20 per year (U.S. funds only). Outside North America, add $40 per year (U.S. funds only). Periodicals postage paid at Augusta, GA, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address corrections to Gray’s Sporting Journal, P.O. Box 433237, Palm Coast, FL 32143-9616.

Contributions in the form of manuscripts or photographs will be gladly considered for publication. A self-addressed, stamped envelope of the proper size must accompany each submission. Please write for editorial guidelines if submitting for the first time, and enclose a SASE; this is very important. We cannot guarantee against damage or loss of materials submitted, but we take great care in handling all submissions.

Address all correspondence to Gray’s Sporting Journal, P.O. Box 1207, Augusta, GA 30903-1207. For subscription inquiries or if you do not wish to have your name provided to qualified users of our mailing list, call 1-800-288-5892.

Gray’s Sporting Journal may not be photocopied or otherwise reproduced without express written permission from the Publisher. First published September 1975.

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GSJ

JOURNAL

Largemouth What’s not to love?

by Russ Lumpkin

A

n old turkey hunter once told me, “When the dogwoods and redbuds are blooming, turkeys are gobbling.” But by the time our turkey camp opened the first weekend of May—having to host it around the Masters and Easter and other considerations—the blooms were long gone. We figu ed the turkey hunting would be slow, but we had options. Wild pigs plunder in great numbers in the swamps of the Savannah River.

In addition, the turkey camp is always about half bassfishing camp. The fishing is usually very good, and in fact, the dinner plans always include one all-out fis fry that usually leaves enough leftover fried bass for appetizers on subsequent nights.

After a beautiful April that ran cooler than usual, we thought the fishing would be ripe about the time May rolled in and temperatures began climbing toward 90. We had every reason to believe the camp would continue its string of yielding at least one largemouth that exceeds eight pounds.

The camp opened Thursday morning, and over the next two days of hunting, the action proved sparse at best. By Saturday afternoon, however, we had two birds on the ground. Even with the quiet turkey hunting, the bass fishing had actually been worse—especially for spring days, especially for largemouth bass. All we could imagine is that the fish we e on the bed. Still, we kept at it.

At least initially. As Saturday afternoon waned into evening, I found myself alone on the lake and bore on my shoulders the weight of a skunk. I didn’t want to pack it in and kept changing flies streamers, poppers, terrestrials, and Dragon Tails that are all the rage. Nothing.

Near sunset, I maneuvered my kayak amid a stand of pond cypress. In the past, a bug pitched near the buttressed trunks had yielded plenty of hard-fightin , leaping largemouths. But after a couple casts, I began to lose heart. So, I reminded myself what a beautiful day it had been. Around the lake, I’d seen ospreys, a bald eagle, and gators aplenty. Bobwhites, mostly a thing of the past in the Georgia coastal plain, whistled all around. Red-winged blackbirds, calling from the cattails, reminded me of fishing farm ponds with my father. Finally, I made a short roll cast to the right side of a tree, and two strips later, I connected with a decent buck bass. It leapt a few times and put a heavy bow in the fly rod. By the time I wrangled it in, my kayak had moved a good 25 feet from where it had been when I set the hook and still had momentum.

That leaping fish reminded me why I so enjoy catching largemouth bass on a fl . It also made me wonder: Why don’t more fly anglers target largemouths?

In the world of conventional tackle, bass fis ing is big—huge, in fact. A short walk through the iCAST angling expo shows that fishing only for largemouths with spinning gear is larger than all fl fishing put together. The fly industry has made attempts to tap into that big bass market. For example, Sage and St. Croix offer rods designed specifically to lift heavy poppers and lay them back down near stumps and lily pads.

While most fly angling concentrates on trout, I’m of the opinion that it’s fly fishin , the process of it and nature of it, that attracts participants more so than any particular species of fish Once an angler

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has the necessary skills to catch trout, he or she can apply and adapt those same skills to catch any game fish on the planet—and fly anglers are a traveling bunch. Yet the fly magazines and film tours and blogs seem to highlight only the salmonids or some salty destination. It’s rare to see a story or fly fishin film about Micropterus salmoides.

Among fly anglers, this anti-bass sentiment or lack of interest or whatever it is, is nothing new.

Paul Schullery, in American Fly Fishing: A History, includes a section on bass bugs, which summarizes early fly fishing for black bass in the United States.

One of the first denunciations of bass fishing appeared in The American Turf Register (March 1831), and the piece described bass waters as “turbid” and “sluggish.” The writer also mentioned alligators and “hissing moccasins” as reasons to dislike bass fishin .

In the late 1800s, James Henshall tried to change the perception of the largemouth. He wrote extensively on the many virtues of black bass and stated that American anglers had allowed themselves to be too heavily influenced by British writers to see worthiness in any game fish beyond the salmonids. He used the term black bass to cover the variety of the sunfish family of bass species, but even a brief reading of his work gives every indication that he spoke mostly of largemouths and even promoted the game qualities of largemouths as superior to smallmouths.

But soon after Henshall wrote The Book of the Black Bass (1881) and praised largemouths as a great game fish he had detractors. One Chester, writing in The American Angler in 1882, called the fish “a porcine, snake-devouring rover of stagnant water.”

These days, perhaps the bias is due to the Bassmaster circuit, which treats fishing like a NASCAR event. Weigh-ins aren’t even on the water but in arenas packed with fans and complete with flashin lights and an MC who might as well be calling a WWE match. Each fishe man is heavily sponsored and festooned with logos from lure and boat manufacturers. Such competitions, with retrieves that skate fish across the water and fishe man strutting on stage while waving big bass, are anathema to the “quiet sport,” which is a pursuit for people who don’t mind manual labor. Most fly anglers explore water by either wading or paddling a canoe, kayak, or drift boat. Even in salt water, anglers who use enginepowered skiffs to reach distant fish then either wade

hard-sand flats or pole the boat But I ask, what’s not to love about fly fishing for largemouth bass?

The above statements about bass and their home waters are partly true, but in my opinion, such characteristics aren’t negatives. The presence of gators and moccasins are proof that even a farm pond can be wild and dangerous. And if fly anglers hesitated to step foot in turbid waters, the carp craze would never have lifted off. And even if you don’t enjoy fishing for bass in still water, the native range of largemouth bass includes rivers from the St. Lawrence southward that drain into the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River basin. They are also found in rivers that terminate in the Atlantic, from North Carolina to Florida and into Northern Mexico.

Even before Henshall’s Book of the Black Bass was published, largemouths had already begun making their way around the world. In the 1870s, France and Belgium received transplants of largemouths.

When Henshall wrote, “He [largemouth bass] has the faculty . . . of making himself completely at home wherever placed,” he had no idea what would transpire over the next century.

Today, largemouths have been successfully transplanted to every state except Alaska, and they can be found on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. And in fact, the fish that tied George Perry’s world record largemouth bass at 22 pounds 4 ounces came from a lake in Japan.

The joy in fishing for largemouths isn’t that they’re widely available, but that they’re everything a fly rod angler could want. They’ll eat just about anything. A friend of mine caught a seven-pounder while flipping a Stimulator for redbreast. And while largemouths are widely known for explosive takes on topwater, their fie ce attacks on streamers are a fitting prelude to the acrobatics that will surely follow. Few game fish take to the air as readily and often as a largemouth bass. Their writhing, twisting leaps will remind you of tarpon, and if you’re close enough and hook a specimen of sufficient size, the rattling gills cement that comparison.

To top it off, their flesh is delicious. In many places, they are invasive. As a fly angler, you have no reason not to fish for largemouth bass—they’re fun, and you can catch and keep a few without guilt.

Chances are high, there are some near you. n

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Buddha of the Burlington Northern Freight hopper, logger, banjo picker, folk doctor, and trout Moses to wanderers on the Flathead.

by Parker Bauer

CRAIG MONTANA, BY RICK GERBER

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ROCK CREEK, BY RICK GERBER

September 1978.

Our tackle was in the car, ready to whack trout, but first we had to find my brother. We drove around the streets of Martin City, Montana—all of them, a two-minute jaunt—without spotting the Martin City Hotel, where he’d said he was living. We decided, or I did anyway, to stop at a bar and ask directions.

The bar’s sign shivered on its hinges, and a couple of muddy pickups were parked out front.

My wife eyed the place warily. “Well,” I said, “are you my wife or not?” and in we went.

The bar had a sawdust floor, a barmaid who’d never heard of the Martin City Hotel, and a customer with a big luna moth of suds on his mustache.

“You missed Butte a few hours back,” the guy snorted. “Hotels for every occasion.”

He knocked back half a glassful. The barmaid waved him off, then leaked a little smile. “Place up the road’s got rooms this time of year. The Dew Drop Inn.” The name sounded dubious, but I thanked her and said we were looking for my brother at the Martin City Hotel.

The guy fixed one red eye on me. “Listen,” he said with a note of menace. “There’s no hotel.”

“Who’s your brother?” the barmaid asked.

Now, that was a question far bigger than the whereabouts of the Martin City Hotel. The sort of numbing riddle that sages spring on the unenlightened: My brother, who was he?

Back in the Pliocene, when we were boys, I knew. Bob was me, more or less, and I was Bob. We were four years apart but did everything as one, finished each other’s sentences. We’d sail all day in a cardboard box, our boat, bobbing around on the sea of our mutual imagination.

We grew up, regrettably. Take that adverb any way you want. We hunted and fished together, but now we finished each other’s sentences, full of wisecracks, only as a kind of throwback joke. In our college days, I literally lost track of Bob. At the University of Montana, he took certain courses in the English department that convinced him he didn’t need a degree to ride boxcars. I was the one who had always loved trains, but it never would have occurred to me to go down to the yards and get on one without a ticket.

I heard about his hoboing and a lot more besides.

I pictured him cross-legged in a boxcar gazing out at passing valleys and peaks, cold black rivers, tall

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FAR AND AWAY, BY RICK GERBER

stands of ponderosa like the masts of the mythical ark on Mount Ararat. Bob, the Buddha of the Burlington Northern.

Not that the barmaid needed, or wanted, to know any of that. I just gave her his name.

“No kidding?” she said, cocking her head. “Your brother’s Bob Bauer?” She twisted the wet bar rag around her wrist and gave me the once-over. It felt like getting a physical.

But she knew where he lived, it turned out, and drew a map on the bar with her damp finger. My wife was already easing toward the door. The Big Sky meatball weighed in again. “I don’t know nothing about your brother,” he bristled, “but there’s no damn hotel.”

We were halfway outside now. The barmaid leaned on the bar, not done with me yet.

“You just seem so normal,” she said.

Dusk. We drove past a boarded-up movie

theater, the bones of old buildings, following directions. At last we found it, a dusty frame building like any other, no business sign of any sort, but Bob was there. The barmaid was beginning to look like an angel.

Bob roared my name—not simply a welcome,

but a sort of annunciation. Then the same, thunderously, for his sister-in-law. “Charlotte!” he said, as if she were arriving, with me, in glory.

Bob’s hair was long, not as long as mine but a lot messier. He had a couple of rooms with high ceilings at the front of the building and a big window full of snaky unkempt plants. The whole place had a honeyed, weedy odor, issuing from heaps and sheaves of mysterious leafy matter spread out to dry on every horizontal surface, including the bed and kitchen table. Bob gave us the tour, scooping up crumbly sprigs to our noses.

“Mullein,” he barked theatrically. “Introduced from Europe, grows wild everywhere.” He lifted a pale woolly leaf to the ceiling lightbulb. “Antiseptic, astringent, emollient, expectorant, good for toothache, cramps, convulsions. Perfect for piles.” He twirled another, thin and feathery. “Yarrow—take it in teas for colds and flu, ulcers, abscesses. Stimulates bile, purifies the blood.”

And so on with skullcap and valerian and a dozen others. I wondered why I’d want my bile stimulated, but didn’t ask. In the months since I’d seen Bob, he’d become, somehow, an herbalist. Without seeking it, he’d gained some local renown: cures were claimed. Now he was stockpiling for the everimminent Montana winter, amassing mountains of medicinal herbs and drying them here in his

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rooms, enough for everyone he knew.

Several well-used banjos and guitars stood in a dim corner, as if they were sneaking a cigarette together. Bob was brewing a pot of herb tea, too busy to pick us a tune, but he did plunk a tape in his custom audio system: an eight-track deck he’d rescued from a junk car and wired to an antique console radio, long dead except for the speaker. This strewnout unit took as long as the tea to warm up, but finally Bob Wills and his Playboys poured out, spry fiddles sparring with the speaker’s electrical pops and snarls. The tea, the distillation of Bob’s latest new life in northern Montana, tasted like the scent of the room, sweet and weedy and slightly suspect, like everything else.

Anyway, we’d found him. My brother, whoever he was at that moment. I did have to wonder about that—because what had brought him way up here, I knew, wasn’t herbs. What lured him was logging.

Philosophically, spiritually, anatomically, Bob was no logger. But he’d been reading the Beat poets and liked the sound of the life they wrote about: music, spontaneity, easygoing girls, hitting the road in old cars. The only drawback was, road or no road, the Beats were basically urban types. Bob wasn’t about to hang on the Columbia campus or in Golden Gate Park. The notable rustic exception in the group was Gary Snyder, who wrote poems about working as a logger in the big woods of the Northwest—a Beat with a job.

So Bob got a saw; he already had the old car.

How much actual logging he did I can’t say. He couldn’t have discerned much poetry in the gnashing havoc of trees crashing down all around. But out in the woods he did meet a luckless logger—a lyrically desperate case it seemed his destiny to help.

The man had gashed his leg with a chain saw and gone to a doctor, but the wound only got worse.

In mounting pain, he lay around at home, where the propped-up leg obstructed his wife’s line of sight to the TV set. Several times she threatened to throw him out of the trailer, but then Bob showed up toting a brown bag of herbs. With nothing to lose but the leg, the suffering sawyer let Bob put on a poultice derived from old Indian remedies.

The wife, an Indian herself, turned off the TV and watched Doc Bauer at work. In a few days, the logger was out of harm’s way, and hers as well—back in the woods, lopping off trees right and left. The word went around. Bob’s reputation was made.

We finished the tea, sitting for a while in silence.

Then out on the darkened street a car went by with loud pipes. “They’ve got a law against mufflers around here,” Bob grumbled. The rumbling looped away and faded at last. “I know where we can get some,” he went on now, nonchalantly, as if to his teacup, and I knew it wasn’t mufflers he meant.

It had taken us an hour of herbs to get around to it.

Talking about trout, like angling for them, demanded a slow, sidelong approach. It took a ritual of access, devoutly kneeling, the way that courtship used to and religion, in the higher and crankier churches, still does.

Bob told us about the long walk he’d taken lately—the whole 60-mile length of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. He’d carried his old 12-gauge Stevens and lived lavishly on herb-stuffed grouse. He didn’t take a rod but did get a look, along the way, at the South Fork of the Flathead River. No one, not a soul, was fishing it. Clear as vodka, and it had to be full of trout. Why didn’t we head on up there, he proposed—just start out tomorrow?

“We don’t want to keep you from working,” I lied.

“You don’t?” he said, flipping off lights for the night. “What kind of brother is that?”

Charlotte spread her sleeping bag on the sofa.

Then, with a start, she noticed that one arm of the sofa had a burn hole in it big enough to den a marmot, so she switched the bag around to put her head at the other end. I unrolled my own bag on the floor. Bob, I figured, would clear off the herbs and sleep in his bed, but instead he lowered himself, fully clothed, into his empty bathtub, an enormous old fixture on lion’s feet.

All was quiet except for the distant howling, doleful as lost hounds, of diesel locomotives crawling up the Continental Divide.

“Bob?” I said after a while.

“Uh huh, what is it?” his voice came back in the dark, booming from the tub.

“What is this place we’re in here, anyway?”

“Martin City.”

“I mean this building.”

“What do you mean, what is it? The Martin City Hotel.”

“Nobody else seems to know that.”

“I know.”

By then I’d forgotten the question, and wondered what, exactly, was in the tea we’d drunk.

September was a good half gone. Wet

weather was coming in a couple of days, the first Continued on page 82

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Photography by Brian Grossenbacher

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Big cities on its banks and far away, along with agricultural interests and drought, have drained much of the “mighty” from the Colorado River. By the time it reaches Mexicali, Baja, it has slowed to a crawl. This used to be a waterfowl haven, and hunters gathered here. When the river went dry, the ducks went elsewhere. Hunters turned to quail and eventually discovered wild pheasant. Whoever figured on shooting pheasant in high cotton?

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The pheasant hide under upland cotton, a medium-staple crop that grows thick and makes the rows nearly indistinguishable. Still, the walkers plow through, pushing the pheasant and calling out the roosters, “¡Gallo! ¡Gallo!” The birds’ strides crackle over dry leaves, and taking flight, they burst from the foliage like popcorn. When they fall, each retrieve reminds you this is an arid land.

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For more information, see page 84.

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At the end of the day, a passel of roosters brings satisfaction. Now it’s time to thank the walkers and admire the cock pheasant—their vivid plumage provides bold contrast to the landscape of inland Baja. It’s also time to get back to the lodge so you can reverse the parch that’s been building in the back of your throat. High cotton indeed.

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MORNING FOG PINE ISLAND, BY GALEN MERCER

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CIRCLES UNBROKEN A posthumous introduction.

BY O. VICTOR MILLER

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W

hen I first see Betsy Franck, I’m speechless, transfixed. My heart sloshes an extra beat. She’s a hereditary composite of her father and grandparents, favoring a youthful Cher. Her long dark hair falls halfway to her elbows. It’s as though she has stepped enigmatically into the present from my childhood. I feel I’ve known her all her life.

An accomplished musician and songwriter, Betsy has an entertainer’s charisma. She has come from a gig in Statesboro—a tribute to Gregg Allman—to my childhood home on the Flint River in search of her father’s boyhood, so her son can know something of his grandfather and to scatter his ashes in the places where as an adolescent he loved to roam.

We were playmates, Bobby and me, wild boys, who loved the woods and springs. We hunted and fished along this riverbank, swam the swift currents, shot the rapids where the whitewater braids itself over the rocks.

We sit on the deck my son built overlooking the river. Much of what we’ll say to each other will seem already said. We are silent, soaking in the view. I pick a pomegranate from its tree on the edge of the lawn, scoring the rind with my pocketknife, breaking the fruit in half. She holds out her palms to catch the ruby red arils; the fleshy seeds spill into her hands like bloody tears. We share the fruit as I try to recall details of her father’s childhood 65 years ago, reviving memories that would’ve remained forgotten of a time when everything was green and possible and we thought we’d live forever. Gazing downriver, we become aware of time as a vortex when all things past and present exist in the same eternal moment, when the best and happiest moments are immortal and bad karma can coil around and bite you on the ass. I believe the forbidden fruit was a pomegranate, that Mother Eve got caught red-handed with ruby juice dribbling down her chin.

In the dusk we watch migrating chimney swifts flitting like bats as they circle and dive to roost in the chimney of Mother’s Williamsburg cottage.

The house is haunted by my mother, a poltergeist.

The house remains much as she left it, a monument to herself and her exquisite taste. Nothing but 18th-century antiques suit the house. My father’s

ghost is a river spirit, haunting the corner of the lot where the deck now stands. Bobby spent almost as much time at my house as he did at his own home.

For our nocturnal ramblings we snuck out the upstairs dormer window, dropping to the lawn like cats.

We’d meet our sidekick Marvin and set out on adventures preconceived by her father, like gigging eels.

T

here’s one,” Bobby hisses in the dark, “dead ahead.” Marvin and I stand up to see, rocking the rowboat we’ve borrowed without permission from Radium Springs Resort. Bobby’s Boy Scout lantern spotlights a black and silver eel lying in an S on the bottom of the sandy channel of Radium Creek. He hands the lantern to Marvin and eases his bamboo gig pole into the water.

Allowing for refraction, he jabs, leaning his weight on the gig. The eel is pinned, the pole quivering. He lifts it off the bottom and the eel goes ballistic. The pole bends and wobbles. Nothing fights like a three-foot eel on a bamboo pole. Bobby brings it up thrashing, slinging moonlight, but the eel wiggles free before he can boat it. “Son of a biscuit eater,” declares Bobby. “Got dog!”

Bobby is learning to cuss. He blames me for paddling too fast with the broom we’ve stolen from Tillie, the saint responsible for my deportment and by extension, for Bobby’s. He blames us for rocking the boat.

It must be a trait of adolescent boys to want to gig something. Bobby, the oldest and closest to puberty, always got the first turn with the gig, his rules.

Marvin went first if snatch-hooking was called for.

He was by far the most accomplished snatch-hooker. He tossed his treble hook over a sleeping jack or into a school of flaring silver shad. At just the right time, he snatched and we ducked the barbed missile when he missed. Generally, I was the kid in the back of the boat with Tillie’s broom.

We missed more eels than we harvested, but one we’ve boated lashes around in the dark bilge against our bare ankles, causing more misses. These eels, we’d learn later, were born in the Sargasso Sea. Their mothers migrated from the spring creek over the little dam into the Flint River, which joins the Chattahoochee at the Florida line to form a third, the Apalachicola, before it flows into the Gulf of

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Mexico. The eels rounded the cape of Florida to the Atlantic and the Sargasso Sea, where they spawned and died. The elvers retraced their mothers’ voyage back to the springs. Some nights we fished for bass in the creek, bait-casting a luminous Jitterbug plundered from his father’s tackle box, which being retrieved wobbles webs of moonlight across the crystal water.

