BOOKENDS ON THE BOULDER

from High Country Angler | Fall 2021

PREDATOR ON THE FLY

A GUIDE’S LIFE • BY HAYDEN MELLSOP Bookends on the Boulder

Scaring the daylights out of me, an owl alights from a willow branch and ghosts between the trees, dissolving into the darkness of the meadow beyond. Heart racing, I empty my bladder against the trunk and return inside, light a burner and boil water. Outside again, dressed against the chill, sipping hot tea in silence, I watch as the sun’s first rays color the mountaintops to the west.

Back inside, I flick on a light and study a rudimentary map, deciding on a course of action. Within an hour’s drive from the cabin flows any one of a number of famous rivers, but my interest is drawn elsewhere. The cabin sits toward the narrow end of a tapering valley which, yesterday upon arrival, had been soaked in the soft glow of evening, long shadows cast across cattle grazing on a checkerboard of hay meadows interspersed with the occasional barn or ranch house. The road and a small river intertwined like two strands of DNA up the valley’s center, with mountains rising in the distance, squat and purple in the gathering darkness.

On the map, the blue line of the river and the black of the road come together where the valley pinches close like the waist of an hour glass, then rise steeply before the countryside opens out again into a serpentine valley. The black line peters out after several miles, while the blue line continues to meander. I decide the famous waters can wait. Unable to decide between bacon and sausage, I cook some of each then point the truck upcountry, toward the highlands.

The blacktop ends where the valley constricts, at first to manicured gravel, until I cross a bridge and the potholes and rock ledges begin. The mountains part sufficiently to allow both the river and an occasional small meadow to nestle between them. I drive until I guess it’s been a half hour since I’ve last seen a telephone pole or side road, then turn down a narrow rutted track through mud and standing water to a flat spot among some trees and park. Across the river a meadow’s grasses hold the last traces of summer’s color, and an occasional aspen flares golden amongst the uniform green of the firs blanketing the higher ground.

The river flows clear over grey and tan cobbles with wisps of dark green algae that undulate gently in the current on the downstream ends of the larger rocks. A surging wind gusts from several directions at once, and off-white clouds scud between the peaks, but the air is warm and pleasant. After fifteen minutes of carefully working the current seams and eddy lines of the first run, an elbow bend that empties into a cut bank, I take a nice rainbow. The fish rises to sniff at my dry and at first refuses, before following it downstream, indecisive, nose high, weighing its options before committing. Over the next six hours, I hike a couple of miles of stream and see not another fish, nor trace of one.

Suddenly, I notice shadows are falling across the water in dark fingers from the firs lining the opposite bank, and I reach a place where a rapid tumbles out of a steep dog-leg in a series of boulder-y drops. I stand at the base of the last of these, the water soft and aerated, white like a veil laid down on emerald, and drift a semisubmerged mayfly emerger along a bubble line that snakes between large boulders. The fish rises to it in the shadows and I don’t see the take, but set by instinct to a gentle disturbance on the water’s surface. I play the fish around a

couple of boulders before kneeling in the water and drawing it to my hand. Its dark olive topside fades to pale yellow along its sparsely spotted flanks, the slashes under its jaw vibrant orange, matching its gill plates. It lies quietly across my palm with apparent acceptance of its fate until I lower it back in the water and it slowly swims free.

Standing, I stretch out my back and look upstream toward the head of the pool and the cascade beyond. I wonder how long the river here has been tumbling its course, and how long cutthroats have lived and died in this thin ribbon of life, playing their part in the great clockwork, and for how much longer they will. While standing my boots have sunk an inch or two into the pea gravel, and as I turn and wade to shore the equilibrium of

rock and water reasserts itself and my footprints disappear. It is late in the evening and I sit again on the deck, this time margarita in hand instead of tea, thinking of bookends and late-day salvation. Although the sun has set, its rays curve from below the horizon to light the bellies of the clouds orange and red. The marg performs its magic, untying the fisherman’s knot in my shoulders and easing the ache in my calves and thighs. I toast Montana, and cutthroats. About The Author Hayden Mellsop is an expat New Zealander living in the mountain town of Salida, Colorado, on the banks of the Arkansas River. As well as being a semi-retired fly fishing guide, he juggles helping his wife raise two teenage daughters, along with a career in real estate.