Our mothers would cook a bass but wouldn’t come near an eel. They wouldn’t even allow the metallic-smelling shad in the house. Bobby, a winsome maverick with blond hair unruly as a sandspur, could sweet-talk Tillie into frying an eel for us. He had sway over any woman regardless of age. My mother called him harum-scarum and didn’t trust a word he said, but he was her favorite. She was as susceptible to his boyish charm as was everybody else. They rivaled each other on the piano. Bobby played well although he never practiced. “That boy full of the Devil.” Tillie smiled, but he wooed her with his mischief and irrepressible energy. She was putty in his hands.

There are no longer eels in Radium, which in modern times dries up during the summer. Much of Bobby’s old neighborhood was devastated by last January’s tornado. Many houses were destroyed, his former home damaged. Riparian wetlands where Bobby and I hunted squirrels were demolished as well, great live oaks sucked up by the roots, longleaf pines twisted and splintered, strewn akimbo like fiddlesticks. I have to re-create much of our childhood geography as I recall our adolescent adventures. It’s as if the setting of our boyhood has vanished with the eels. I find solace only in that our childhood venue was destroyed by natural forces and not by bulldozers.

T

he next morning my sister and I drive Betsy the quarter mile down the road to Radium Springs, the largest spring in Georgia and the heart of our childhood geography. From Bobby’s house on the Radium golf course or my house on the river, you could hear the bass thump of dancehall music from a jukebox. When a formal ball was held in the grand casino, the live music wafted up the river and across the links until late at night. The grand casino, a white antebellum colossus, was destroyed by flood, then fire. Swimming in the springs is forbidden now, which in my mind is a sin. The water is surrounded by a metal fence of thick wire cables to protect folks from themselves. This was the nucleus of our childhood, where we went at least once a day

all summer, the major setting of our youth and the best years of our lives. Now the springs are closed on Monday, the gates locked. Sneaking in from the creek, we have the old resort to ourselves. All my life I’ve known how to sneak into Radium Springs.

We sit on the wall over the boil, the deep blue crater with a cave that is the artesian source of the swimming area and the creek. The water today is as uncharacteristically clear as it was in our childhood although the rest of the lake is choked by hydrilla.

I’ve discovered there’s no joy greater than giving an old friend’s daughter a new glimpse of her father. I go to wishing I had some words, some wisdom to pass on, but I realize I got old without becoming wise.

As a teenager, Bobby worked in the locker room and concession stand, the perfect summer job because all the high school kids came there to swim, sunbathe, and dance. Bobby got paid to be where he’d have been anyway, and for that reason he wasn’t paid much. During our childhood the water boiled from its underground source at a thousand gallons a second. The flow has diminished in modern times, sometimes desiccating to a murky sump that doesn’t produce enough water to feed the creek. As adolescents, we dived the 30 feet to the sandy bottom, finding lost coins, mastodon teeth, and Native American artifacts. It was a rite of passage to dive to the bottom of the boil, bringing up a fistful of white sand as proof. In the heat of summer nights before air-conditioning, we dived into the boil, cooled down enough to sleep. On New Year’s Day, on double-dog dares, we dived into the 68-degree constant temperature of the spring water, which felt warm until we climbed the mossy steps into the chilly ambient air. Bobby could accomplish a full gainer off the high dive into the boil.

Our first brush with mortality occurred at the springs when a navy frogman recovered the body of a lost scuba diver from the underwater cave. He described great caverns and many rooms deep inside the bowels of Radium Cave. Years later, when I was

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18, I was called on to recover the corpse of another diver. The body was covered with eels, so I know there were still eels in Radium in 1960. Those eels and that body remain burned into my memory, illuminated against the pitch dark of Radium Cave.

Now, gazing into the deep blue water, I’m overcome by synchronistic nostalgia. Some craving, some senior moment, some urgent thirst for baptism and rebirth, or maybe just the proximity of a beautiful woman, moves me to strip down to my boxers, climb over the restraining fence, swinging a spindly leg over the no swimming sign. Maybe I seek some spiritual salvation where others have died. I attempt a swan dive, pointing my toes, but my legs splay and flop at the knees. I’m suddenly enveloped in the marrow-chilling shock of the exquisite and transcendent cold. To say the water temperature is 68 degrees is to miss the point. In the heat of summer, Radium Springs is icy cold.

The frigid water, reputed to have healing properties, has focused me, swept the geriatric cobwebs from my brain, slapped me back to the 1950s. I swim toward the dark, ultramarine blue of the cave.

When the pressure hurts my ears, I ascend in a galaxy of fizzing bubbles and climb the mossy steps a younger man. Betsy and Sister avert their eyes as I shiver back into my trousers. Then Betsy pours a milky cloud of ashes into the boil. Bluegills rise to it. One sucks in a fragment, spits it back out.

A great blue heron lights on the lime-spattered concrete platform, where girls in bright bathing suits used to bask in the summer sun. Beneath the platform, Bobby, Marvin, and I speared fish in the gothic shadows and otherworldly gloom.

M

oan,” says Bobby through his snorkel. We follow him under the fossil rock arches into the partial dark beneath the platform. In the noonday twilight, our suntanned bodies are sallow as cadavers. Bobby carries a homemade Hawaiian sling, a joint of bamboo with an inner tube rubber band attached. It works like a slingshot with a tube instead of a Y, but unlike a slingshot, we’ll have to be careful not to pull the rubber back too far. For spears we’ve hammered flat the tips of coat hanger wires and rubbed them to a point on the concrete steps.

Our snorkels drag tendrils of scratchy hydrilla that floats in patches beneath the platform. A dead musk turtle with a sardonic smile bobs in the scum. As a rule, we miss the fish we shoot at, our spears trailing tiny tracer bubbles behind our darting prey, but once in a while we

impale a bream, the coat hanger wire hanging from its side like a bandolier. Then the three of us, in mask, snorkel, and swim fins, try to chase it down. Sometimes a stricken fish swims in circles and we capture it. More often our quarries shrug off our harpoons and get away.

“Hot tomato nose!” he squeaks. “Hot tomato nose!” It’s a whopper, fanning the bottom, thick lips sucking detritus, barbels twitching. Wow, we’ve never shot a fish this big. Bobby stalks within range. The carp ignores him.

It moves along, resting again on the bottom in a golden

Nothing fights like a three-foot eel on a bamboo pole. Bobby brings it up thrashing, slinging moonlight, but the eel wiggles free before he can boat it.

“Son of a biscuit eater,” declares Bobby. “Got dog!” Bobby is learning to cuss. ray of light. Bobby gets set. He loads the sling, inserts the wire harpoon into the bamboo barrel, seats the butt of the spear into the crotch of the sling. He knows he’ll have to pull the rubber way back to penetrate the carp’s thick scales. We watch him aim, drawing the rubber back farther than he’s ever drawn it before. It vibrates, the point of the harpoon overriding the breach, falling into the palm of his extended hand. In this penultimate moment, Marvin and I see what’s fixing to happen. We bleat warnings through our snorkels. “Nu, nu!” Bobby lets fly, and to our adolescent horror, the spear enters the heel of his hand beside the ball of his thumb, running beneath the lifeline, tunneling under the tough hide of his palm, stopping halfway through, half in and half out.

Bobby’s eyes widen to fill his face mask. “Arhoo!” he trumpets. We splash through the stone arch back into the full sunlight, meeting at the platform steps, ripping off our face masks. Bobby’s palms are squeezed together between his knees, a gesture of an inverted prayer. “Got dog!” At first he doesn’t want to show us, doesn’t want to look, but Marvin and I insist. Bobby pulls the black wire all the way through. “Hot tomato nose!” he squeaks.

“Hot tomato nose!” we echo sympathetically. We can’t seek first aid from the lifeguard without revealing we’ve Continued on page 90

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Bird Dog Flushing grouse, as in childhood, with that same twist in the gut but grayer.

by Erin Block

A DRUMMER, BY COLE JOHNSON

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I

am 10 years old, walking railroad tracks, flushing game, and glassing for tie-spikes and rocks that look like something special. Geodes. Unusual but not too pretty, those are the good ones, that’s my theory. Probably because that’s me. The odd, dull, dumpy ones have crystals inside; that’s what I tell my sister and friends as they look at the ground, too, cohorts in this ancient sport of flushing truth from bushes.

Displaying an early talent for smuggling, I put the rocks in my backpack, saved to crack open in the driveway at home with my dad’s good hammer, dissecting quartz, basalt, and peridotite, hoping for that rush of something unexpected even though they’re mostly solid and all the same. Stop that, my dad will say, handing me an old ball-peen of my grandfather’s, moving me to the walkway in the backyard that’s made of headstones, already cracked. Or misspelled, mis-ordered, misdone. It’s like a baker bringing home day-olds. His profession is cemeteries, you see, end-of-life care, but he doesn’t dig the graves. I always have to explain that.

Does the mailman write the letters?

For lack of a Brittany spaniel, my best friend’s dad, Bill, has gathered us neighborhood kids to birddog for him, flushing rabbits, bobwhites, and pheasants if we’re lucky.

When the redtail swoops off his gloved hand and disappears into brush, it’s beautiful and grand; the silence her wings cut through the air is like looking at a airplane from thousands of feet below. Seen but not heard, what your grandfather praised you for.

And when she reappears bloodied with a rabbit in her beak, we kids are too preoccupied with putting pennies on railroad ties to notice. Here comes an engine. Quickly now. Bill slips the rabbit in his vest and the hawk returns to his hand, slurping a thread of hide like spaghetti.

Midwest hardwoods canopy overhead, blocking

light like clouds. They sway and dapple the ground like an Appaloosa’s hindquarters as we rush thickets. A whitetail snorts and stomps its feet. Hustle, Bill says, hustle. Same thing he says coaching T‑ball games as I run too slowly around bases. Out! Soon I’ll realize I won’t be able to play the game anymore, not as I have been, anyway. That we’ll all be separated, boys and girls, girls and boys.

But now we’re just bird dogs, just kids for a while longer—flat- hested and skinny-legged, dirt smears and scratches on my face. What’s a tomboy to do when she grows up? That’s what I start to wonder. A cottontail breaks and the redtail dives. I hear the bells fastened to her legs start and stop in uneven measures like a tambourine player who’s lost the beat.

Now I am thirty-two, leading a man up a highcountry valley where I’ve seen dusky grouse—blue they were once called—where I told him we’ll find a covey. They’re here, I say, I promise. Which I know I shouldn’t do. Animals, hearts, weather—you can’t guarantee or trust them. But I know how to make an educated guess, which is better, I’ve learned, than prayer. For with eyes closed, it’s impossible to see unless you’re following close enough to be tripped.

Here in the field those who know their history are bound to repeat it, which is a good thing in this instance, not a warning. And I’ve studied the trails and topography, put in miles and days, bushwhacking steep passes to unending valleys that move like the sound of a bass drum, large ripples with high

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F domed peaks quieting toward the horizon. I don’t need a map or GPS anymore but carry one with me, logging coordinates where I’ve flushed grouse throughout the season. And now at its end I need to find them again, like a squirrel who’s cached pinecones for winter. Now I want to eat, to suck marrow from the season’s bones and then CrockPot the carcass to milk a bit more.

But things have changed, like going back to a childhood home and walking those Midwest hardwoods as a grown woman, even though I still might smash a penny or two. After three months of drought, the ground looks like winter lips, parched and peeling at lines where the skin bunches at rest, when not smiling or cursing or biting to keep

and half smile on my face. Still that twist in my gut, waiting for a flush for the noise from stillness that startles even when you expect it, just like thunder.

For the adrenaline that spills like wine, in blood and heat and beating heart.

The forest is silent. In an old Western fli k, we’d be moments away from being ambushed by the Bad Guys, always with handlebar mustaches.

I stop to check huckleberry ground cover and currant bushes that ring pines like gilded Christmastime tree skirts. I know proven patches where I’ve picked quarts a day—but this year there’s nothing.

Hours pass and I continue checking for berries, lifting branches with the back of my hand like a scold.

I smell it first thing, berries baking on a southern

I told him we’ll find a covey. They’re here, I say, I promise. Which I know I shouldn’t do. Animals, hearts, weather—you can’t guarantee or trust them. something in. Each afternoon the clouds build but are barren, save for lifeless threats and dry lightning.

The regular blooms of porcini mushrooms are absent and huckleberries mummified on-vine. But grouse are still eating somewhere. Find the berries, find the birds. That’s what I say, my educated guess.

And again for lack of spaniel or setter or neighborhood kids, I’m finding and flushing game. Hustle, I mutter, looking back at my partner following, trusting me to pick our way through the wilderness.

I quicken the pace—hustle—and remember childhood sports when things changed, when there was softball for girls and baseball for boys and when I quit playing those games. When friends feared cooties or being teased for having a girlfriend—one word now, not two. It made all the difference. Yet here I am, bird-dogging again with a man following and depending on me, bursting through forest and field expected to know where I am and why it matters. I guess this is what a tomboy does when she grows up, leads the way up a mountain. Not so flat- hested, skinny-legged, or naïve; my hair, graying a little, in one braid instead of two running down my back. But still the same dirt and scratches

slope. Clark’s nutcrackers and black-capped chickadees flo k and feast. Grouse must feed here too.

With sign we’ve gone high enough, we split and walk parallel through fermenting meadows and pine stands. It makes me want to eat the air.

Jim Harrison wrote he often missed shots at grouse because he was thinking, and indeed, that’s when they have a knack for breaking cover. Grocery list, work schedule, sending a birthday card to my sister. Two flush and fly and we miss. Nose down we move up-mountain, through dry streambeds and over time-felled lodgepoles, walking as quietly as we can over dry and decaying earth. Did you see them land? my partner asks. I shake my head. He does too. Minutes pass like hours and then days, and at my left they flush again, downhill, losing elevation and gaining ground over pines that grow into blue like a chapel ceiling, but I don’t hope or pray or offer anything unwise. I know it would be foolish to follow: I’m not that good a bird dog. n Erin Block lives in the mountains of Colorado and is a librarian and freelance writer. She is the author of two books, The View from Coal Creek and By a Thread.

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Earning It! Photography by Nick Trehearne

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ost hunters of black bears in British Columbia ride the logging roads and look for bruins that won’t require a lot of work.

What’s the sport in taking the easy way? Hiking in, covering the mountains and valleys and surrounded by dark forest that yields only little sign of humans and lots of sign for bears . . . That’s earning it!

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our miles in and four miles out—and then again—with the carcass and quarters of a big bear. No machines to make it easy. It’s bloody, dirty work, but that’s earning it! Just what you’d expect of a man who hunts bears with a bow.

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For more information, see page 84

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SP KY ISH F

Haunted by big fish.

by C. R. Beideman

DESERT GOLD, BY JOSH UDESEN

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I

n muddy water trout look like shadows. In clear water they look like ghosts. But even then, there’s no such thing as a spooky fish At least, there wasn’t until 1926, when the definiti n somehow expanded to include its own negation: “Spooky (adj.)

1854, ‘frightening;’ 1926, ‘easily frightened.’” That’s according to etymonline.com. With these definiti ns a person could say, “I’m spooky about spooky situations,” which sounds ridiculous.

For me, a wary fish may be easily spooked, but a spooky fish bel ngs in Jaws.

Speaking of Jaws, remember when Chief Brody scoops the chum and Quint says, “Hooper drives the boat, Chief,” and suddenly Jaws rises from right under Brody’s feet, who slowly steps back with his cigarette tight in his lips and says, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” That spooked the hell out of me as a kid, but I was thrilled that Dad let me watch it.

Later, learning to fly fish in Montana, I wondered if it was possible to get an angry strike from that close. It is. During runoff, browns will eat streamers fished tight to the muddy bank. This discovery worked so well that when salmonfly season arrived, I continued streamer fishing by weaving among tourists who planted themselves out past the fish I wanted. It must have been Fourth of July weekend because family vacation freedom was in the air; in the lot, RV generators hummed patriotically, and the timeshare porches smelled like charcoal and victory.

But I was alone.

Divorced.

Custody pending.

I unhooked my Freud-sized streamer from the rod and smashed it down between the bank and a river rock. A toothy brown slithered out in front of my fly and attacked so fast it spooked me and I failed to set. In my head, Quint goes, “You got city hands.” The fish swam back to its lie, its tail swishing: still feeding. I caught it with a nymph. Above me on a porch, some vacationers clapped.

I tried to smile.

And moved on . . . casting upstream in front of this rock or this grassy undercut, always on the

move, moving a lot of fish and catching a few, and getting eyeballed by tourists with foam flies I imagined shop clerks stabbing hooks into their customers’ lips. Looking for solitude, I pushed upstream away from the crowd, where I noticed a weathered old man whom I couldn’t seem to leave behind. Like me, he moved fast. Like me, he fishe alone. I waded through a slick section and shook him. A fish wiggled free from my hook. I kneeled and watched it move—still feeding. The spooky old man stood behind me. His sporting goods store waders were cinched with twine. He wore a flopp hat with a circular brim and thick eyeglasses in ’70s frames behind which his dull blue eyes seemed distant. His white neck beard flutte ed in the breeze.

“Stay low when you pass,” I said. “I’m sighting a fish.

But he didn’t want to pass. He wanted to talk. “I like that method,” he said. “No bobber.”

I looked at the fish “Already hooked this one.”

“It’s gonna be down now,” he said, dropping onto a sun-soaked rock.

“We’ll see.”

The old man ate a homemade sandwich while I lost the fish again It smelled like bologna.

“Almost,” he said.

He told me his name, which I forgot, because he also told me they call him Neck Beard.

“All the parts you should shave, I keep,” he said.

And I knew I liked this guy. I later found out he’s something of a legend.

“You’re not fishing salm nflies eithe ,” I said.

“There’s a few around after dark,” he said, looking at the willows, “but they’re on March browns. That’s why they’re taking your nymph—March brown pupa.”

“I haven’t seen any rises,” I said, admiring his intricate fl , clearly his own pattern.

“That doesn’t matter,” Neck Beard said. “I got fi e or six out of this stretch.”

“Small ones?” I said.

“Oh yeah. All over eighteen.”

Then he told me about his home water, the Henrys Fork, and he seemed like a father describing his beloved child to a stranger: “There’s buckets here, but isn’t a flat section of river for fi ty miles.

When you fish the Henrys, when you come around the bend to a slick, time stops. You can leave a dry fly out the e for days.”

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I’d never heard the Madison disparaged by an angler before. My fish was down and I needed to move.

“Sometimes,” he continued as though confessing, “you stare at the water and suddenly it seems to be going backwards. You look up and all the drift boats are gone; you hear sandhill cranes warble in the high grass; and you don’t know what century you’re in, or what eon.”

“How’s the streamer fishing? I asked.

I’ve heard that a broad profile—an acrossstream cast—is the best streamer presentation. But trout eyes are on the side of the head, not in front.

Just something I think about, when I need to think about something else.

I’ve had plenty of snagged logs turn into trout. So I knew I’d hooked a fish, but the fish didn’t panic. That was the spooky part.

Neck Beard moved away upstream ahead of me, and I continued to streamer-beat the water until a strike so overmatched my rod that my elbow hyperextended. If I’d been smoking, the cigarette would have been tight in my lips. The next second the fis was gone. I tied on a nymph with shaking hands. I dropped it in the water, squeezing cork as though it were my ex’s lover’s neck. The bucket was deep and long. Prospect nymphing, I caught three. With each strike, I thought: Is this the one? That’s been holding in my subconscious for a decade? Each hookup was a letdown. I cast until one felt spooky. I’ve had plenty of snagged logs turn into trout, so I knew I’d hooked a fish but the fish didn’t panic. That was the spooky part. It methodically probed upstream and dug under the heavy current. I know you don’t let them do this. You apply pressure and turn the head. But with light tackle, the pressure was on. I didn’t have the courage to risk breaking it off. And after a few seconds, my fly flew back at me.

I dropped the rod. I squatted on my solitary rock, holding my head in my hands, about to explode from the intensity that welled up like a Big Bang but was suddenly called off. No universe, sorry.

I needed that fish Neck Beard came wandering back from upriver.

“How’d you do?” he asked.

I stared at him.

“There’s a trophy brown in this pool. I lost it.

Twice,” I fina ly said.

He opened a beer. It had to be warm. “Let me see you fish that pupa,” he said. “Show me how you fish without a bobbe .”

“I’m resting the hole,” I said, and he sat down next to me, not saying much but handing me a warm beer, which I stuffed away in my pack.

“How’d you do?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said. His gaunt face was serene. He didn’t finish the sentence. Eventually, I got up and began high-sticking. I didn’t catch anything. I didn’t expect to, really, after so much activity in the bucket already. But Neck Beard had gotten me up and fis ing again; it’s hard to make that next cast, because of the thousands it will take to touch another trophy.

Neck Beard watched me awhile, then walked away. In my periphery I saw him casting, moving back downriver. I imagined the tens of thousands of casts he’d made over a lifetime: all connected, none more important than another, because each one contributed to his cast. All superimposed in my mind, his cast looked like a sideways eight, a Möbius strip.

My cast, I realized, was getting sloppy. And it was getting dark.

Scurrying back through the slick rock section under the pines, by headlamp light I spotted a salmonfl . I thought about tying one on and casting my way back to the bridge, but fi eworks captured my attention. The neon light reflected impressionistically off the dark river surface, and I opened the beer. The percussion (the bombs bursting) shook the timeshares while the mountains just stood there in the distance. I heard families celebrating, and I knew my thrilled children were lying out on blankets to watch some other display somewhere else. Neck Beard was gone now. I wondered if he had a wife and kids, and how much it meant to him to be out here alone, fishing and camping, like me. Though I had yet to claim a campsite, I walked slowly back to the bridge, thinking about that spooky fish n C. R. Beideman fishes skis, and writes out of Bozeman, Montana. His writing appears in several journals and anthologies, including: Mid-American Review and This Side of the Divide: Stories of the American West by Baobab Press.

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W

e wait for one of the dogs to strike, all of us leaning toward the fire and away from January cold. Flames rise and sparks fly when somebody tosses on another branch, casting shadows that dance up and into the pine and oak trees on a dark moonless night. After the flames subside, the embers glow.

Gavin Martin, the old man, talks—slow and steady. His voice is like the soft, slow rhythm of water tumbling over rocks. The rest of the Martins stand there, looking at the fire as if they’re deeply troubled or thinking long and hard about something difficult.

Gavin mumbles a story that I have trouble believing.

About how there were no raccoons in Japan and how in World War II there was a plan to set loose a bunch of raccoons just off the shore before U.S. soldiers went aground in the invasion that was planned right at the end of the war. About how they thought the Japanese soldiers

Bounty H Raccoons are smart—at least smart enough to separate the faithful

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d

COONHOUND BEWARE, BY TOM BEECHAM (1926–2000) COURTESY OF REMINGTON ARMS.

l

Hunters dogs from the faithless. by H. William Rice July 2019 · 49

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would run in fear if they saw the raccoons—this never-before-seen animal with big eyes, a black mask, strange humanoid hands—coming off the beach in Japan like soldiers coming out of the water.

But the masked invasion never happened, because Japan surrendered.

When Gavin slows down, we hear the dogs. Running, crashing through the undergrowth between some fallow fields and the banks of the Pea River.

They yip and yelp and whine. We listen for that frantic bark, that plaintive moan that morphs into bawling.

It’s a sound like no other—it’s as if all that matters in the whole damn world is up in that tree and reflects a passionate belief that only they know where to find it.

“So they train ’em,” Gavin Martin mumbles, “train these raccoons up to swim in a follow-the-leader kind a line and plan is, they get a ways off shore, set up out in the water, and send them coons a’swimming in ahead a the soldiers. So they head to Long Island Sound for practice ’fore they head for Japan.”

I imagine a line of raccoons swimming in Long Island Sound, cock an eye to see if one of old Gavin’s kinfolks will give me a look that says, the old man is an inveterate liar. But they stare on into the fire, their faces grave as if this were a wake.

“Your raccoon,” Gavin says, turning his wrinkled face my way, “is one more smart animal. Swims like a otter. Never makes the same mistake. So they put ’em outta the boat, into Long Island Sound, and the coons swim off toward shore and—” Gavin Martin stops midsentence as if his voice were a radio and somebody cut the power.

Eastward toward the river, one of the hounds has begun to sound frantic. Other dog voices echo through the woods.

I take those dog voices apart one by one by one, and I hear the distinctive, high-pitched wail of my young blue tick, Thor.

All eyes go to Gavin.

He nods his head. Everybody moves. We lumber into the darkness in the direction of the howling dogs, toward the river.

It’s almost as if we’re soldiers moving through the woods, and as we get close to the river, they become dark and deep, cavelike—our headlamps seem feeble car lights on a dark, lost highway. After about 10 minutes, everyone is panting, and I see Jack’s headlamp slow down ahead of me.

We stumble into an open place. Under a huge oak tree that shoots rocketlike into the darkness, the dogs try by turns to climb the tree. They collapse in a pile, snarl at one another, then try to climb the tree again. Thor is right in there with the Banshee, Randy’s walker, and Mr. Roosevelt, Jack’s redbone. Thor shows his teeth, throwing himself into the mêlée, and when he can, stretching himself out on the tree trunk with his long snout pointed up as if he’ll die of sheer longing. But for all that, the barks are not close enough together. It’s as if the dogs aren’t sure of the scent.

Jack Martin pulls a portable floodlight out of a camo backpack and hands it to old Gavin. He shines it up the bole of the tree. We see what might be the glint of eyes way, way up. But it’s so high and the night so dark, it’s hard to make out exactly where they are.

“Believe they’s—well, look like—well, maybe three?” Gavin says.

The other Martins—silent until now—have come to life, craning their necks, repositioning themselves, trying to get a better look. Frankie, the fire keeper, shows up.

“Might be a heap a coons up there—maybe.

Anything might happen. But—” Gavin looks up the tree, takes his hat off and hits it against his leg, then looks again. “Damn, it’s hard to see up that high.”

It’s enough for me to be here, so I do as I’m told, say nothing. The Martins are real coon hunters. As long as there has been a Coffee County, Alabama, there has been a Martin hunting coons there. But never, as far as I can tell, has there been a bounty hunt for coons. This is the first. A farmer name of Edgefield has organized it in the early part of the winter—well in advance of spring planting—because raccoons have overrun his property. Eaten his chickens, devoured his corn, infested his hayloft, crept up on his porch to eat cat food.

“They taking over, invading,” he reputedly said. “I won’t have it! I give you five dollars a coon—five cash money for every one a them bastards you bring in.”

Thus, they became bounty hunters. I was invited because my wife’s father knows Gavin. So I, new to coon hunting with an untried dog, became a bounty hunter too.

I load my gun, get ready to shoot as Gavin Martin shines his light and tries to see what’s up there.

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“I don’t know about this,” Jack says. He’s the youngest in the group, somewhere close to my age—a small man with long blond hair tied up in a ponytail and dark, earnest eyes. “Ain’t no fan a shooting somethin’ and leavin’ it wid, wid, wid, well, wid enough life to run off and suffer.”

“That’s the fun part—watching the dogs fight the coon,” Randy croons.

“I can see one of ’em just fine from here,” he says.

“I’ll pop his ass. Hold that damn light still.”

He shoots.

Nothing happens.

“D’you aim at all, Randy boy?” Gavin chides.

Randy utters something profane under his breath.

“Let the new boy try one,” Gavin sings out.

I steady my aim, put the sights right between two of those eyes in the tree, and squeeze the trigger.

This time we hear the shot, then a pop up in the tree. A large raccoon moves into the light, then after a moment of climbing comes tumbling out of the tree, grabs and hangs on a limb breaking his fall, then plummets on down, grabbing at the air.

He lands in the middle of the howling dogs. But he’s not there long. In the glow of Gavin’s light, I see him roll off a dog, land on two back feet, find all four, duck and swerve like a boxer, and then skedaddle underneath and between the dogs on out of the fray as spry as if he’s never been hit. The dogs sprint after him, wailing.

“What we do now?” Randy says.

“Wait,” Gavin says. “Only two things. That ole coon dens up or gets treed.”

Gavin looks after the dogs and the coon. “My bet is he dens up. Hit or not, he’s runnin’ scared.”

All around us we hear dogs running—first, in the direction of the river, then along the fallow fields.

The dogs’ voices pick up a bit and head our way.

We hear them come by us. Then everything goes quiet. We wait some more.

When something skitters through the bushes behind us—some shadowy something, Gavin jumps, shining his light around . Then without whimper or bark, the Banshee and Mr. Roosevelt come bursting through the woods. The skittering creature dashes into the open, climbs the side of the poplar tree behind us. It’s a coon—the coon we wounded or another coon.

We all prepare to shoot.

But as the coon scampers up the side of the tree, something moves over our heads in an oak tree just behind us. I look up and see two coons come down the oak tree and tree-hop to one right beside it, then like circus acrobats, hang on limber limbs, climb and jump into yet another tree, and climb some more.

Both Randy and Frankie shoot. Nothing.

Gavin follows them with his light. One raccoon jumps off a low limb and runs for it. Then the other one comes out of the higher tree branch like a skydiver, hits the ground with a thud, and takes off in another direction. More shots, but those coons are gone.

The two dogs collide, clash, snarl, go round and round chasing one or another of the flying coons.

Then the two dogs take off, bellowing like the end of the world has come.

By now the coon heading up the poplar tree changes his mind, jumps from one of its branches onto an oak branch, hangs for a moment on the arching limb, falls to another stouter limb, then climbs up the bole of the tree with surprising speed and disappears into the tree limbs that connect over us like a canopy. We all three shoot, but he’s moving too fast for us.

In the quiet after coons and dogs roar back into the woods like a tornado, the five of us stand there like stagehands brought along only for transportation, lighting, and sound effects. I sense something missing.

“It’s embarrassin’. You boys wid the guns can’t hit nothin’. Not a damn thing. Not even one. Can’t even shoot,” Gavin Martin growls.

“Gimme that damn rifle,” he bellows, turning around to look at all of us. “I show you no-counts how to shoot.”

“Shut up, Uncle Gavin,” Randy says.

Jack and Frankie are quiet, standing there in the cold and the dark.

“Well, boys, it’s not about money,” Gavin says.

He stands before us like a preacher before a congregation.

“I don’t wanna go back to old Edgefield without a single coon to show after we agreed to bountyhunt for him. After they practically fallin’ out the damn sky on top of us. I don’t know ’bout you, but by golly, I gotta name to defend.”

Then I realize what’s missing.

“Where’s Thor?” I say.

Continued on page 86

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S t e e l Wa t e r s Photography by Adam Tavender

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Over eight days of wilderness survival and angling, you get to know a place—at least in the circumstances of that small window of time. Smoke from distant fires added brighter, more intense red to the sunrises.

Friendly winds often blew the smoke clear of the river and revealed true blue sky. And on the warmer days, glacial melt added emerald hues to the lower Dean.

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July 2019 · 55

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And on occasion, the beauty of fly angling and the wilderness of British Columbia brought great reward—fast and bright and as shiny and strong as polished stainless steel.

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For more information, see page 84.

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GSJ

TRADITIONS

EDITED BY WILL RYAN

A Wise Wise Ol’ Cat Cat On desperate battles with the biggest fish of your life.

by George V. Triplett (Adapted from Tragic Fishing Moments. Edited by Will H. Dilg. Chicago: The Reilly and Lee Company, 1922.)

DUANE RAVER FISH ART

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Judge George V. Triplett of Owensboro, Kentucky, is a Green River fisherman, fisherman, and for all around fishing fishing excellence a Green River fisherman fisherman can’t be beat. Old time Kentuckians in the early days of our country did more to elevate fishing fishing as an art than did any other Americans. They were the first first to develop the modern first to cast direct from the reel. They pioneered reel and the first the way for modern bait-casting. (Will Dilg, ed.)

II

doubt whether any one of us can recall a more genuinely tragic moment than when his first little two-inch shiner wriggled off the hook and dropped back into the bosom of the old horse-pond. But that was in our chrysaloid stage before we had acquired the philosophic spirit in this greatest of all games of chance. Later we discovered that all angling has in it the blessed element of chance. If it were otherwise—quoting Dr. Van Dyke—it would “rob life of one of its principal charms and make fishing too easy to be interesting.” Nevertheless, I have always somehow wished. . . .

It was a long time ago and the retrospect brings up many things a bit alien to our modern sporting annals. For instance, in those days jugging was a gentleman’s sport. This is not a “gone-are-the-days” lamentation—old anglers will know what I mean.

Jugging was a form of fishing popular with our forefathers, like the netting of quails and the baiting of bears. It was a river sport and required plenty of room and patience and muscle. Almost any serene summer afternoon, when the old Ohio was drowsing along as clear and unruffled as the surface of a mirror, the juggers could be seen pulling their boats up towards the bend above town. To their jugs or buoys they would attach short lengths of strong cord, with big hooks,

baited with liver or chunks of fat pork. The jugs would be cast overboard, about one hundred feet or more apart, the boats leisurely following them down the channel. Now and then a jug would disappear or go zigzagging across the river, and then there would be an exciting chase and the possible capture of a big channel cat that might tip the beam at fifty fifty or a hun hundred, or even two hundred pounds.

One day when I was watching one of these strenuous exhibitions I got an idea. Why not go afaf ter one of those big fellows with rod and reel? That was before the big-game sea-anglers had begun to win buttons by conquering giant tunas and tarpons, but I must have had the budding faith of the Order, for that little idea grew and grew until it reached maturity. I became too obsessed by it to wait for a peaceful afternoon, and so an early midsummer morning found me pulling my boat up towards a long, low-water ledge of rocks that jutted out into the river almost to midchannel.

I doubt whether I have ever been able to make much improvement in my outfit—an outfit—an old-time, onepiece, hand-made cane casting rod, light, strong, resilient, and balanced to a hair, a valorous old smoothrunning reel and a coil of sea-grass line, boiled to the fraction of a second in linseed oil and polished until it was almost transparent. That was the outfit with which I went forth to conquer a 200-pound channel cat.

I landed at the outer point of the ledge where the channel ran close in and deep. Baiting my hook with a generous slab of pork, I cast out. The big cork drifted down with the current for about a hundred feet and I awaited results. It was a long wait and the July sun was mounting higher and growing hotter.

With another rig I skittered about for smaller fishes. Then suddenly the big cork disappeared and the reel began to buzz. When the cork bobbed up some fifty feet further away and started to perform queer antics I began to have expectations. Later on they assumed much acuter form. At last I had hooked a big channel cat. I had never caught anything heftier than a bass on that fine sea-grass line, but I had the broad Ohio all around me and the day was still young. It is true my hopes hung by a slender thread, but it was oiled sea-grass and my faith was that of all old-timers. With such a line they would have gone forth cheerfully to battle with a whale.

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I have written elsewhere of the strength, tenacity and resourcefulness of a channel cat. This one was too busy ploughing the sandy bottom of the river or doubling and diving out in the deep water for me to learn whether he was just an ordinary rampageous cat or one of those dynamic veterans that I had seen tow a two-gallon jug at torpedo-boat speed. But at last I saw him. I had worked him around the inner side of the point and as he swung close in I could take his full measure. There is a term in the sportsman’s lexicon called buck ague. If I did not contract a fully developed case of it just then I certainly had violent premonitory symptoms. But I held on to the rod and the sea-grass line held on to the fish Again and again he rushed off to deep water and as often I succeeded in bringing him in. I could see him plainly in these closer rushes and while doubtless he has grown some in my memory since that eventful morning, he seemed to be just about as big as I was, and I realized, then and there, that there was either the making of an angler or a champion channel cat out on the end of that lonesome ledge. I have never seen a big channel cat that knew when to quit. When they lie quiescent and appear to have given up, you had better corral your wits.

You’ll need them. It was so in this case. Off again, on again, gone again.

But of course that sort of thing could not go on all day. In fact probably it didn’t last as long as I now think it did.

Finally I managed to coax my fish into a shallow cove where I could give him the coup de grace.

That is a very good way to put it now. I am willing to extend to this particular cat such assurance of my most distinguished consideration, though I wasn’t thinking in such polite terms then. I had waded out into the water up to my knees and the time seemed to have come for eventualities. The big cat evidently had reached the same conclusion. When I started to maneuver him into a narrow gravelly pocket, once more he broke for deep water. As he rounded a little saw-toothed sliver of Carboniferous sandstone that had lurked out there in the swift currents for a hundred or a thousand years—waiting for that supermoment—the reel suddenly ceased its humming, the sea-grass line sagged in the guides and I saw a short quivering length of it go trailing out towards the channel and then disappear forever! n

F

ishing, like life, is about loss. This catfish story, which originally appeared in Outers’ Recreation magazine in the series My Most Tragic Fishing Moment, capitalized on exactly that sentiment. Anglers such as George Triplett wrote in from around the country to tell the tale of the one that got away. As we all know, losing a big fish is a stunning, then stinging experience. If nothing else, reconstructing the narrative lets you see how the loss actually happened—and as therapy goes, what is intellectually manageable can in time become emotionally so. That’s the theory, anyway.

If the rendition includes a bit of exaggeration—that is only a measure of the psychic pain incurred. In this tale, Triplett was fishing for a 200-pounder, and certainly implies that the one on his line was close to that mark.

The North American record channel cat is just south of 60 pounds; the record blue cat is in 125-pound range.

The pain must have been real.

My Most Tragic Fishing Moment was also a sign of the times, part of a larger cultural reaction to the unfathomable losses of World War I (16 million deaths) and the following influen a pandemic (50 million more).

Maybe borrowing language from real tragedies underscored angling’s ability to put things in perspective.

Whatever the reason, the forum, edited by the influe tial fishing writer Will Dilg, resonated with audiences of the 1920s. Adman, bass-fishing nut, a fie y leftover from the earlier midwestern populism, Dilg helped found the Izaak Walton League and organized his environmental crusade around the smallmouth bass—and the whole damn country was going to hear about it! Dilg was part visionary, part booster—and the idea of involving readers in the magazine fit with his commitment to building an angler community committed to outdoor stewardship (and popper fishing for sma lmouth bass).

The year before the story appeared, Dilg had suffered a real-life tremendous tragedy while fishing on his beloved upper Mississippi River: his four-year-old boy fell off the Dilg houseboat and drowned. Dilg didn’t miss a month of the forum, devoting that year’s Christmas issue to boys and fishing if anything, his passion grew, and in fi e years he went from carnival barker to the country’s most important environmental organizer.

With the support of 100,000 Waltonites, he lobbied the Congress, as well as President Coolidge. But if the slope on the upside was steep, it was even more so on the backside. Dilg slid into a rapid decline, hastened perhaps by

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his own roaring zeal, worsened terribly by throat cancer. He was dead before the decade was out.

As Dilg’s meteoric rise suggests, fishing in the Midwest enjoyed a national salience during this age of the Babbits. And though the basses remained the featured fish catfish proved an important part of the mix, thanks in part to the long history of catfishingin the Mississippi Basin, with such celebrated anglers as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Thanks also in part to the fact that catfish could grow to the size of young stock and seemed, if anything, to benefit from pesky environmental concerns such as unabated pollution or county-sized power dams. They were the fish of industrialism, equal opportunity eaters. Anything alive, or that allegedly had been, made for dinner. The smellier, the better. Darkness and murky waters only made their hunting easier.

How this sightless searching operated in biological terms is captured perfectly in a recent study titled “Tracking Wakes: The Nocturnal Predatory Strategy of Piscivorous Catfish, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers were perplexed by one of the catfish that turned up in their nets: A 20-pound, congenitally blind channel cat, to be specific that was in better condition than sighted cats from the same water. But how does a blind catfish catch a healthy shiner and crayfish (which were among its stomach contents)? Using catfish and guppies in a completely darkened tank, researchers determined that the catfish relied on smell or taste to determine ‘prey wakes’ left by the guppies; digitized tracking showed some of the wakes to be as old 10 seconds. With no sight to cut corners, the catfish followed the wakes like hounds on a trail, eventually sucking in the guppies from behind. The result was a more calorie-efficient capture, since the guppies engaged in no prey avoidance.

Such an approach to feeding made catfish and their smaller Yankee cousins, bullheads, the most obliging of quarry, available to anyone who could wind up and toss a handline, or simply row a boat and drop off a jug. The cats’ lack of discretion didn’t win them many early champions among the sporting elite. As Huck and Tom would testify, catfish were often associated with youth or indolence or both. No one set a trotline to improve his social standing.

Devotees have long shrugged off the disrespect and, in effect, embraced the implied debauchery. Uncle Perk, the venerable store owner in Corey Ford’s famous Field & Stream series, The Lower Forty, offered the classic defense of bullhead (or bullpout or hornpout as they are

called in New England) fishin , which could have been extended to all the family members of Ictaluridae: “Poutin is such a lesser-known sport that there is a serious question whether it’s a sport at all. It more or less falls in the same class with froggin’ or dippin’ except when you go poutin’ you get pout, and froggin’ you get frogs, and dippin’ you get smelt, but all of them you wind up getting wet. Wives generally claim that horn poutin’ is immoral and leads to drinkin’, which is nonsense, of course, because nobody ever goes poutin’ till he’s had three or four drinks already, so it is just as true to say that drinkin’ leads to poutin’.”

The dangers of catfishing can extend beyond the garden-variety dissolution that comes from falling in with a bad crowd. Well-known fly fisher and author (and retired Gray’s Sporting Journal editor) Jim Babb had a harrowing brush with the great beyond when, as a 12-year-old, he sneaked under a no trespassing sign so that he could fish up under the turbines of the local power dam where the big catfish took their chopped-up shad.

As Babb recounts in his book River Music, “a back eddy pulled me off the bank . . . and two other johnboats fi led with no’count low-life river rats had come up behind the boils and looked for me. They had swept back and forth through the wild swirling currents, trying to see where I’d gone, and fina ly old Willard Parks saw something, gunned his johnboat through the boils, reached down into the water with a tuna gaff and hooked me aboard.”

Babb’s descent into industrial-strength catfishing had a good deal to do with wanting to live like a modern-day hero of a Mark Twain novel and hang out with the local river rats; it’s probably a good thing that, unlike Triplett, they had a gaff on board and knew how to use it.

The latter part of the 20th century has brought some refinement in technique and, if anything, even more passion for big cats. Consider our most famous catfis angler of the century—the late Otis “Toad” Smith. One of the most beloved outdoorsmen of his day, Toad coauthored a book (with Doug Stange) called Channel Catfish Fever. Toad was a big man with a bigger grin, and not all that many teeth to interrupt it. His most famous catfish exploit came as a result of heart surgery.

Before the procedure, he arranged to retain possession of the damaged and soon-to-be-removed heart valve, a catfishe man’s version of eminent domain, I suppose. After surgery, he took the piece of his heart home, soaked it in commercial catfish scent (according to one source)—and, Continued on page 85

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GSJ

GRAY’S GEAR & LIFESTYLE

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ew experiences more profoundly impact your wardrobe decisions than a close encounter with a venomous reptile. Whether you’re protecting yourself from Mr. No Shoulders in remote backcountry or simply seeking a bit more peace of mind while fishing your way around a local farm pond, LaCrosse has the perfect solution with its new Snake Country Boots ($180). Flexible Snake Guard fabric rests between a waterproof Dry-Core liner and full-grain leather exterior, providing 360-degree protection while placing a premium on comfort and lightweight durability. Finger holes make for easy pull-on and off, and they’re ready to wear right out of the box—making them an ideal pair of go-to wet-weather boots, even when snakes are out of season. www.lacrossefootwear.com

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age has few rivals when it comes to designing specialty fly rods with a particular purpose in mind, and its new Dart ($700) is no exception. This fast-action, small-water jewel is exactly what you need if fishing for highly selective trout in close quarters is your game. Designed to throw precise loops under low, overhanging branches into pockets of water where wary Appalachian brookies ply their trade, the Dart comes in 0-to-4-weight models at 7 feet 6 inches, plus an even shorter 3-weight model for extremely confined spaces. Highly accurate and stealthy, but with enough backbone to navigate all the obstacles that come with mountain streams and creeks, the Dart is sure to become your rod of choice whenever you need to present tiny flies in tight spots www.sageflyfish.c

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ith summer fina ly upon us, there’s no better time to take advantage of multipurpose garments that help you pack light for quick escapes to the beach, lake, or river.

The new Waylon Shorts ($70) from Flylow are highly versatile and boast a 40+ UPF—perfect for wading streams, swimming, boating, or hanging out around the campfi e. The lace-up waist means you’re not burdened by a belt, while a zippered thigh pocket makes for easy storage of extra leaders, tippet, and fly boxes. Out of the water, they’re dry within minutes while the stretchable polyester–spandex blended fabric guarantees a comfortable fit Behold, the perfect pair of shorts for adventures that are tight on space and low on prep time. www.fl low.com

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hether you’re looking to make a grand firs impression or simply putting the finis ing touches on your fishing cabin, hunting lodge, or dream home, Legacy Forge and Millwork Doors will create a beautifully sculpted, artistic panel of silver, copper, and nickel framed in a variety of exotic woods to help set the tone. This family-owned, Oregonbased art foundry specializes in handcrafted entryways, bar fronts, kitchen islands, and stove backsplashes—all designed to your specifi ations by its team of artists and craftsmen. If you have a one-of-a-kind piece in mind, simply send a picture and it will be created for you. Or choose from a wide assortment of scenes already in stock. Either way, Legacy Forge will walk you through the process of creating a remarkable showpiece that’s sure to spark conversations for years to come. Pricing generally runs between $3,000 and $6,000, but varies according to customization. www.legacyforge.com

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eatherman has been synonymous with EDC multi-tools ever since its founder, Tim Leatherman, set out more than 35 years ago to create a “Boy Scout knife with pliers” in his Oregon garage. Large companies took little interest in the fruits of his labor, so Leatherman used mail-order catalogs to put his products on the map and, ultimately, create an entire new category. Now the new Free collection ($40–$140) take things a step further with first-of-its-kind technology that integrates magnets into the design, thereby making it easier for users to open, handle, and close the device. An internal locking system that clicks when each tool is in place serves to let you know it’s ready to use while reducing wear and tear on implements, making it more durable than its predecessors.

Traditionalists need not fear, as the legendary Wave series will remain in production. But the Free may make you a little more willing to pass your well-worn Wave down to the next generation. www.leatherman.com July 2019 · 65

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ANGLING

Juan &John A fraternity, regardless.

EVENING FLORIDA KEYS, BY GALEN MERCER

by Scott Sadil

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omething’s up. Even from my end of the bar, where I’ve been camped all afternoon, regaining my bearings after a week alone on the water, I recognize right off the tone of the banter— a running dialogue, laced with liquor and loud laughter, between a pair of veteran anglers with strong opinions they feel no need to hide from anyone within earshot.

What is it this time? Soccer? Vegans? The El Chapo trial? Because I’ve aged out of the veteran class, into a league I haven’t yet found a name for, I avoid drama these days by keeping handy a few easy platitudes for these moments, the same ones I pull out when I lose a good fish or blow a tough cast. The concept, cribbed from an old McGuane calf-roping essay, is that there are a billion-plus Chinese who don’t care how my stories turn out. By the same measure, that’s about the weight of my opinions—as well as judgments passed, for all to hear, from the other end of the bar.

But—hold on: Was that just some dig about . . . fly fishing?

This ought to be good.

P

rime time near fabled marlin and wahoo and tuna waters off the Pacific coast of Baja, it’s not as if I expect to hang out in a backstreet hotel bar and hear talk about tight loops, strip sets, and heroic efforts to revive and release trophy fish. And I confess I find it sort of refreshing, these days15, to listen in on gear guys who show up and unashamedly whack their fair share of fish for the cooler—even lots of coolers. I, for one, really do enjoy eating sashimi, quick-seared wahoo steaks, or most wild fish of any kind. Plus, to keep things in perspective, I remind myself what happened the previous fall, when the yellowfin tuna, following a multiyear slump, showed up in unprecedented numbers, so that anyone with an offshore boat and enough cash for fuel could practically count on making the five-fish daily limit—until the commerical trawlers arrived and, in one week, harvested a reported 9,000 tons of tuna.

“After that,” said Bob Hoyt, owner of Mag Bay

Outfitters out of Puerto Adolfo López Mateos, “the bite slowed down.”

Bob’s been making a living in Magdalena Bay for more than two decades. He built and owns the modest in-town hotel and bar where I’m reacquainting myself with fellowship and social etiquette. Plus, he’s got a big shell-encrusted yard full of boats at his house, two dusty blocks away, where I leave my Subaru and trailer whenever I show up and launch Madrina, my little double-ended beach yawl. And this week, like most weeks in fall, he’s hosting a guide and fly angler who have chartered one of his boats and captains to run out of the bay each morning to chase schools of striped marlin.

“British guy last year was ready to book for sixteen straight days,” Bob told me when I asked him by phone what to expect if I arrived with Madrina in fall, a season during which I had never visited Mag Bay before. “Guy said he was determined to finally get his first marlin on a fly. So I asked him: What’s he going to do the second day?”

It’s Bob who ends up introducing me to Juan and John. But not before I’ve heard enough of their lively chatter to grow convinced these are two serious and accomplished gear guys who have just had themselves another banner day, including snook over 40 pounds and a grouper that filled the width of the transom of their twin-engine Grady-White.

And, if I’ve heard right, they think the marlin fly game, or any other sort of big game fly fishing, is a joke.

Bob leads the bigger of the two my way.

“He . . . is a fly fisherman,” Bob says, pointing at me while stepping aside so that John, tall and broad as a linebacker, can get a good look. “He even writes books about it.”

John waves his buddy—Captain Juan from San Quintín—down to our end of the bar.

“Enlighten us,” says John.

B

ut I refuse to bite.

Because I get it. I just do. Is there any serious

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angler anywhere who isn’t moved—who isn’t deeply moved—by big fish? What Juan and John can’t understand is why anyone would want to catch, at best, the small ones.

I’ve heard Trey Combs talk about marlin you raise to the fly that could spawn twice and still not realize they’re hooked. And if you want to talk about a joke, a serious joke, watch somebody try fighting a 50-pound yellowfin tuna with, even, say, a 14-weight—and then imagine what might happen in waters where these same fish top 100, 150 pounds. And more.

Plus, we know the drill when fly fishing for marlin. It’s especially exciting for the guide, who, wielding a hookless lure on conventional gear, teases a fish to the surface, drawing strikes and increasingly frenzied rushes as the energized marlin slashes its way closer and closer to the speeding boat. Finally, in a gonzo, cops-and-robbers moment, the guide hollers at the captain to throw the boat into neutral—at which point, following some rule of sportsmanship or hierocracy or I don’t know what, the fly angler makes a 28-foot cast, all the distance he or she can manage with a fly that looks like a cross between a feather duster and a bath toy.

Don’t get me wrong; I know fun when I see it.

And, because I don’t want to thoroughly disappoint Juan and John, I let on that, yes, I’ve dealt with a marlin, a chance encounter while panga fishing near Isla Cerralvo in the Sea of Cortez.

“It was just there, lying on the surface,” I say.

“Juan Carlos, my captain, pointed it out. I put my fly near it. It ate it.”

Juan and John glance at each other and grin.

“I turned to Juan Carlos and said, ‘Okay, now what?’”

Juan looks down at his bowl-sized margarita.

“How big?”

“Small. About the same size I am. Hour, hour and a half later, I had it up to the boat, to the point that I took off my gloves and gave them to Juan Carlos and asked him to grab the leader. If he got hold of the bill, I told him, we might be able to get a picture.”

I look around for José, the young bartender, to see about more coffee.

“And?” says John.

I shrug, take a sip from my cup of lukewarm dregs.

“Probably needed another hour or two. It was

just swimming along below the gunwale, maybe even resting, while we motored off toward the horizon” Captain Juan lights another cigarette; he fusses with the bill of a grimy ball cap.

“Still counts, doesn’t it?”

It occurs to me he’s had some experience with fly fishing charters along the way.

“Counts for what?” I ask. “To whom?”

O

utside, daylight fades. Neon glare sparkles on the black concrete bar, polished to the sheen of high-end granite. José turns on the flat screen hung high on the wall above the bottles. Soccer; no sound, thank you. Rather than share my old stories, I’m much more interested in hearing about what Juan and John do, things that can’t be done with a fly rod. Like that transom-long grouper I heard mentioned. What about that?

While John swipes through his phone, I’m quick to understand I’ve never met two guys keener to grapple with big grouper. Broomtails. Leopards. Goldens.

If 80-pound test isn’t enough, switch to 100. Either that or the fish takes line and game over, you’re buried in the rocks, a hole in the reef. Often they first troll for bonito or maybe small skipjack tuna—fish I’m happy to wrestle with, and sometimes barely beat, with the brunt of a 10-weight. Then, with one guy pinning the fish, they truss it as live bait in a sophisticated bridle— with hooks hidden at both ends.

Maybe I really am getting old; I can’t seem to get enough of stories like these, ones that transport me to fishing I’ll probably never experience before I’m gone, crated off into the unknown.

Then again, how can you not be intrigued by whatever sort of fish you might move with live bait the size of a hunk of cordwood?

A

nd here’s another thing,” says John after demanding I switch from coffee to at least one friendly margarita, the likes of which he and Juan have been wading through since they arrived from the water. I let him buy. By the end of the first half of the soccer match, I know it’s John who owns the offshore Grady-White on the trailer alongside the bright pickup in the hotel parking lot—and that he also Continued on page 88 July 2019 · 69

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SHOOTING

GSJ

Cross-Training

TERRY WIELAND

It works for athletes.

It also works for shooters.

by Terry Wieland

Nothing teaches trigger control like shooting a smooth double-action revolver, and this skill can then be applied to rifles and shotguns.

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I

n September 1986, on the Delay River in Northern Quebec, I made one of the luckiest shots of my life.

We were in a canoe and spotted a number of caribou swimming across, upstream from us. They reached the shore and disappeared into the alders.

I jumped out and plunged into the bush, hoping to cut them off. Suddenly, a bull appeared over the foliage, climbing a bank. Its antlers spread from one horizon to the other, or so it seemed. I tossed the rifl to my shoulder, pulled the trigger, and dropped the bull where it stood with a shot that broke its neck.

That caribou, my first was about 75 yards away, and since it was climbing away from me, the neck was all I had to shoot at. If I had had more time to think about the shot, I would probably have missed, since I was nervous and out of breath, and offhand rifle shooting has never been my long suit. What saved me, I am convinced after long years of brooding, was the fact that for that past summer I’d been shooting four or fi e rounds of trap every week.

When that bull appeared out of nowhere, it was as if I’d been surprised by a clay pigeon, and I reacted with a trapshooter’s instinct—pulling the trigger the instant the sight picture looked right.

As a very broad, very general rule, it’s better in almost every shooting situation to shoot quickly rather than slowly. From trap to skeet to Schützen matches at 220 yards, it’s never a good idea to ride the target for too long. Raising your rifl , holding it steady, getting out of breath and wobbly, lowering the rifle and sta ting over is death in a long match.

Harry Pope always advised beginners to learn to shoot quickly, pull the trigger the moment the sight picture looked right, and depend on the law of averages to plant a sufficient number of bullets in the 10-ring. Another famous offhand shooter from the same era said that taking too long, and then lowering the rifle to start over, tired you out and accomplished nothing. What’s more, it was a bad habit that only got worse.

Shooting from a bench, which most of us do most of the time when preparing a hunting rifl for a trip, has the insidious effect of encouraging you never to pull the trigger until the sight picture

is exactly right. There is no doubt that you should try to be exact, especially on a long shot, but such practice can backfi e. It makes you shoot slowly and deliberately, which is fin , but becomes a liability if it makes you shoot too slowly.

Another bad habit it encourages is opening the bolt carefully to extract the empty case, rather than working it smartly and flinging the case far and wide, as you should do when big game hunting. Early on, I did exactly that while hunting Cape buffalo in Africa, much to the consternation of the professional hunter. I now try to combat that tendency by forcing—forcing—myself to work the bolt and fling the brass every time, in every shooting situation, whether I’m sighting in a rifle or shooting p airie dogs.

The gradual slowing down of my shooting generally is something else again. I always do better at trap and skeet when I shoot quickly. In Quebec in 1986, I had done a lot of trapshooting, so that sped up my rifle shooting; conversely, however, if I do a lot of rifl shooting, I find that my pace when I go to shoot trap has been slowed down signifi antly. Counteracting this requires a conscious effort.

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ith any gun, trigger control is an essential element, and no discipline requires better trigger control than bull’s-eye handgun shooting. This is the old-fashioned (and now largely ignored) competition where you stand up, holding the gun in one hand, and shoot at a target 25 or 50 yards away. No crouching, no two-handed isosceles or Weaver-stance stuff—one hand, standing upright, arm straight out.

At most shooting ranges, this has fallen completely out of favor, with the majority of handgunners now gripping the gun in both hands and spraying shots at targets 10 or 15 yards away. Going back to the old ways and practicing with a handgun bull’s-eye style has two benefits One, if you then revert to two-handed, July 2019 · 71

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it seems almost ridiculously easy. Two, it teaches a consciousness of trigger control and sight picture that can readily be applied in rifle shooting, whether at targets or live game, with either a scope or open sights.

Logic would tell you that if you want to become a better offhand shot with a hunting rifle, the way to do that would be to practice offhand. It’s impossible to argue with that. There are, however, a couple of drawbacks. One is that if you are shooting a big blaster like the .300 Weatherby I was carrying in Quebec in 1986, the noise and recoil make any prolonged practice rather unpleasant. It can also induce or aggravate a flinch.

But I believe the overall effect of shooting a wide variety of guns, from black powder single shots to semiauto pistols, has been a benefit, making me feel at home with almost any firearm, under most conditions.

Shooting trap, on the other hand, is fun and can impart some of the same good habits without the travail. As well, since clay pigeons disappear with alarming speed, it forces you to react to the unexpected and shoot quickly every time. It is to offhand shooting with a big game rifle what practicing scales on a piano is to playing Rachmaninoff.

Still, actual offhand practice with a rifle is invaluable. It’s a good idea, however, to do most of it with a rifle that is comfortable to shoot. In the case of something like a .458 Lott, you can load some light practice ammunition that allows you to burn 35 or 40 rounds in a session, and have fun doing it.

Then, as departure day approaches, you work in a few shots each session with full-power loads.

Some advocates of practice loads suggest that you never shoot the full-power game load. Then, they argue, when you get to Africa and center your reticle on a Cape buffalo, you won’t be conscious of the recoil anyway. I look at that suggestion a little askance. It ignores the vital necessity of doublechecking your sighting with full loads, before you leave for Africa, as well as checking it under the cold eye of your professional when you get there. As well, practice with full-power loads lets you know

ahead of time if the recoil is going to cause any problem with the functioning of the rifle itself— and that is by no means a far-fetched concern.

As you can see, there can be tangible benefits from cross-training among shooting disciplines, but there can also be negative effects, such as a flinch developed in practicing with your elephant gun then carrying over to the trap field when you’re in a shoot-off for ten grand. Because of this, many ultra-serious competitors in sports such as trap or high-level bull’s-eye pistol, refuse to shoot any other firearm under any conditions. In fact, years ago, the coach of the all-England skeet team forbade his team members even to pick up another gun, of any description, for any reason. He wanted all their muscle memory to be focused on their competition skeet gun, with no vestigial residual memories popping up at an inopportune moment to spoil a shot.

As someone who loves to shoot all kinds of guns, under all kinds of conditions, shooting at game from clay pigeons to Cape buffalo, I could never limit myself that way. Perhaps the negative effects of shooting many different guns over the years have made me less proficient with one or two. If I am intending to enter a match of some sort, or go hunting for a particular beast, I go into training some months previous in order to shake off bad habits, reaccustom myself to the gun in question, and generally sharpen up. But I believe the overall effect of shooting a wide variety of guns, from black powder single shots to semiauto pistols, has been a benefit, making me feel at home with almost any firearm, under most conditions.

That comfort imparts confidence, and if anything can combat the combined bugaboos of flinching and buck fever, it is knowing that regardless of what happens, you can handle a gun well enough to deal with it.

I didn’t know any of this in 1986, when I went to Northern Quebec to hunt caribou. I never thought of all that trapshooting as any kind of practice, but that’s what it turned out to be. Which leads me to believe firmly that a lot of practice with even the wrong gun is better than not enough with the right one. n While Wieland credits that long-ago caribou to practice on the trap field, he has also learned that he can reverse it and blame a bad performance on too much of something else. To paraphrase Cecil Rhodes, “so many guns, so little time.”

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SADDLING UP FOR THE GRAND NATIONAL. COURTESY OF YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART IN NEW HAVEN, CT. © ESTATE OF SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS

UNDER STARTER’S ORDERS NEW MARKET. COURTESY OF THENATIONAL SPORTING LIBRARY & MUSEUM, MIDDLEBURG, VA. © ESTATE OF SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS

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ART

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A. J. Munnings Equestrian Artist The miller’s son who became

Sir Alfred James Munnings, KVCO, PRA. by Brooke Chilvers

T

he flatlands fens, and turbulent skies of East Anglia, especially the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, have been called the nursery of British landscape art. And no wonder. Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), born in Sudbury on the Suffolk–Essex border, painted portraits for a living but preferred depicting his native countryside in works such as View in Suffolk. John Constable (1776–1837), born 16 miles upriver in a village on the River Stour, is most famous for The Hay Wain, which epitomized a vanishing way of life in a region today dubbed “Constable Country.”

One hundred years later, Alfred Munnings (1878– 1959), born in Mendham on the Suffolk–Norfolk border, used impressionistic brushwork to paint traditional British subjects, including horse fairs and Gypsy encampments. He then topped his career with an outpouring of airy, color-drenched sporting-art canvases of throbbing Thoroughbred racing meets.

A lifetime of commissions for his equestrian portraits from the most aristocratic or wealthy

families from England and America contributed to Munnings’s fortune and fame. His clients included William Waldorf, 2nd Viscount Astor, Robert and Anthony de Rothschild, the 9th Duke of Marlborough and his son Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill, King George V and Queen Mary, and the Duke of Wales (Edward VIII). His last commission was of Queen Elizabeth with her champion racehorse, Aureole, at the 1953 Epsom Derby. During his single six-month whirlwind American tour, in 1924, he painted the horsey Phipps, Tuckerman, Whitney, Brady, and Prince families.

By 1919, AJ, as he was called, could afford the Georgian “house of my dreams,” Castle House, in Dedham, with its 40 acres of meadows, gnarled oak trees, and glimpses of the Stour. In 1944, this second of four sons of a successful grain miller was appointed Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO), and elected president of the Royal Academy (PRA).

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and war and included cart and draught horses, Hackneys, pit ponies, Thoroughbreds, quarter horses, chargers, and the Cleveland Bays that pull carriages in royal processions, a breed nearly extinct today. AJ’s earliest memories are of the sounds of wagons drawn by shires for unloading at Mendham Mill and the “jingle of the silver-mounted harness” of the spirited gray mare his father drove. He described Merrylegs, the black-maned toy pony with a bobbing head his father gave the four-year-old scribbler, and how he flattened out used envelopes for AJ to draw jousting knights and highwaymen.

By eight years old, he was taking twice-weekly art classes with the parish vicar’s daughter.

An idyllic childhood and spotty education came to an end at age 14, when his father apprenticed him as a commercial artist, for six years of 10-hour workdays, to Norwich lithographers Page Brothers & Co. Munnings churned out snappy narrative compositions for advertising illustrations for Colman’s Mustard and chocolate and biscuit manufacturer A. J. Caley & Son. He developed his rich sense of color and a strong and confident hand f om mistake-intolerant etching.

For further enrichment, Caley’s director, John Shaw Tomkins, took Munnings abroad to Munich, where the young artist saw the impressionistic brushstroke and play of light in Heinrich von Zügel’s (1850–1941) farm animals. In Paris, where he returned several times between 1902 and 1903 to study at the Académie Julian, he ingested Monet, Degas, and the naturalism of Bastien-Lepage’s (1848–1884) agricultural scenes.

During his apprenticeship, Munnings spent evenings at the Norwich School of Painters with mostly working-class landscape artists who were influenced by Dutch Golden Age masters such as Ruisdael and painted outdoors directly from nature.

In the studio, working from plaster casts, especially one of a horse’s head from the Parthenon, “my eyes were opened to all the never-ending wonders of perspective and light and shade,” Munnings wrote in his lively three-volume autography, An Artist’s Life, The Second Burst, and The Finish, published between 1950 and 1952.

Like his father, who read the Sunday lesson at church and gave “penny readings” in the local hall, AJ was a perpetual show-off and life of the party, often performing his rowdy poems at table, especially

his famous hunting ballad, “The Tale of Anthony Bell.” Also like his father, he drank too much—a favorite recipe called for rum, brandy, sherry, lemon, sugar, and cloves—which exacerbated his volatile temper, foul mouth, and crippling gout. Although utterly charming (except perhaps to his first wife, the artist Florence Carter-Wood (1888–1914), who attempted suicide on their honeymoon and succeeded with cyanide two years later), AJ also inherited his mother’s melancholia. In a letter, she wrote: “He seems happy, at least as happy as it is possible for him to be—he really very seldom seems quite satisfied or happ .”

AJ’s art career nearly ended in 1898, when he was blinded in one eye while handing a puppy over a hedge and a rebounding thorn pierced and then infected it. The injury affected his depth perception and the ability to aim his brush, but stubborn and undaunted, he submitted two paintings, Stranded and Pike-fishing in January, to the 1899 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; both were accepted.

For another submission, he was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour.

To satisfy his need to regularly change equestrian models, AJ acquired an Irish gray mare, a skewbald, a dappled gray, a bay mare, and a shaggy chestnut pony, among others. He also bought a Gypsy nag and a bright blue Gypsy caravan outfitted with a flat-be cart to haul his traveling studio during vagabonding summers, hiring a Gypsy boy aptly nicknamed Shrimp to handle his camp and animals. Shrimp, decked out in a black waistcoat and a yellow kerchief at his throat, also served as his indispensable model from 1908 through 1912, riding a white Welsh pony or driving a borrowed herd of horses across a river for Munnings to paint from life.

When World War I broke out, due to his blind eye, AJ was rejected three times as unfit to fight But in 1917, he received a civilian posting as a “scratcher” at a Remount Depot, checking tens of thousands of Canadian horses for mange before shipping them out to the front, a terrible task for a man who felt a life without horses would not be worth living.

Auspiciously, Munnings was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund as an official war artist and attached to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade in France. Close to the front line and under shellfi e, he painted British Major-General J. E. B. “Jack”

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Seely mounted on his famous warhorse, Warrior, in a single sitting. He was then embedded with the Canadian Forestry Corps, whose 13,000 lumberjacks and horse teams cleared land for airfields and milled 750,000 tons of timber for everything from building barracks to fueling steam engines.

Munnings’s defining year came in 1919,when among the 350 paintings by 70 artists at the Canadian War Records Exhibition at the Royal Academy, 45 were by Munnings, including Seely’s portrait. It galvanized Princess Alice, wife of the Queen’s brother, to commission him to paint her husband, Major-General the Earl of Athlone, in uniform on his charger at Windsor Castle. In addition, the success of his 41-painting exhibition Pictures of the Belvoir Hunt and Other Scenes of English Country Life made him a man of property with the purchase of Castle House.

Feeling flush he bought a first- lass train ticket to his first racing meet, at Bungay in Suffolk, marking the dawn of his perennial passion for the kaleidoscopic hubbub of Gypsies and winner’s circle spectators, carousels, shooting ranges, and the brilliantly colored silks of the mounted jockeys. He also painted his first portrait of Thoroughbred, 1919 Grand National winner Poethlyn. Years later, he wrote, “I am looking at the scene, the old, old scene—a centuries old scene. Horses come up the course looking like those of years ago. . . . Bright colors in the sun just the same as of yore. . . . What a sight for the artist! with the long shadows and the lights on the boots, lights on the horses. . . . This is the best picture I have ever seen. . . .”

Preferring the jostling setting of race “starts” to flash-by finishes Munnings could watch three or four races a day, without ever placing a bet. The Jockey Club at Newmarket Racecourse even converted an old rubbing barn right on the track into a studio for him to work from.

He often worked in watercolor in the field then translated the piece into oil in the studio, using his own horses and lent props as models. Sometimes the process was opposite, going from oils to watercolors.

Commissioned “potboilers” paid for Munnings’s increasingly worldly life, including 34 horses to ride, to hunt with, and to paint. His second wife, Violet McBride, the daughter of a society riding instructor, handled the family finances and kept him

on point. Yet AJ suffered real artistic conflict for whatever the benefits and pleasures of long stays in stately homes, he preferred to paint a landscape sitting alongside a river or to linger drinking with his Gypsy models.

Munnings found watercolors easier to work with than oils but slowly abandoned them after 1924.

He would work alternately on two oils of the same painting, the smaller one summarizing the overall atmosphere, and the larger one with all the details.

Using a paint-laden brush, his loose, split-second strokes created texture, a sense of muscle and movement, and light- and shadow-play on the reflecte surfaces. A splash of green on a chestnut hide created highlights. He spent no more than three days on a painting, including two or three sittings with the rider and two with the horse.

Interestingly, rather than making it all up in his mind, Munnings could really only paint what he observed directly. “He lacked the mental power to recall everything—so every detail had to be there for him to copy,” as one critic described it. Shrimp re-stirred river waters to re-create eddying refle tions; Violet pounded her horse to induce the right fla e of its nostrils.

Unfortunately for his place in art history, Munnings ended his fi e-year term as president of the Royal Academy in 1949 with a scandalous, drinkinfused ranting from the banquet table against Modernism, Matisse, and Picasso. Broadcast live by the BBC to thousands, the speech immediately cast him as a reactionary country hack.

Yet Sir Alfred Munnings’s equestrian portraits and racing scenes remain beloved, eternal “best sellers.” The Red Prince Mare sold at Sotheby’s in 2007 for $7,848,000; a dozen more have reached over $2,000,000, establishing records for “sporting art.”

Munnings’s ashes are buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. His memorial plaque, next to Constable’s, reads: o friend, how lovely are the things, the english things, you helped us to perceive. n Brooke Chilvers thanks Martin Chasin of the Friends of British Sporting Art, the American affiliate of the British Sporting Art Trust, for an outstanding 2018 autumn visit to Newmarket, Gainsborough’s House, and the Munnings Art Museum at Castle House. “Please join us at www.friendsofbritishsportart.org,” writes Brooke.

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EATING

Halibut Flat-out delicious.

by Martin Mallet

T

he very notion of an apex predator evokes a particular set of traits. Think of the precision assault of a wolf pack or the explosive sprint of a cheetah, which find their ma ine equivalents in the ingenious hunting tactics of orcas and the blistering runs of tuna. But there are different kinds of predator—less elegant, but equally deadly. The sort exemplified by crocodiles on the one hand and halibut on the other.

You might be tempted to lump flatfis in with other “lowly” bottom feeders. Skittish things, forever hiding or fleein . Certainly, a flounder flittin away in a puff of sand doesn’t exactly scream danger.

It doesn’t help that their body shape is so pitiable.

Indeed, flatfis are an evolutionary oddity. Instead of lying flat on their stomachs, like many other bottom-dwelling fish flatfis lie flat on their sides.

This means that they originally lay with one eye facing the ground. Over millions of years, the other eye migrated to the top of its head, and the result is a distorted, jarringly unhappy-looking monster.

They are reminders that sometimes the thing that works is not necessarily the prettiest.

Whereas a small flatfis doesn’t seem menacing, a large halibut is not to be taken lightly. The halibut is by far the largest member of the flatfis family: an efficient vigorous, and oddly shaped predator that will eat just about anything it can fit into its mouth.

They also have been known to kill unwary fishe men with a wayward flo . Most notorious is the story of 78 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

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Joseph T. Cash, an Alaskan fishe man who found himself bleeding to death with a broken leg, three cracked ribs, and a severed artery after a halibut violently slammed into him. He managed to crawl to his winch and lash himself to it, ensuring his body would not be lost at sea before succumbing to his injuries. The halibut that killed Cash in 1973 was 150 pounds. Consider that the largest halibut ever recorded was nearly 900 pounds.

People wouldn’t risk their lives in pursuit of these fish if they weren’t delicious. And indeed, they are.

Halibut is the most valuable groundfish on both the East and West Coasts, where it is prized for its fi m, meaty white flesh But there is so much more to halibut than just the fi lets. If you’re fishing halibut yourself or buying them whole, you have access to morsels that are much harder to find in fish markets and add another dimension to an already interesting fish

SMOKED HALIBUT CHEEKS TOSTONES RELLENOS The cheeks, which naturally have a lot of fat and connective tissue, take very well to a low-and-slow smoking approach, with the final result being almost like pulled pork. For smoked cheeks, bigger is better—think pork shoulder roast. I used a cheek from a 110-pound halibut for this recipe. Smaller cheeks will also work, though they will require a bit WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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more attention to make sure they don’t dry out. In this recipe, I use the smoked cheeks as a fi ling for tostones rellenos, which are fried and stuffed plantain cups. It’s a good way to share halibut cheeks, which you might normally be tempted to hoard.

You can make the smoked cheeks and sauce ahead, but the tostones should be eaten while still warm.

Smoked halibut cheeks 1 pound halibut cheeks, with skin on 10 percent brine (approximately 6 tablespoons per quart of water), enough to cover the cheeks Brine the cheeks for 30 minutes; then rinse the outside and pat dry. Smoke gently at 180 degrees F, skin side down, for about 2 hours using a mild wood such as alder. When the cheeks are done, the fat and collagen will have rendered and the cheeks will be moist and succulent. Once the cheeks have cooked, wrap them in aluminum foil and let rest for 10 to 15 minutes. Separate the meat from the skin, and shred with two forks. Set aside.

Fish Taco Sauce

This fish taco sauce is from the Soup Addict blog, which occasionally branches out from its namesake. ½ cup sour cream ½ cup mayonnaise juice from ½ lime ½ teaspoon ground cumin 1 teaspoon fine y chopped fresh dill 1 teaspoon fine y chopped fresh oregano ¼ teaspoon chipotle powder ½ teaspoon minced capers 1 jalapeno, seeded and fine y diced 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro salt, to taste To make the sauce, whisk together the sour cream and mayonnaise; then add the lime juice and stir to combine. Stir in the remaining ingredients, and taste for seasoning.

Tostones rellenos

2 green plantains, peeled 3 cups canola oil, for frying

2 teaspoons salt ¾ teaspoon garlic powder a handful cilantro leaves, for garnish To make the tostones, first cut the plantain into approximately 1½-inch segments. Heat the oil to 350 degrees F, and deep-fry the pieces until they are golden but have not yet begun to brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Using either a tostonero (a plantain press) or another convenient surface (the bottom of a frying pan, for example), flatten the cooked plantain pieces to make a disk, which you can then form into a cup. Alternatively, place the plantain pieces in a small muffin pan and smash them to form a cup, then unmold. Return the tostones to the oil and continue to fry until golden and crisp, 1 to 3 minutes. Season with the salt and garlic powder.

To complete, warm the halibut cheeks, and divide among the tostones. Drizzle with the sauce and garnish with a cilantro leaf.

HALIBUT SAUSAGE WITH GARLIC AIOLI AND AJVAR Halibut fins were once considered the only good part of the fish That’s not just a saying, in the early 1600s halibut were considered a trash fish except for a thin strip of muscle and fat that supports the fins Slow-cooked, it renders to a soft and unctuous texture very similar to pork belly. You can also use it as you would use pork belly in charcuterie, to make a pure fish sausage. I’ve opted for very simple seasonings, to give maximum versatility with the condiments. This version is served with roasted garlic aioli and ajvar, but the possibilities are endless.

2 tablespoons butter ¼ cup minced shallots ¼ cup dry white wine ¾ pound halibut fin mea 1¼ pounds halibut trimmings 2 tablespoons Italian parsley leaves, blanched for 5 seconds 1 tablespoon salt 5 feet hog casings, soaked in lukewarm water and rinsed In a small saucepan, melt the butter over medium

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heat and cook the minced shallots until softened but not browned, about 5 to 7 minutes. Add the white wine, and raise the heat to medium high. Cook until almost all the liquid has evaporated; then set aside.

Run the fin meat through the small plate of a well-chilled grinder; then reserve and chill. In a food processor, pulse the trimmings along with the parsley until you have a coarse paste. Let rest in refrigerator for at least 30 minutes; then combine with the ground fin meat, the cooked shallots, and the salt, and stir for 1 to 2 minutes, until the mixture comes together. Pack into a sausage stuffer, making sure to remove as much air as possible from the mixture; then stuff into hog casings and twist into 10 six-inch links.

Roasted garlic aioli Aioli is a versatile and delicious condiment. This version is made with roasted garlic, which mellows out the flavors.

1 head garlic, cloves separated ¾ cup olive oil 1 large egg yolk ½ teaspoon dry mustard ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper salt and pepper, to taste Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Drizzle the garlic cloves with 1 tablespoon of the oil, and wrap them in aluminum foil. Place the foil packet on a baking sheet and roast for 20 to 25 minutes until the garlic cloves have softened. Remove the packet from the oven and let it cool. When cool enough to handle, unwrap the garlic and squeeze the cloves from the skins into a food processor with the egg yolk, dry mustard, and cayenne pepper. Pulse a few times to combine. With the motor running, pour in the rest of the olive oil in a thin stream. The mixture

will thicken to a mayonnaise-like consistency. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Transfer the aioli to a squeeze bottle and refrigerate.

Ajvar Ajvar is a Balkan condiment made with roasted red peppers. It is a smoky alternative to ketchup and pairs very well with anything grilled.

2 red bell peppers 1 small eggplant 1 garlic clove, peeled and smashed 1 tablespoon olive oil 1½ teaspoons white wine vinegar ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper Preheat your grill or broiler on high. Prepare the bell peppers by cutting off both ends and removing the core, making a single sheet. Prick the skin of the eggplant with a fork. Grill the bell peppers first, cooking without turning until the skin has charred all over. Transfer the peppers to a small bowl covered with plastic wrap, and let them steam for 10 minutes to loosen the skin. Meanwhile, lower the heat and cook the eggplant by roasting it for 30 minutes, turning occasionally, until it has softened. Once the peppers are ready, peel the skin and transfer to a food processor. Once the eggplant has cooked, halve it and scoop out the flesh into the food processor. Add the garlic clove, olive oil, white wine vinegar, and salt and pepper. Pulse until combined. Taste and adjust for seasoning.

To finish, gently grill or fry the sausages along with buttered buns and serve with the condiments. n Martin Mallet doesn’t live in an area with a recreational halibut season but does live close to a commercial fishing wharf.

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Buddha Continued from page 14 headlong storm of autumn, but we went.

The dirt road climbed 50 miles through lush west-slope forest, mostly lodgepole and hemlock. A scatter of tamaracks stood in long shafts of lastchance sunlight, shedding their golden needles. A spare tire, bald, rode on the backseat beside me, on left-hand curves wanting to roll on my lap. The emptied beer cans of Bob’s lumberjack summer—Great Falls, Rainier, Grain Belt, Olympia—clanked around our ankles.

His station wagon, a Dodge Pioneer pushing 20 years old, lurched and whined under the burden of its monstrous tail fins Bob had owned it only a few months and, one suspected, would soon finish it off. It had a pushbutton transmission, and at the slightest change in slope, he’d punch a different button on the dash and the shuddering old beast would suck in its breath and shift up or down, either way giving us a good swift kick. “They just don’t make ’em like this anymore,” he sang out for the twenty-third time.

But trout lay ahead. We were on our way, no looking back. As if to insist on this, the car had no rearview mirror: Bob had hung it over his bathroom basin, where it watched over the lion’s-foot tub and I’d shaved in it that very morning.

The road came to an end where a cluster of pickups and horse trailers was already parked. I imagined a band of outlaw worm-dunkers galloping in on our guileless fish. “Hunters,” Bob assured me. “Horns and meat, that’s all they want.” He was wrangling the woeful spare tire off the backseat. His doors wouldn’t lock, so he’d hide it in the woods.

Under the big pines it was bluegreen and cool as we set out on the footpath. Yellow birch leaves, not yet fallen, seemed to float unattached to any branch. Thimbleberry leaves bigger than a man’s hand hovered in high-noon twilight. Bob darted around looking for the berries, more or less edible, but it was already too late in the year.

The going was rocky but he sailed up the trail, Charlotte and I chuffin

along behind. We’d just arrived from Florida, where the only mountain was Disney’s, made out of Styrofoam. Bob had been reading a book by a Tibetan lama who described an esoteric practice called lung-gom: a way of walking very fast, done in a trance. Allegedly the lung-gom adept could ghost over the most rugged terrain with his feet hardly touching the ground. Bob believed it, and I was in no position, 50 yards back, to do any scoffin .

But then we came to our first sight of the river, a revelation. We stood on a high footbridge looking down. It fi the overall category of river, the way a giraffe was a quadruped, but tell that to the first taxonomist who saw one. I’d never seen a stream so clear. Like a lens, the water focused the stony riverbed far beyond the ability of the unaided eye.

So this was the South Fork of the Flathead: pools and long scrolling eddies, lolling along over pastel cobblestones, pink and cream and mint green, that might be 2 feet deep or 20.

The first drop of doubt—mine— dribbled into this expedition.

Trout want clarity, like you and me, but this was overkill. How could you catch fish when they were spying on you, every move you made, through the aquatic equivalent of the Hubble telescope? Just standing on that bridge looking down, you felt naked.

And still, we had miles to plod, all uphill. Don’t worry, Bob said. He’d brought along a small jar of herbal salve that he’d made.

A pack string with a party of hunters came down the trail, headed home. The blocky brown horses carried no antlers on their loads; the riders looked glum under their cowpoke hats. We stood aside to let them pass and said hello.

All we got back was a grunt.

N

ext morning, near our camp, was chilly and gray. I sat on an outcrop that dropped to the river like a set of stairs. A bee settled on my knee and seemed to watch, drowsily, as I knotted on a fl .

Already Bob had disappeared around a bend upstream. The river ran through a

winding, voluptuous gorge with walls rising sheer from the water. It was too deep to wade, so he must have found a ledge on the wall to walk on. Downstream looked easier, with chunks of fallen rimrock that Charlotte and I could work our way over without getting too wet.

But the water, to me, was way too clear. It slicked along stark and lifeless, not a riser in sight. Would we keep some to eat, Charlotte wanted to know. With all the trouble we’d taken to get here, and everything looking so virginal and pristine, she took it for granted we were going to catch fish Full of hope, she sprang from rock to rock, flipping a gold spoon while I threw limp casts and watched the river wash my streamer around. We kept at it half the morning and caught nothing.

Here I was, the big fishing ape who was supposed to have a grip on everything. I gazed at the river gliding past, emptying itself out, and didn’t have a clue what to do next. I wished Bob would come back with the key to it all, and when the day wore on and he didn’t show up, I began to worry about him.

No Bob, no fish nothing. The river’s lisp swelled in the gorge like surf in a seashell.

Another thing—not that it mattered—we’d run out of new water to fish Below us the gorge narrowed and the current sped up through the slot, with no more rocks to clamber around on. But where the wall fla ed out to form the narrows Charlotte spotted a little baseboard of ledge, and before I could compose a solemn essay against the idea, she was out there on it. I couldn’t let her drown all alone while I stood and watched, so I was out there with her.

Viewed from a distance, this had to be the dumbest fishing scene ver.

On her first cast she hung a fish She’d crept out on the ledge as far as she could, then stretched her arm and flun the spoon around the fla e of the wall, down the narrows, to a pool below that she couldn’t even see. The rod dipped, the line sang like the D string on a banjo, and minutes later she led a lemony 14-inch cutthroat back along the ledge to quiet water. I helped out by keeping my mouth shut. She hadn’t known you

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Gray’s Sporting 4.625 x 4.875

couldn’t catch a trout in this river, so she caught one.

About that time, Bob came around the bend waving his rod, frantic droplets fl ing off. He wanted us to come upstream. The footing was slippery and by the time we got to him, we were wet to the waist. He was all worked up.

He’d found a good fish it was rising, and he’d thrown a whole shelf of hardware at it, every sort of spoon and spinner. He held his hands up edgewise around an invisible trout. It wouldn’t hit, but since it was rising, he was sure I could get it to take a fl . One thing, though—to make the cast, a long one, first ’d have to get myself out on a midstream rock. “An Errol Flynn leap,” he yelped, lunging and thrusting his rod at a juniper bush.

The trout was in a long, walled pool with a skein of slow currents. We scrabbled to an overlook, but saw nothing rising and sat down to wait. The sky was still dull as daybreak. A clump of harebells hung out their purple fl wers on the broken-up rock beside us. It was over, I was thinking, or maybe Bob had only been imagining things—but then the fish began to ise again.

He held my rod while I made the buccaneer leap, barely. The rock was flat topped, just big enough to stand on, just far enough out to separate my backcast from the wall of the pool. Bob reached the rod across the gap. Taking hold of it, I felt like a statue of myself, as frozen as that, and wondered if anyone had ever stood on that rock before me.

I wanted to get it over with, get back to the bank. The fish rose a good 80 feet away. Bob knelt at the tail of the pool to spot it, and I saw, as if from a great height, how absurd it all was. I couldn’t make a cast that far. At best I’d dump one a few yards short, in a heap. Not to mention that my fl , modeled on a dust wad found in a barracks, resembled no bug the trout might be rising to; but it was a bit late, marooned on this rock without my fly b x, to be thinking of that.

Bob gave the word and the cast was in the air, ready or not. The whole thing, I felt, was out of my hands. I only knew if the first cast was bad, there wouldn’t be another. The fish would spook. And

Big Fish River A new acrylic, framed 26 x 39, image size 21 x 35 Visit chetreneson.com to view new paintings Prices and information on lithographs and commissioned watercolors on request. renesonpen@att.net • 860.434.2806 Chet Reneson 42 Tantumorantum Road, Lyme, CT 06371

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People, Places, & Equipment High Cotton (Page 16) Brian Grossenbacher hunted pheasant with Artuto V. Malo’s Baja Hunting (bajahunting. com), which is near Mexicali, Mexico, and only 120 miles from San Diego. Malo offers a variety of upland birds as well as deer and other hunts. More of Brian’s photography can be seen at grossenbacherphoto.com.

Earning It! (Page 36) Nick Trehearne hunted black bear in northern British Columbia with his friend Matt.

The two took up this adventure on their own and didn’t go through any lodge or outfitte .

They hiked in and camped a few days in an area that sees very little human activity. Visit nicktrehearne.com to see more of his fine wo k.

Steel Waters (Page 52) Adam Tavender fished with his father for steelhead in British Columbia’s famed Dean River.

They drove from Vancouver to the small town of Bella Coola, and from there, employed West Coast Helicopters (westcoast helicopters.com) to carry them over mountains and glaciers to the banks of the river. Experience with wilderness survival and handling encounters with grizzlies is a must. See more of Adam’s good work at adamtavender.com.

Gordon Allen An artist from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Gordon has been contributing to Gray’s for years. His line art is scattered throughout this issue. You can see more of Gordon’s work at www.gordonallenart.com.

amazingly, weirdly, the line fl wed out flat and graphic, farther than I’d managed to cast all morning, hurling the big lumpy fly straight to the trout’s lunch bucket, or so I thought.

“You’re way off,” Bob called out, echoing in the gorge. “Go left.”

The rod seemed to guide my wrist, not the other way around, and made the called-for correction. Like a living creature, the unrolling cast licked at the air three or four rod lengths short of the fish “Shoot!” Bob shouted in a sort of whisper, and the last loose yards of line, released from my left hand, shot where they wanted. The cast fell back to the water with a few waves of slack, not a bad thing at all. I never even worked the fl , just let it drift, slowly sinking, straightening out the leader. Nearby, on his knees, Bob saw what I couldn’t, the flash of the t out as it took.

He threw up his arms, then pointed at the fish and it ran with the fl , ran and ran.

W

e ate both trout, with no apologies: in those days, the dogma of catch-and-release hadn’t yet reached that remote fork of the Flathead. It was one of those meals so good, so kingly, you eat mostly in silence. To speak would seem a sacrilege. Charlotte’s fish not so big, was the true delicacy, but both were delicious. We ate them with our fingers like Communion wafers, no one having thought to bring any forks or spoons in his or her kit. Nor did we have a skillet or scrap of foil. Bob simply broiled the fish on crossed sticks over the fi e.

All along I’d been thinking of this outing as totally impromptu. We showed up in Martin City, Bob said let’s go, we went. But sitting there picking the trout bones, pondering our improbable catch—Charlotte’s ledge and Errol’s rock—I began to wonder about that.

The notion came to me, out of nowhere, that Bob had dreamed up everything we did, was still dreaming it as we went along. Somehow, he’d conjured up the trout I caught, found it

in that crystal pool where no trout had been. Found it, moreover, for me. The fi about casting to the fish himself before coming to get me seemed as transparent as the South Fork of the Flathead.

Any trout that went for my gargoyle fl would have turned itself inside out to grab his spinner.

That was Bob for you. A dreamer, banging away on a banjo, playing out possibilities in his head. Scenes, not schemes. Seeking and finding letting go and giving away. If all this were a dream, Bob’s, in that bathtub, then the doorway we’d come in by was the Martin City Hotel.

There really was such a place, sort of. Riding up in Bob’s car, we’d passed the Hungry Horse Dam and the ugly lake it made, with barren mud banks: the less said about it, the better, except that some of the dam builders, long ago, stayed in the Martin City Hotel. That was its heyday; so Bob said. Later, when it closed, the locals mostly forgot about it, but the building survived, where Bob now lived. To him it was lore brought to life, rescued reality, part of a lost and found world of boxcars, old music, and herbal medicine.

So, was there really a Dew Drop Inn? I wasn’t so sure about that one, and didn’t necessarily want to know, if the answer might joylessly undo everything I’d just now figu ed out.

The fi e began to spit and hiss; we felt the first cold raindrops. By dusk we were back at the car, rolling the spare out of the woods, and the rain was turning to sleet. Later that night it would snow. Bob’s wiper blades were shot, so he rigged a worn-out work glove on the blade on his side, and we headed down the mud-slick road. He tapped out a tune on the push buttons—Drive, 2, Low, Drive, 2, Low— while the glove waved across the windshield, flou ishing the middle finge . A yellow leaf skipping in the headlights led the way. n Parker Bauer has written scripts for National Geographic documentaries and The Walker’s Cay Chronicles, essays for The American Scholar and The Weekly Standard, and ficti n for Blackbird.

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Traditions Continued from page 62 when he was well enough to fish (the next day?) used it for bait—and hooked and landed a six-pound catfish.

With catfish it has never been about the method but the pursuit, which lives on in the current enthusiasm for noodling.

Mr. Triplett, for his part, implies a certain respect for the jug fishermen, though in his telling it feels more like amusement than sport. “Now and then a jug would disappear or go zigzagging across the river, and then there would be an exciting chase and the possible capture of a big channel cat that might tip the beam at fifty or a hundred, or even two hundred pounds.” It sounds almost like a poor man’s fox hunt.

The story harks back to Uncle Perk’s question of whether such fishing was done for sport. One of the earliest catfishing stories seemed to embrace just this ambivalence. It was written by John James Audubon in the 1830s, when the great man was in England completing Ornithological Biography (the sequel to Birds

of America). He wrote of the days early in the century, when he was first married and living back in Henderson, Kentucky, on the banks of the Ohio River. The local anglers around Henderson favored toads as catfish bait—they were apparently quite available in the spring—and used trotlines, basically a long thick cord with (in Audubon’s case) a rock at one end for an anchor. Audubon marveled at the rig’s efficiency, noting that “The trotline is in the river, and it may patiently wait, until I visit toward night.” Apparently this relieved Audubon of the tedium of angling.

All that occurred more than two centuries ago, and it’s hard to believe that Audubon, Uncle Perk, Smith, Babb, and the other great catfishermen of yore could recognize today’s world of enthusiasm for catfish angling, with more than 7 million anglers nationwide. There are multiple magazines devoted to them. There are tournaments with prizes in the tens of thousands of dollars and high-end tackle designed just for catfish.

Triplett’s idea of using a rod and reel instead of a jug may or may not have oc-

curred to him exactly as he reports, but the general movement from jug and handlines to rod and reel certainly did happen, as he predicted it might. He was right about one other thing too. As with any fish, you have to care about losing one before you can care about catching one. Triplett, it appears, had that one covered.

Will Ryan teaches expository writing at Hampshire College—and spends a muddy, glorious weekend every April at the family bullhead camp on the banks of French Creek in northern New York. His most recent book is Gray’s Sporting Journal’s Noble Birds and Wily Trout: Creating America’s Hunting and Fishing Traditions, published by Lyons Press.

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Bounty Hunters Continued from page 51 It’s as if Thor hears me call his name.

Far, far away, way up that Pea River, in the direction opposite to where the other dogs ran after the coons, I hear him bark.

“Hear that?” I say. “It’s Thor—he’s treed one. Treed one on his own.”

They all listen.

“Ain’t no coon,” Randy says, big-bellying in my direction.

“How you know?” Jack says.

“I can hear it—he’s just barkin’.”

All eyes go to Gavin.

He holds his head down as if he’s listening to complicated music or figu ing a math problem. “Fifty cents’ worth,” he says.

“What?”

“Fifty percent chance,” Jack translates.

“I’m goin,’” I say. “It’s not like we’ve gotten anything here.”

“Your dog could be on a deer or a fox.

That happens to young dogs that ain’t fully trained,” says Frankie.

“Anybody goin’ with him?” Gavin

sings out.

Silence.

Then the sound of the Banshee and Mr. Roosevelt in the other direction.

They’re barking now, sounding as if they’ve treed.

Jack has his hands deep in his jacket pockets.

“I guess we better be true to our dogs,” he says.

So they lend me a floo light and we split up.

“Good luck,” several of them say as I head into the dark, following the sounds of Thor.

I

walk through the pitch-dark woods toward Thor’s barking. By now it’s midnight and the cold seems to be coming after me, grabbing at me with icy fingers I find something of a path along the river, and I know as long as I stay within the sound of the river, I won’t get lost. I pick up my pace. Trotting along helps me to keep the cold from making me shiver.

A full ten minutes later, when I get to Thor, he has quieted, his barks coming only about every minute. He stares up the tree, but when he sees me, he wags his tail, walks around the tree a time or two, looks up at the tree and barks a few more times. I shine the spotlight up in the tree. It’s a medium-size oak tree clean of leaves with nowhere for a coon to hide. I shine the light into adjoining trees, but I see nothing.

Then I hear the soft sound of baying dogs from back down the river. The barks seem frantic and continuous. Thor pricks his ears, twists his head, and without giving me another look, he heads back to the Martins.

Be true to your dog, I think. But don’t expect him to be true to you.

I hear the dogs again and more of what could be shots, but I have trouble listening because I am now sitting, leaning against a tree and feeling too weary to go back and chase another coon. I decide to give myself ten minutes to rest.

The next thing I know, I wake up again still shivering and see a glow of yellow staining the eastern horizon. I look at my watch. 5:58 a.m. I look around me and see not man, dog, or coon. I listen. Silence.

In the gray winter dawn, I trudge back to the river and follow it upstream.

I find my truck at full daylight. But I don’t find my dog Thor.

L

”Setters Afield”

Oil

Charleston, SC

24” x 30”

ater that day, I knock loudly on the door of Gavin Martin’s large, sprawling farmhouse. Dogs erupt behind the house. I walk around through the side yard and into the back, and there they all are in a kennel big enough for forty foxhounds. Thor stands among the other dogs—not just the Banshee and Mr. Roosevelt, but several other coonhounds, a couple of pointers and setters.

They all bark at me as if I were a masked intruder, even a raccoon. Thor barks, too, as if he has never laid eyes on me before.

But he does wag his tail as if he wants to make it clear that he’s just barking to fi in with the crowd. He knows me.

“Well, you did make it home, sonny boy?” a voice calls from the back gallery of the house.

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Gavin sits there with a cup of coffee in the mild noonday weather, dressed in jeans and camo just as he was the night before. An orange toboggan covers his bald head. I sit down on a porch step. “’Preciate you letting me go on the hunt, Mr. Martin.”

“Well, it would a helped a heap if we’d killt somethin’, sort a show you how it’s done.”

“You mean y’all didn’t kill anything even after—” “Those boys can’t hit nothin’. Looks like I’m gone have to do the shooting too. I already train the dogs, plan the damn hunts.” He grumbles something unintelligible under his breath.

“Well,” I say. “’Preciate you bringing Thor home.”

We’re both quiet.

“Well,” I say, “reckon I better collect my dog.”

I stand up, head for the kennel. Then I look back at him.

“About those coons in Long Island Sound,” I say. “D’they make it to the shore?”

“Naw.”

“Well, coons swimming in a line like soldiers, coons being trained for an invasion of Japan. Well, it’s hard to believe. D’they drown?”

Gavin Martin says nothing. I take another step.

“So what happened to them?” I say, turning back again.

“Took a right, headed for Europe, coast of Portugal.”

“What?”

“Took a right. Never was seen again.

Headed east.”

Gavin Martin stands up. He puts his palms together, rapidly moving his right

over his left, conveying motion.

“They skedaddled. Just like them coons last night. Gone. Adios, amigos.”

“Come on,” I say.

He looks as sober and serious as a professor explaining relativity. No hint of a smile.

“Where’d they go? I—it just cannot be—” “Headed east—out into the Atlantic.”

“They drown?”

“Either that or took over some island somewhere, sorta like them coons took Edgefiel ’s farm.”

“Come on.”

“Your raccoon is—” “I know they’re smart,” I interrupt.

I head to the kennel to collect my faithless dog. n H. William Rice is the author of The Lost Woods: Stories and is winner of a 2015 Georgia Author of the Year Award.

His many stories and essays have appeared in an array of journals, periodicals, and books. He is a professor of English at Kennesaw State University.

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Continued from page 69 owns and flies his own private plane, has houses both north and south of the border, and a thriving hotel in San Felipe.

And he still loves to fish for grouper.

“I asked the guide who’s here how many marlin his guys get. You know what he said? Over the course of a week, his clients average about one fish a day.”

John looks me in the eye—as if challenging me somehow.

“That sounds about right,” I offer.

Angi, from the kitchen, carries out plates of sashimi, dark as lipstick, painted nails.

“One fish, repeats John. He shakes his head. He raises his hands, arms spread. “This stuff ’s too expensive for just one fish a d y.”

E

xpensive?

I’m still thinking about that the next morning, long before dawn,

when I find myself fid ling with reels and flies and a couple of 12-weights I pulled out of Madrina before heading for bed in a spare room at Bob Hoyt’s house. Finally, I decide to leave my own gear behind. I’ve been invited along as a guest, for Chrissake.

The palm trees stand quiet as I walk in darkness to the Whales Tale Inn. Dogs bark; roosters crow. I catch scent of the nearby estero. For some reason, I also recall the time, as a punk surfer, I waved away a steak my grandfather tried to serve me for dinner—some health notion I was enamored with at the time.

I still haven’t quite lived that one down.

But there’s more to this than just being polite.

I imagine a fraternity or fellowship or community that’s worthwhile believing in as we plunge through swells and treacherous currents running through Boca Soledad and out into the open Pacific And later that morning, after the plugs go out and, suddenly, all the rods fold like saplings flattene

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by a vicious gust of wind, and we end up with a deck laced with tuna and blood, I have nothing but respect for the angling capabilities of Juan and John, plus Jim, a friend of theirs from Loreto, and our local guide, Rubén Durán. Not a single profanity, not a tangled line. Everybody, it seems to me, is able to get along just fine.

As long as the fishing holds up. n Scott Sadil’s essays and fiction have appeared regularly in Gray’s since 2006.

This, however, is his first installment as the publication’s new Angling editor. His latest fiction collection, Goodnews River: Wild Fish, Wild Rivers, and the Stories We Find There (Stackpole Books), was published in February this year.

“Fishing the Surf” Waiting for a strike 18” x 24“ oil on panel Jan McAllaster Stommes www.janstommesart.com

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Circles Unbroken Continued from page 30 been spearing fish in the swimming area. We examine the wound, two punctures on either side of his palm. It bleeds hardly a trickle but leaves an indelible trace of tiny black flakes under the tough skin. Before the end of summer, Marvin and I will sport the same black lines.

Our mothers will think we’ve been tattooed by some clandestine gang of juvenile delinquents.

F

rom the springs, Sister and I take Betsy to Radium Dam, where the milelong creek cascades turquoise water that marbles into the whiskey brown river where huge striped bass circled like gray ghosts in the deep clear pools. Above the dam Bobby and I dived for golf balls that we sold by the bucket to his father to practice chip shots. In the riprap beneath the dam, we found arrowheads the color of caramel, so thin you could see sunlight through them. In early spring we caught shellcrackers in the foaming tailwater, and one autumn Bobby killed a

wild turkey here while hunting squirrels.

At the time, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t shot a turkey buzzard. He took it to my house, where his elder brother, Duffy, identifie it and Tillie baked it for us.

The Radium golf course, now abandoned, lies along the riverbank downstream from the dam. Golfers used to carry shotguns or fishing rods in their caddy carts. Turkeys roosted along the river, and fish sought the clear spring water to spawn. When the Flint floode the 18th hole, we bodysurfed the rushing water over the hilly fairways and elevated greens. My son has given me a Savannah River projectile point he found on this high bank. We give it to Betsy for a memento of her daddy’s youth. We feel that the arrowhead has passed through us to seek her out. Leaving the dam, we cross the railroad tracks where there was a dependable covey of bobwhite quail for Queenie, the Francks’ aging black and white pointer, to find and flush quivering like a tuning fork. We took turns missing the rattling covey rise with Bobby’s .410 Mossberg bolt action. Across the tracks

were a trap and skeet range and a log lodge where we had Boy Scout meetings.

We played war among the trap bunkers and Capture the Flag. We had American and German helmets to reenact WWII, tossing dirt clods for hand grenades until we graduated to Red Ryder BB guns. For the War Between the States, Confederates wore Levi’s turned inside out, gray with a blue stripe down the outside leg.

Nobody wanted to be a Yankee. For that, we had to draw the short straws.

T

o retrace the riverbank we toured by automobile, we launch my johnboat. Reaching Radium Dam, we kill the outboard and drift with the current into the shoals adjacent to the golf course. A breeze sizzles through the ruddy brown cypress needles and rattles the golden leaves of a sycamore, swaying gray beards of Spanish moss, slinging diamonds of sunlight across the water. We flush a pair of wood ducks that lift off the water trailing pearls. We commune with the river spirits and the ghosts of

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my childhood and wonder how our grandchildren will know what’s holy when all the forests are gone. Where will the ghosts go when there is no wild.

Where will God go?

Betsy has told me she wants to learn to cast a fly rod. I assemble a 6-weight and tell her to pretend she’s slinging paint off a paintbrush. It doesn’t take long for her to catch on. Soon she’s casting sassy loops and esses between 12 o’clock and 2. Tick, tock. There’s kinetic magic in this vibrant woman casting a fly rod, poetry in motion, a symphony of life and death. It’s as if she waves a magic wand that stirs the past into the omnipresent now, sunlight flas ing from her hair. Yet she insists on casting toward the middle of the river instead of to the bank. “You won’t catch a fish until you cast to the shore,” I tell her.

“I don’t want to catch a fish, she says, “until I learn to cast.” Betsy’s as hardheaded as her daddy was. She has his contagious energy for anything new.

Before we return to the boat ramp, she inverts the urn, pouring the last of her daddy’s ashes into the river. The breeze

blows a wisp of gray dust back into the boat. The rest of Bobby is caught into a tiny whirlpool, spinning and spreading white ashes like a spiral galaxy in miniature. Betsy has finished what she came for, and I’ve discovered there’s no joy greater than giving an old friend’s daughter a new glimpse of her father. I go to wishing I had some words, some wisdom to pass on, but I realize I got old without becoming wise.

When it’s time for her to drive home to Nashville—to her profession and to her husband and son—I ask her to sing a song on the riverbank. We return to the deck where we shared the pomegranate. She opens the battered case of her daddy’s guitar and sings a requiem to her father in her full-throated womanly voice. The sweet music tumbles down the river, reviving memories and resurrecting ghosts. It carries to the Radium Dam and to its headwater springs, over the hills and greens of the vanished golf course, through the tornado devastation of our childhood forest. It mingles with the sizzling breeze, wafting and twisting over the currents

and backwater eddies. It carries downriver to the golf course, the white-water rapids, the vanished Radium casino, the boil, the concrete platform, and the ghosts of sunbathing girls in bright bathing suits: Will the circle be unbroken By and by, Lord, by and by?

It’s as though, gazing down this river, we have entered a snag in the fabric of time. The past bonds with the present.

The years between us have melted. We feel her daddy’s childhood and other spirits that haunt the riverbank. The music wafts in the sweet acoustics over the water. Bobby’s ashes will follow the path of eels, when there were eels, to the Gulf, around the cape of Florida, to the Sargasso Sea and to the oceans of the world.

There’s a better home a-waiting In the sky, Lord, in the sky. n Victor Miller is at once a genteel southern gentleman, an irreverent rabble rouser, and an ever-curious scholar. His tales of outdoor adventure are a heady concoction, written these days from his family home on the banks of the Flint River in his native south Georgia.

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GSJ

The Gray’s Guide to Sporting Travel EXPEDITIONS ////

Guided fishing trips out of Grand Isle are almost always successful and often lead to big fish like this one.

DIY anglers, however, have access to the same water, and with some careful planning, can also post big results.

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY ZACH MATTHEWS

5/20/19 12:04 PM

THE

trailer tires rolled back with an audible squelch, sinking past the axles into the rich black mud of the Louisiana marsh.

“How’s that look?” I called out the open window of my 4Runner, which was locked in four-wheel drive. “Great, babe,” my wife, Tracy, replied from the narrow shoulder of the highway, where she stood casually assembling an 8-weight fly rod. I set the emergency brake, rechecked to make sure my rig was still on dry ground, and began loading the boat.

We launched our skiff-rigged Gheenoe directly off the narrow edge of one of the most unique highways in North America. Louisiana Highway 1 cuts like an arrow in a diagonal path across the state, from Shreveport in the far northwest all the way to the coastline about two hours south of New Orleans.

There, it makes a 90-degree dogleg to the east, with its last stretch connecting the coastal communities of Port Fourchon and Grand Isle. Port Fourchon is a Halliburton town, full of roughnecks waiting to board helicopter ferries out to the offshore derricks lurking in the haze.

The Deepwater Horizon memorial was erected there. Grand Isle, meanwhile, is a resort community, crammed with what the Cajuns call fishing camps—slat-built houses on stilts with the comforts of home directly over the marsh.

Between the two towns is probably the most accessible stretch of redfish sea trout, and sheepshead fishing in the United States—especially if you, like us, want to guide yourself. This area is “coastal” only in that it’s tidal and salty; open water is actually a few miles farther south. Everything here—from the structures to the roads—is so close to sea level, ocean and earth almost become one. When the very mild Gulf tides are in, you can wet a line or launch a boat practically anywhere.

Tracy is a relatively nascent fly angler, but her skill set is growing, and she

Roadside

REDS A DIY trip in the heart of bayou country.

by Zach Matthews

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is particularly adept at poling our little skiff. I rebuilt our Gheenoe several years ago with this exact stretch of marsh in mind. Using marine plywood, fiberglass and epoxy, I rigged the boat with front and rear decks and a solid central floo .

Poling from a cooler in the rear, the boat handles like a skiff version of a Corvette.

You can absolutely fish the Louisiana marsh from a conventional flats skiff, and many anglers do, but this fishe y is the textbook definiti n of “microskiff ” water. Extremely small craft such as canoes, kayaks, or Gheenoes gain easy access to the twisty back channels and can literally scoot between pools that would stymie a larger boat. Local anglers pursue redfish while seated in kayaks, or they stand to pole and cast in canoes and similar craft. Having a motor opens up a broader area but certainly isn’t necessary to catch fish After taking a few minutes to get oriented, Tracy and I decided to use the breeze to our advantage and searched downwind along the outer edges of a few marshy islands a couple hundred

yards from the highway. When I heard Tracy’s pushpole begin clicking on oyster beds, I knew we were in business. Redfish are structure-oriented fis much like freshwater bass, but in the marsh, there aren’t many hiding places.

Oyster beds provide some of the only vertical variation and offer places for bait to congregate—and for redfish to hunt. Consequently, if you find oysters, you’re likely find redfish nearby. In fact, you can play this game in advance thanks to the wonders of Google Maps, giving yourself a head start on where to focus your search. Oyster beds look like white specks or dots, usually on the fan of a miniature tidal “delta” on the southern sides of the islands.

Sure enough, moments after we heard the audible cue of the pole tapping oyster shells, we saw incoming fish—a small school with a primary bogey headed straight at us, like an incoming bomber on a slow strafing run.

I tossed a spoon fly in front of the lead fish which was perhaps 60 feet out and moseying along in no particular hurry.

It immediately slashed at the fl , missing wildly. With my hands now shaking from adrenaline, I frantically stripped line in and threw again, accidentally casting over the fish as it closed. With most species, that’s a blown opportunity, but redfish a e special.

Stripping in still more line, I chanced a final cast, high-sticking the fish at the nose of the boat. By dragging the spoon through the water, instead of stripping, I enticed a take. The redfish locked eyes with me precisely as it bit down on the spoon and immediately went bananas.

A six-pound redfish is a great figh on an 8-weight, but not an especially difficult one. Redfish have soft mouths that hold hooks well, and they are not leader-shy, so you can get away with 12or even 15-pound tippet. Unless they can tangle you up or snip you off on an oyster bed, the fight is generally a foregone conclusion. After a couple runs, we scooped the fish into our oversized net and laid it gently in our icy cooler.

That’s unusual for me. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I catch and release,

In the fall, bull redfish crash the handful of passes or deeper channels to spawn. They are easy to dredge up with frozen shrimp on heavy tackle but may also fall for a spoon or weighted shrimp fl . Keep the fly near the bottom, and use at least a 10-weight rod.

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That was the year William James Lindskov purchased his first quarter of land. Eighty-three years later, things are a little different—or at least the scope of them is. You see, Bill’s son, Les, had a vision: to share with the world the beauty and splendor of the immense Lindskov Family Ranch through a lodge called Firesteel Creek.

In 1999, the world was supposed to end, but Les, his wife, Marcia, and their four sons, Monte, Bryce, Mark, and Todd, had other plans.

While the world worried about Y2K, the Lindskov Family lodge rose on the banks of Firesteel Creek, in Isabel, South Dakota. A decade later, they added Timber Lake Lodge, with its herds of American bison, Rocky Mountain elk, and whitetail deer. A legacy was born.

Today, the birds fly wild and strong. Pheasants, sharptails and Huns bursting from cover. The deer and antelope really do look through the kitchen window, yet it never ceases to amaze how well they can hide when they want to.

As I gaze off into the vastness that is western South Dakota, I sometimes wonder what draws hunters to Firesteel Creek and Timber Lake from all over the world. Surely there are a host of destinations to choose from, yet we have been fortunate that so many have returned to our lodges time and again. Is it the scope of infinite acres spotted with grainfields or one of Dad’s famous cocktails—“a glass of pop with a stick in it”—personally delivered in the lounge?

‘Life is worth enjoying; come visit us.’

Perhaps it is our talented hunting guides and their canine companions—each tuned so flawlessly it’s like watching an orchestra play. To them it’s not a job as much as a passion—the ability to come home each evening and say “That was a great day.”

But the biggest reason people return must be Mom. Perhaps it’s her chicken-fried steak or fried chicken, or maybe it’s her buttermilk pheasant or famous roast beef. Then again, it could be her moon pies, chocolate cakes, or fantastic apple crisps—made from apples picked in her front yard. I may be biased, of course, but I think many would agree: Mom’s cooking is where it’s at. Mom is also a true role model— one who can fry three dozen eggs, make biscuit gravy, greet a stream of guests and not miss a chance to see what her grandchildren are up to that day.

So there may be many reasons sportsmen keep returning to our ranches. And we hope that one of them is because they love it here— just like we do. We love that there are no roads or people. We love that we can walk out on the porch and hear nothing apart from nature.

We love it this way, because life is simpler and moral out here. We hope you, too, can experience the way we are blessed to live every day.

Life is worth enjoying; come visit us. —Mark L. Like his brothers, Monte, Bryce and Todd, Mark Lindskov is a thirdgeneration guardian who manages the Lindskov Family’s Lodges.

P O B OX 17 ISA BE L , S OU T H DA KO TA 576 33 L OD G E 6 0 5 -4 6 6 -2 4 52 / M A R K 6 0 5 -8 5 0 -3 8 9 9 F I R E S T E E L C R E E K L OD G E .C OM T I M BE R L A K E L OD G E .C OM

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Tracy cradles her first redfish the result of at least fi e years of practice on the carp flats ba k home in Atlanta.

but I make an exception for redfish because of their deliciousness and the efforts I have to go through to catch them.

Still, I will take only a couple from any given trip. In the 1980s, thanks to celebrity chef Paul Prudhomme, blackened redfish became all the rage. The result was a general collapse in coastal redfis stocks across both the Gulf and Atlantic states; a collapse from which the fis have yet to fully recover. Thanks to the hard work of organizations such as the Coastal Conservation Association, redfish stocks have rebounded substantially, but this is still a fish that could vanish if we aren’t mindful of the consequences of a few too many po’boys. Knowing that, I make a special effort to always treat redfish to what you might call a full-dress funeral. Kept fish immediately get wrapped in a thick plastic bag and placed on ice, to maximize freshness. I clean them as soon as possible, vacuum-sealing any fi lets I cannot eat immediately.

Redfish come with their own skillet, as people like to say, so you can grill them skin-side down on any open fi e. Roasted

on a Big Green Egg or similar grill, with a little Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning and an abundance of butter, there is no better fish for the plate. Smallish, keeper redfish are best served as fi lets, while the larger bulls make for fantastic po’boys. Just let the meat cook until flak and white; once the flakes separate and become opaque, load with butter and serve. For po’boys, you can tong the meat straight into a crusty, fresh baguette, serving with good mayonnaise, lettuce, and ideally a sun-warm summer tomato.

T

he Louisiana marsh is a special place partly because it is a nursery for all those big offshore bull redfis that anglers like to target in early fall.

Six-to-ten-pound redfish abound, are available year-round, and make perfect fly rod targets. Tides in the northern Gulf are almost nonexistent; which is an extreme difference from the four- to eight- foot tides that dictate everything about fishing on the Atlantic coast.

On the Atlantic side, near Charleston

or Savannah, redfish anglers focus on spring tides, when the fish can be targeted while feeding on flooded spartina beds. In Louisiana, the fishing is more dependent on water clarity (a function of rain), as well as wind and sunlight.

You can catch fish from dawn until dusk if conditions unspool the right way.

I was introduced to this area by local anglers out of Baton Rouge, one of whom was nice enough to show me the ropes several years ago. Catch Courmier gently paddled me around in a small canoe, meandering through the narrow channels of Bayou Laurier and Bayou Ferblanc.

Once upon a time, as Catch explained, the Louisiana bayou was much more densely clustered with grass and mud islands—and with oysters and fish as well.

Over the last century, oil and gas operators have cut multiple canals through the marsh (straight-line scars you clearly can see on aerial maps). With hurricanes, rising sea levels, and the channelization of the Mississippi itself, the marsh has slowly been eroded. Places marked on the maps as Lake this or Bayou that are

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Cordgrass flats abound in the marshes surrounding Louisiana Highway 1, but some areas can only be accessed by micro-skiffs, such as this custom-rigged Gheenoe. now really open water, and each year the marsh recedes a little farther. The channelized Mississippi is hemmed in by levees near New Orleans, but its tributaries as far north as Arkansas, Ohio, and even Montana have almost all been dammed. Dams hold back sediment. If all that sediment made it to Venice, the last stop before open water, the mouth of the Mighty Mississippi would be many miles farther into the Gulf of Mexico. In some respects, this is a vanishing fishe y, and it is fairly likely that it will be gone completely within the next hundred years, unless things change.

Catch explained that each of the primary game fish in the marsh has its own niche. Redfish hang out around oyster beds and will tail in the cordgrass if the tides allow. In the fall, they seek out deep passes, where bulls upwards of 40 pounds congregate for their spawning activities. Sea trout, another fine-tasting quarry, favor shallow cuts draining grass banks or flats they like moving water and can be caught with something similar to a (freshwater) trout fishe man’s nymph rig. Sheepshead—a black-and-white-barred fish resembling a jailhouse snapper—are scattered everywhere in large schools but can be the

hardest fish to actually catch. The trick to sheepshead fishing is to just barely crawl your fly over the muck in front of a feeding school. Courmier invented a special type of lengthened spoon fl , resembling a twisted metal swizzle stick with a hook through it, that he calls the Coma Spoon. It is sheepshead crack.

A

s a rule, Tracy and I take turns on the deck. As soon as I landed a redfish we swapped positions—the alwaysdelicate dance in a Gheenoe of moving one angler forward and the other back.

From my position atop the cooler I had an even better view, and I knew we were still right where we wanted to be. Twenty minutes after landing the first fish we

poled into a broad, shallow bay speckled with oysters. Tracy spotted the school of redfish cutting across our bow as soon as I did and had a fly in the air before I could even make a suggestion. There is something unbelievably special about watching someone you love handle herself on the front deck exactly right, especially when you taught that person yourself.

Tracy and I had a daughter six months before our trip, and one day we will teach Margot these same skills, together.

Tracy’s spoon slipped into the creamcoffee-colored waters 15 feet in front of the lead redfish which veered toward the fleeing fl . Just as I lost the fish in the glare, Tracy’s rod tip began bucking. The redfish peeled line from the reel, making strong runs across the flat—in vain. Tra-

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cy pumped the fish to 45 degrees, then reeled down, fighting the fish exactly as she had been taught. A few minutes and one scoop-and-score with our net, and the fish was boated, joining its brother in our cooler.

I’d like to tell you that we nonchalantly landed that fish with the sangfroid of anglers who had done it all before.

The truth is, we probably looked more like JV football players who unexpectedly found ourselves in the end zone for the first time. We hooted and high-fi ed each other across the decks, nearly oversetting in the process. A fi e-year plan to build a microskiff, hone our poling and sight-fishing skills on local carp, then self-guide in a distant marsh had all just come together. We had to allow for a little basking in the glow of success.

That afternoon, conditions shifted on us. I blew a couple easy shots, and then the wind picked up, cutting our ability to see into the water almost to nil. On our way back to New Orleans, we bought ultrafresh shrimp from a fishe man’s shack, with his boat backed right up to the lemonade-stand storefront, paying less than half what frozen shrimp cost at home in Atlanta. That evening, cleaned up and back in our city duds, we sipped cocktails

over an elegant downtown bar, secure in the private knowledge that no one else in that fancy restaurant spent the morning self-guiding for redfish No other couple in the room made such a great team.

That’s the electrifying thing about DIY destination fishin . Just as catching the first fish on a fly you tied yourself adds special meaning, so it is with an entirely self-run trip. We owe thanks, of course, to anglers such as Catch Courmier, who showed us the local ropes and who worked out the tactics. We owe Google Maps, and even the Louisiana Highway Department, for making that fishe y so accessible. At the end of the day, though, on this trip, we relied only on ourselves, and that is special indeed. n Zach Matthews lives in Atlanta, where he practices law when he isn’t pursuing striped bass. He is also the host of the Itinerant Angler podcast, now in its second decade of programming. He’s a longtime contributor to many outdoor publications. This is his second selection for Gray’s.

If You Go

The northern Gulf of Mexico is one of the least-expensive saltwater destina-

tion fishe ies in the country. A single day’s Louisiana fishing license costs only $17, and hotels are generally less than $100 per day—if you can find one.

The marshes around Grand Isle are vast, but the area is fairly unpopulated. Port Fourchon has a couple motels catering primarily to roughnecks and roustabouts (both are actual job descriptions on the oil rigs), but the rooms are clean and cheap. Grand Isle is more of an Airbnb town, with a multitude of apartments or suites available for $200 to $300 per night. Grand Isle is not, truthfully, all that grand, so don’t expect chandeliers and doormen—or, for that matter, more than a couple restaurants. For a fishe man, though, it is very nearly paradise.

Any stretch of marsh near this part of Highway 1 is accessible by canoe or kayak, but basic safety rules apply. Always wear a life jacket in small craft, and it is best to fish in pairs or groups. Cars can safely be left by the side of the highway, but be sure to pull well onto the shoulder—large trucks ply these roads for the oil and gas trade. Any local gas station can make a creditable po’boy, and Louisiana is famously laissez-faire when it comes to beer and liquor sales. All the inshore marsh has cell phone reception.

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Alaska Alaska Sportsman’s Lodge PO Box 231985, Anchorage, AK 99523 (888)826-7376 E-Mail: bkraft@alaskasportsmanslodge.com Strategically located on the Kvichak River in the heart of the Bristol Bay fishing paradise.

This river is the only connection between Lake Iliamna and the ocean. Each year, millions of salmon use the Kvichak to travel to their spawning grounds. This provides an enormous food source for the native rainbow trout, which grow in excess of 20 lbs. Because of our location, we don’t need to spend countless hours flying to the fishing spots. www.fishasl.com Alaska Wilderness Outfitting Company PO Box 1516, Soldotna, AK 99574 (907)424-5552 Experience incredible fishing, remote wilderness, and some of Alaska’s most spectacular beauty. Guided and self-guided trips to the pristine waters of Prince William Sound,

the wild lakes and rivers of the Wrangell Mountains and the untamed wilderness of the North Gulf Coast. All trips are remote fly-in destinations that include fully outfitted self-guided trips in our one-of-akind outpost cabins and floating cabins as well as a full-service lodge on the Tsiu River. We accommodate groups of any size and offer discounts for large groups. www.alaskawilderness.com

We offer two different fly fishing adventure trips located in remote areas of the Alaska Peninsula. On the Pacific side is a sophisticated camp that offers extreme isolation, a unique coastal fishery, breathtaking scenery, day hike options, and helicopter fly-outs.

On the Bristol Bay side is a no-frills camp offering an affordable option for die-hard fishermen after BIG fish in a small stream. www.epicaaa.com

Angler’s Paradise Lodge 4125 Aircraft Drive, Anchorage, AK 99502 (907)243-5448 E-mail: pete@katmailand.com Since 1950, we have offered the world’s finest freshwater sport fishing. All lodges have superb fishing within walking distance and are in close proximity to the finest salmon, rainbow, char, and grayling rivers in Alaska. www.katmailand.com

Great Alaska Adventure Lodge Kenai Peninsula, HC01 Box 218 Sterling, AK 99672 (800)544-2261 E-mail: greatalaska@greatalaska.com Visit our world-class resort, featuring record-size Chinook, halibut, and rainbow trout. Deluxe lodge, fly outs, wilderness bear viewing, and fly fishing camps. We also offer fly fishing for IGFA record salmon (specifications upon request). Contact Laurence or Kent John. www.greatalaska.com

EPIC Angling & Adventure (512)656-2736

A and inspiring adventure awaits youyou A luxurious and inspiring adventure awaits you A luxurious luxurious and inspiring adventure awaits Discover the pinnacle of sport

• Largest salmon run in the world

salmon run inrun theinworld • Largest salmon the world Discover the pinnacle of sport Discover the pinnacle of sport • Largest • Alaska’s designated trophy fishing in the heart of Alaska’s • Alaska’s designated trophy • Alaska’s designated trophy fishing in theinheart of Alaska’s fishing the heart of Alaska’s Rainbow Trout area world-renowned Bristol Bay area, Trout Trout area area Rainbow world-renowned Bristol Bay area, world-renowned Bristol Bay area, Rainbow • Fly outs throughout the pristine with unparalleled remote lodge • Fly outs throughout the pristine • Fly outs throughout the pristine wilderness withcomfort, unparalleled remote lodgelodge with unparalleled remote a dedicated wilderness wilderness • Katmai National Park comfort, a dedicated comfort, a dedicated professional staff, and a • Katmai National Parkbath • Katmai Park • Cabins withNational private professional staff,to and aand a professional staff, commitment providing • Cabins with private bath • Cabins with private • A staff dedicated towardsbath commitment toAlaska providing commitment to providing spectacular experiences perfection • A staff towards • Adedicated staff dedicated towards spectacular experiences spectacular experiences each day.Alaska YouAlaska will fish clear perfection perfection eachstreams day. day.

You will clear each Youfish will fish clear teeming with large rainbow Trout and massive streams teeming with largelarge streams teeming with salmon runs measured in rainbow Trout and massive rainbow Trout and massive visit www.fishasl.com the millions. salmon runs measured in in salmon runs measured or call us toll free at 888.826.7376 visit www.fishasl.com visit www.fishasl.com the millions. the millions. or callorus tollusfree 888.826.7376 call tollat free at 888.826.7376 100 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

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Stoney River Lodge PO Box 62, Sleetmute, AK 99668 (907)526-5211 E-mail: Stoneyriverlodge22@gmail.com Owned and operated by Curly and Betty Warren, Alaska Master Guide License #111. Built in 1984 as a prime base of operation for guided top quality hunting adventures. Grizzly, moose, sheep, caribou and black bear, as well as daily fly-out sport fishing adventures. Lodge offers custom designed trips. We cater to people that wish to enjoy rugged Alaska outdoor activities incorporated with a well-appointed full service lodge operated by 30 year plus Master Guide and experienced staff. www.stoneyriverlodge.com Tikchik Narrows Lodge (907)243-8450 E-mail: info@tikchik.com World-class fly-in/fly-out sport fishing lodge hidden amid spectacular 1.5 millionacre wilderness park in pristine western Bristol Bay. Daily fly-out fishing for salmon, trout, char, grayling, and pike. Extraordinary service, accommodations, gourmet meals, and experienced guides. Owned and operated for nearly 30 years by Bud Hodson. www.tikchiklodge.com

Unalakleet River Lodge (800)995-1978 E-mail: appel@unalakleet.com Unalakleet River Lodge is a remote luxury fishing destination in the northwestern bush of Alaska. We have been sharing the natural beauty of the Unalakleet River and the surrounding Nulato Hills with our guests since 1998. We offer our clients Salmon fishing in the wilderness of Alaska with all the amenities and comforts of a full resort.The Unalakleet is recognized as a National Wild and Scenic River and is home to large runs of King Salmon, Chum Salmon, Pink Salmon, Silver or Coho Salmon, Dolly Varden, Arctic Char, and a native population of Arctic Grayling. The Unalakleet River offers 140 miles of prime Salmon fishing isolated from the pressures of road systems and fly out operations. www.unalakleet.com

A rge ntina Argentina’s Best Hunting (225)754-4368 E-mail: contact@argentinasbesthunting.com The perfect blend between hunting, fishing, gourmet dining, and luxury accommodations. Look no further if your goal is to experience the best that Argentina has to offer, as we have a wide variety of species, lodges, and

regions at our fingertips. To learn more, visit www.argentinasbesthunting.com South Parana Outfitters (804)693-3774 E-mail: wingsargentina@gmail.com World class wingshooting in a classic Argentine setting! Argentina, in comparison to other countries, has the advantage of having no restrictions when it comes to the hunting of doves, due to the threat that they represent to agriculture. However, Entre Rios is known for its prolific fauna, its great care for the environment, and its deep respect for the law.

We can proudly say that conservation is at the foundation of our company. All of our guides are bilingual and it is their job to accompany you during the hunt and they will take into account your personalized tastes and interests.

Duck hunting season goes from May through August. Dove is available for hunting all year long. Combination shoots and customized package shoots are available. www.southparanaoutfitters.com

Be lize Belize River Lodge (888)275-4843 E-mail: info@belizeriverlodge.com Belize River Lodge rests quietly on the lush,

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green banks of the Belize Olde River, only 3.5 miles from the mouth of the river—the entrance into the Caribbean Sea and classic Flats fishing, where anglers will pursue bonefish, tarpon, permit, and snook. This beautiful historic mahogany lodge is situated amidst an abundant tropical setting.

Balmy breezes rich with the sound of bird song drift among the private cottages creating a naturalist’s paradise. Relax and delight in our Belizean hospitality and our delicious combination of fine Belizean-Creole cuisine. www.belizeriverlodge.com

British Columbia Legacy Lodge (877)347-4534 E-mail: info@legacylodge.com Wonderfully remote yet easily accessible, Legacy Lodge offers a premier sport fishing experience found nowhere else in the world.

In harmony with the natural environment and in a world all its own, here on the protected waters of Rivers Inlet, surrounded by the panoramic beauty of British Columbia, all the elements converge for epic battles with world class salmon and halibut. For couples and families, parties of friends to corporate groups, Legacy Lodge was made for those who yearn for the perfect fishing vacation. www.legacylodge.com

C alifornia Wing & Barrel Ranch (707)721-8845 E-mail: info@wingandbarrelranch.com.

Escape to Sonoma, CA and enjoy a private hunting club just minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge. Wing & Barrel Ranch brings together the best of the shooting, food, wine, and wine country lifestyle in an elegant setting. Here, legendary memories are made with menus inspired by the surrounding countryside, world-class wines, exceptional shooting opportunities, and incomparable hospitality. www.wingandbarrelranch.com.

C olorado GR Bar Ranch (800)523-6832 E-mail: info@grbarranch.com Nestled along the Grand Mesas, just nine miles outside the town of Paonia, CO, this working cattle ranch has thousands of backcountry acres, trout lakes, miles of trails, and endless fishing and hunting opportunities on our private paradise. A vacation at our ranch is the trip of a lifetime. www.grbarranch.com Kessler Canyon 4410 CR 209, De Beque, CO 81630

(970)283-1145 Combine 23,000 acres of pristine wilderness located on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies with one of the most magnificent hunting lodges in the country. Team that with the most elite hunting guides and dogs in the state pushing up pheasants, chukars, and Gambel’s quail in perfectly maintained bird cover—you could only find yourself at Kessler Canyon. Arguably the finest sportsman’s lodge and resort in Colorado, Kessler Canyon awaits the discerning sportsman who wants to experience the best of the best. www.kesslercanyon.com

Ge orgia Pine Hill Plantation 2537 Spring Creek Road Donalsonville, GA 39845 (229)758-2464 E-mail: dougcoe@pinehillplantation.com An Orvis-endorsed wingshooting lodge, we provide private plantation amenities and hunt quality to discriminating upland bird hunters who appreciate finer traditions of plantation-style quail hunting. Experience the best Georgia has to offer from horseback and mule-drawn wagon. Pine Hill’s lodges are arguably as nice as any private quail hunting plantation…you can trust Orvis on that! www.pinehillplantation.com

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Kennels in

Gray’s Sporting Journal Please Call Amos Crowley at

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Spring Bank Plantation at Barnsley Resort 597 Barnsley Gardens Road, Adairsville, GA 30103 (770)773-7480 Spring Bank Plantation keeps alive a long Southern tradition of managing and preserving our game and lands. We offer upland game hunting and one of the Southeast’s most extensive shooting clays facilities— over water, in open field and in the woods.

Shooting guides ensure that all hunters— beginners and experts—fully enjoy their outing. Ladies and teens are particularly invited to experience our Southern shoot tradition at our luxury North Georgia quail hunting plantation, just an hour north of Atlanta. www.springbankplantation.com Wynfield Plantation 5030 Leary Road, Albany, GA, 31721 (229)889-0193 E-Mail: Annick@wynfieldplantation.com Orvis Wing Shooting Lodge of the Year in 2005 and has also been named among Garden & Gun magazine’s “Top Fifty People, Places, and Things in the South.”

With private cabins, southern cuisine, and a sporting clays course, Wynfield’s accommodations have a unique charm. Located in the heart of quail country, Wynfield represents bobwhite hunting at its finest.

Few things in life are more exciting than your dog locked down on a covey that flushes high and fast when the time is right!

Book your quail hunting experience of a lifetime at Wynfield Plantation. www.wynfieldplantation.com.

Idaho Flying B Ranch 2900 Lawyer Creek Road, Kamiah, ID 83536 (800)472-1945 E-mail: info@flyingbranch.com Located in beautiful north-central Idaho, we are an Orvis-endorsed wing shooting and fly fishing destination with a complete big-game program. Flying B Ranch offers adventures that bring back guests again and again. Open year-round with a full-time staff, the Flying B Ranch delivers consistent quality. Enjoy no-limit wingshooting from our spacious western log lodge, pack into the backcountry for a big-game hunt, or fish for everything from wild westslope cutthroat trout to giant B-run steelhead. It’s all here for you, your family, and friends. www.flyingbranch.com

Kans as Ravenwood Lodge (800)656-2454

E-mail: ravenhpsc@aol.com Contact Kenneth Corbet for reservations.

Ravenwood is a place where hunters can have it all. Located on the eastern edge of Kansas Flint Hills, Ravenwood offers great hunting grounds and a spectacular mix of hard-fl ing European driven pheasants, private guided field hunts, or plantation hunts for wily bobwhites, big cock roosters, prairie chicken, turkey, deer, or sporting clays. Open year-round, reservations required, established 1985. www.ravenwoodlodge.com

M aine Libby Camps PO Box 810, Ashland, ME 04732 (207)435-8274 E-mail: matt@libbycamps.com Orvis-endorsed wing shooting and fishing lodge. Lakeside log cabins, home cooked meals, master guides, and sea planes to access the four million acre private timberlands of the North Maine Woods. Daily fly-outs for trophy native brook trout and land-locked salmon (May-Sept) and for wingshooting in October. Hunting for grouse, woodcock, moose, deer, and bear in the “big woods.”

Fifth-generation owners, since 1890. Orvis Fishing Lodge of the Year 2006-07. www.libbycamps.com

ARGENTINA GRAND SLAM WINGSHOOTING

WWW.SOUTHPARANAOUTFITTERS.COM

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Montana Al Gadoury’s 6X Outfitters Bozeman and Lewiston, MT (406)600-1835 E-Mail: al@6xoutfitters.com Since 1979, guided walk trips on private spring creeks, Yellowstone River floats, and private lakes. Upland bird hunts are based in Lewiston. All wild birds—sage and sharptail grouse, Hungarian partridge, pheasant, and turkey. www.6xoutfitters.com Gallatin River Lodge 9105 Thorpe Rd, Bozeman, MT 59718 (406)388-0148 Our resort is located on a quiet ranch on the Gallatin River west of Bozeman. We offer fly fishing guide service on the Madison, Yellowstone, and Missouri Rivers, plus many famous spring creeks nearby. Superb accommodations, exceptional dining, and conference facilities are available year-round. www.grlodge.com

Ne w M e x i c o Land of Enchantment Guides (505)629-5688 or (505)927-5356 E-mail: trout@loeflyfishing.com Offering single-day guided fly fishing trips and all inclusive, multi-day packages on

the best rivers, streams, lakes, and private ranches in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Excellent year-round fishing.

Experienced guides welcome beginners and experts alike. Orvis-endorsed. www.loeflyfishing.com

Ne w Z e aland High Peak (643)318-6575 E-Mail: Simon@highpeak.co.nz Where great hunting stories begin. Exclusive New Zealand hunting experiences for discerning clientele seeking that rare combination of fine trophy, authentic stalk, and a personal approach. Set among the central South Island’s Southern Alps, the Guild family takes pride in hosting their clients individually on their private station in pursuit of famous Red Stag, Thar, Chamois, and Fallow Buck. www.highpeak.co.nz

North Dakota Dakota Hills Hunting Lodge HC56, Box 90, Oral, SD 57766 (605)424-2500 or (800)622-3603 E-mail: dakhills@gwtc.net Contact Tom Lauing. We offer some of the finest world-class wingshooting available, with an abundance of pheasant, Hungar-

ian partridge, chukar partridge, sharptail grouse, snipe, dove, and bobwhite quail. Allinclusive package includes first- lass lodging along the Cheyenne River, all beverages, three Western-cuisine meals per day, open bar, ammunition, clays, license, 21-bird limit, processing, and airport pickup. www.dakhills.gwtc.net

S pain Hunt Trip Spain 011-34-931162001 E-mail: contact@hunttripspain.com A professional hunting company established

by Francisco Rosich in 1986. Its exclusive purpose is hunting game trophies throughout Spain. Hunt Trip Spain has hunting concessions all over the country for the broad range of magnificent game animals available in Spain: 4 subspecies of Spanish Ibex (Beceite, Gredos, Southeastern & Ronda), Spanish Red Stag, Moufl n Sheep, Fallow Deer, Pyrenean and Cantabrian Chamois, Feral Goat, Wild Boar, Roe Deer and Barbary Sheep. Outstanding hunts for Red-Legged Partridges, driven or upland hunts are also available. HUNT TRIP SPAIN has served International hunters for more than 20 years.

Come, let us transform your visit to Spain into an unforgettable adventure. www.hunttripspain.com

COLORADO ROCKIES

TROPHY ELK-DEER-BEAR Archery, Rifle, Muzzleloader Hunt thousands of acres from secluded cabins on our private hi-country ranch, directly bordering the Grand Mesa National Forest. Summer vacation: explore ranch & wilderness by horse and 4 wheel. Fish 7 trout-stocked lakes. Breathtaking scenery.

GR BAR RANCH, Paonia, CO www.grbarranch.com 800-523-6832

Gray’s Sporting Journal

Gray’s Sporting Properties Advertise your sporting property, ranch or farm in Gray’s Sporting Journal

Please contact Mike Floyd mike.floyd@morris.com

Al Gadoury’s 6X Outfitters 406-600-1835

www.6Xoutfitters.com

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Utah Falcon’s Ledge (435)454-3737 E-mail: info@falconsledge.com One of the great western fly-fishin and wingshooting lodges. Cast to trophy trout on clear tail-waters, mountain freestone streams, private stillwaters, and enjoy a day floating the famous Green or Provo Rivers.

Secure, pristine, and unpressured. Non-fis ing spouses stay free! Honored as the 2012 Orvis Endorsed Fly Fishing Lodge of the Year! www.falconsledge.com

Virginia Chincoteague Hunting & Fishing Center (888)231-4868 Virginia’s Eastern Shore has one of the largest, most diverse populations of waterfowl in North America. Hunt puddlers, divers, sea ducks, mergansers, Atlantic brant, Canada, and snow geese all in the same day with over a 30-bird limit. We also offer rail hunting in September and October. www.duckguide.com

(540)984-4212 E-mail: info@murrayflyship.com Located in the Shenandoah Valley, 90 miles west of Washington, DC. Over 300 rods by Scott, Winston, Orvis, and St. Croix. More than 50,000 flies in stock. Harry Murray conducts 20 fly fishing schools for trout and bass. Complete guide services. Free mailorder catalog. www.murraysflyshop.com Primland 2000 Busted Rock Road Meadows of Dan, VA 24120 (866)960-7746 Join us for a rare opportunity to visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and experience driven pheasant shoots comparable to the best in the U.K. From pegs in a deep valley you’ll aim your double gun at the wild flur y of game birds as they appear from the towering ridges above. Upland birds is also a signature activity with spacious grounds and hard-flushing birds. Primland is the ultimate retreat for world-class golf, refined dining and outdoor activities in an environment of rare natural beauty. www.primland.com

Y ukon T e rritory Tincup Wilderness Lodge (604)484- 4418 or +41 43 455 0101 E-Mail: info@tincup-lodge.com

Murray’s Fly Shop PO Box 156, 121 Main Streeet Edinburg, VA 22824

Situated on the shores of Tincup Lake close to the Kluane National Park in Canada’s Yukon Territory, surrounded by mile up upon mile of unspoiled natural landscape, Tincup Wilderness Lodge enjoys a truly unique location. The surrounding Ruby Range provides views of breathtaking beauty from dawn to dusk. The Lodge can be reached only by floatplane. In order to ensure our undisturbed privacy in a family environment, we limit bookings to a maximum of 8-10 guests per week. This level of occupancy also enables us to welcome groups, giving all members plenty of scope to pursue their various interests and activities. www.tincup-lodge.com

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NOTICE The outfitters, guides, lodges and plantations listed here are advertisers in Gray’s. The copy is provided by the advertiser, and Gray’s makes no claim as to the value of the services provided by any advertiser. When hiring an outfitter or guide, shop with care, and check references before making a financial commitment.

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www.libbycamps.com / 207-435-8274 matt@libbycamps.com

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GSJ

BOOKS

Summer Lit

by Christopher Camuto

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teve Raymond’s roots as a writer reach back into the newsroom of The Seattle Times in the 1960s, “near the end of a colorful era in the history of journalism.” Enos Bradner, the paper’s outdoor editor, was one of the many anglers on the staff, and Raymond became his protégé in not only writing the straightforward prose of the print journalism of the day but also fly fishing for trout and steelhead in the then uncrowded waters of the Pacifi Northwest. We learn this in Sixty Seasons: Notes from a Fly-Fishing Life (Skyhorse Press, hardbound, $24.99, 212 pages), a miscellany of essays on Raymond’s enviable angling life.

Over the decades, Raymond has quietly amassed an impressive body of work in fly fishin . Along with his breakthrough book on Kamloops trout, the two books he published with Winchester Press have long been classics—the 1973 The Year of Angler and the 1985 The Year of the Trout, both graced with Dave Whitlock’s illustrations. Arnold Gingrich’s preface to the former suggests that Raymond’s “promise” was something special from the start. In 1991, Lyons & Burford brought out Steelhead Country, which gives us Raymond’s take on that remarkable obsession. Two Lyons Press titles, the 2002 Nervous Water: Variations on a Theme of Fly Fishing and the 2006 Blue Upright: The Flies of a Lifetime, show Raymond waist deep in contemporary angling, gathering new experiences while staying close to his roots as an angler and a writer. It’s worth noting that while fly fishing changed immeasurably across his lifetime, Raymond’s prose remained vivid and clear,

unhurried and thoughtful, unforced amid the competitive din of a sport that had, for better or worse, caught on.

Sixty Seasons is a minor but valuable addition to all this. It sheds further light on Raymond’s early career, especially his excitement over discovering Ernest Wolcott’s little-known survey of the rivers and lakes of the Pacific Northwest, “my virtual Bible as a young angler.” He pays his debt to his mentors, Enos Bradner and Ralph Wahl, recounts falling in love with steelhead fishin , remembers fishing New Zealand for the first time, remembers the early days of many now crowded fishing venues.

His essays on angling literature reveal his loyalty to fly fishin ’s foundational writers—Haig-Brown, of course, Robert Traver, Arnold Gingrich, Lee Wulff, Vince Marinaro, Nick Lyons. His favorite writers—Harold Blaisdell, Negley Farson, William Humphrey, Dana Lamb—reveal Raymond’s attachment to the past. In reviewing John Gierach, favorably, Raymond seemed to resist new literary voices, especially those associated with what he called the “‘smart-ass’ school of fly-fishin writing.”

Still, Raymond’s take on fly fishing has had its innings, and his appeal is as broad as it is deep. As Gary LaFontaine wrote about Raymond, he is the kind of angling author that non-anglers can read with pleasure.

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ew if any angling writers can get you hooked up with exciting angling action as quickly as can

A gray fox falls through the river ice and drowns.

Todd Davis, “Perception,” Native Species

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Chris Santella, who may well be guilty of belonging to the smart-ass school of fly fishing writing.

Author of the happily ominous Fifty Places to Fly Fish Before You Die, Santella has gathered his recent angling/travel journalism together in The Tug Is the Drug (Stackpole Books, hardbound, $24.95, 176 pages). Santella’s fishing ambitions are limitless, and these pieces crackle with the way the unbound desire to fish will teach you more about world geography than you ever learned in school—giant trevallies in the South Pacific salmon on the Ponoi, juvenile tarpon in the Yucatán’s cavern-fed lakes, permit in Chetumal Bay, salmon in the River Moy in County Sligo, or trying the “forbidden fruit” waters of Cuba.

When Santella fishes more familiar venues like the Deschutes or Crater Lake, he manages to find or reveal, some unexpected angle in the angling—an edgy take on the landscape, the character of the waters at hand, the culture of the setting or the personalities of guides, and, of course, the thrill of the take.

If Steve Raymond is a classicist, Chris Santella digs the improvisational jazz of angling. Grateful for his far-flung shots at angling glory, Santella never plays the hero or the expert. He takes in whatever fishin scene he finds hoping to get the reader packing for some unlikely destination. Beyond the angling, he trumps historians with a scholarly analysis of the Lewis and Clark expedition as a fishing trip. His revelations in “Dylan: The Fly-Fishing Years” will stun musicologists.

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avid Joy and Eric Rickstad’s Gather at the River: 25 Authors on Fishing (Hub City, softbound, $18) reminds us that anglings of all sorts show up in literature that has nothing to do with mainstream fishing writing. Rivers and lakes, swamps and oceans work their magic on writers for whom angling is, at most, a minor preoccupation or distant memory. This anthology is rich with short, colorful essays by means of which a talented gathering of writers reveal some way fishing loomed large in their lives, often their young lives. Taylor Brown remembers the outrage of a blacktip shark he brought to hand off Gould’s Inlet during his Georgia boyhood. J. C. Sasser offers a haunted, lyric riff about fishing as a child in the South Georgia woods. Ron Rash travels back to the Blue Ridge Mountains

to find his boyhood self on Goshen Creek. M. O. Walsh gives us a terrific piece about encountering the primal wildness of nature. Eric Rickstad shows us how we truly understand our angling only in retrospect after we have lived at least half a life.

William Boyle’s “For My Father” is a ferocious essay on coming to understand abandonment. There’s more, as good as the essays I’ve cited. The core gesture of this anthology is that unusually strong memories, as well as emotions it takes decades to unravel, can be found near water. Water dark or bright draws us to it, and then the curiosity of our angling stirs up all sorts of joy and trouble.

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odd Davis, who contributes regularly to Gray’s, writes an earthy, observant kind of poetry that has grown over the years, simultaneously branching into the light and setting dark roots in nature, family life, and spiritual awareness. Native Species (Michigan State University Press, softbound, $19.95, 94 pages) is his seventh book of poetry.

Davis’s poems tend to begin where all our outdoor lives begin, with careful observation of the world our senses find about us—the sounds and sights, the taste and scent and feel of the tangible things that draw us into nature. Not the vaguely painted nature of sentimental verse, but the particulars: “A cloud floats in a pool that turns like a slow clock, / helping these insects slide from birthing shucks” begins “First Thoughts about God after Spying a Speckled Trout Eat a Green Drake.” Then, as the speaker pursues his God, we see the things he sees: duns on the water, the red and blue spots of a brook trout, a heron, a sycamore until “a fis wrings its tail, flings itself / toward the molting sky, mouth open / to a psalm of snared flies.

I’m not drawn to any theology, but I’ll take Todd Davis’s careful working through his own understanding of nature, self, family, spirituality, and art.

He is a true countryman in the old sense, a hunter and fishe man, and in this poetry his claim on abstractions—things heavenly if you want—is as earthy as a fistful of earthworms, a draft of cold spring water. n A countryman of sorts, Chris lives and writes in central Pennsylvania, tending nature and prose.

July 2019 · 107

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POEM

The Politics of the Mad Angler

by Michael Delp

He seeks the consensus of dark bends, feeder creeks, the formations of gravel turned into messages on sand bars.

Where there is sky, he dreams of more.

Where there are politicians he dreams of men with true hearts, their dark veins pulsing with pure run-off.

He offers himself to the air, is willing to trade his life for one river, or if necessary, one cedar, one mayfl , even one pebble dropped from the belly of a glacier.

He uses his body like a sextant, charts the stars at night, imagines his voice coming from the bottom of the river, prowls the swamps with his eyes closed, casting into dark pockets, the fish swa ming in the half light seeping from his skin.

He is true only to himself.

He knows no speeches, has no platform.

His eyes are clear pools, his head a seething universe of emergence schedules, the secrets of nymphs, that single language coming from cold springs in the hills, each one a wild heart pumping the wisdom of iron into the river.

Michael Delp is coeditor of the Made in Michigan series at Wayne State University Press. His most recent book is Lying in the River’s Dark Bed (WSU Press, 2016). He lives in Interlochen, Michigan.

108 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

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Fly Ballet, an original oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches, by Georg Miciu Nicolaevici.

Back Cover: Which Way Did He Go?, an original watercolor, 17 x 27 inches, by C. D. Clarke.

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