So was the talented Doug Larsen, who fascinated me with his expansion of the carp family: the specklebelly geese so popular among Texas gunners were “sky carp,” the grayling with their tall dorsal fins that darted out after our flies were “sail carp.” I know he wanted to place the enormous salmonid of the Danube and other waters, the taimen, into some remote branch of the carp family. But it wouldn’t go. The Russians who fished for them, he explained with ill-concealed disgust, waited until the taimen made his first jump, then let him have it with a twelve gauge. The only way to land them, really, and one that put aesthetically pleasing or even polite tackle out of the question. You would be at one with the shark assassins of Montauk and other brutes.
Larsen had brought with him our third companion, a Mr. Duff, who listed among his shadowy achievements giving investment tips to Mookie Blaylock. During the course of our week’s angling it became clear to me that the suave, well-dressed, and neatly coiffed Mr. Duff, introduced to me as having warmed up for Atlantic salmon by float-tubing for bluegills on their spawning beds, was a werewolf. His attempts at angling innocence, like asking whether a Near Nuff Frog would be a good fly to tie on, didn’t fool me even in the beginning. Something about the space between his eyes put me on the qui vive. He was into fish all week and stood on the banks of the tundra river at evening and howled like a Russian wolf to commemorate each catch. Not quite physically powerful enough to pinch down the barb on his hook, he had other strengths. Setting off on my middle-of-the-night excursions, I realized that when I reached the river, the wolf would be there. In the end, we accepted Mr. Duff as he was, a wild dog, saliva glistening in the corners of his mouth, chastely marcelled waves of blond over his forehead, and a gymnast’s ability to fish up to, around, and past you, nipping continuously at your water, as well as an unswerving, otherworldly need to catch the most fish. In other words, a werewolf.
Larsen and I were no longer comfortable with our considerable experience in angling for sea-run fish. We were being hunted down by this bluegill jock and had to exhaust our reserves of strength and knowledge to stay ahead of him. And the Ponoi rewarded him frequently as he gazed reflectively through his cigarette smoke. Incidentally, while he always had a cigarette smoldering between his lips, I never saw him light one. This primeval or eternal cigarette ought to be a final clue for any reader who needs one.
After a few days, you imagine you will be on the river forever. This is one of the few places I have ever fished where salmon seemed truly eminent. One fished with ongoing concentration, trying to throw strikes with every cast, mending as exactly as possible and looking into one’s fly book like a fortune teller. The world of the river became more enclosing, the hurtling power of the fish ever more emblematic of the force of wild things and the plenitude of undisturbed nature.
One afternoon I fished in the trance state of repeated casting. The river was so comfortable, I did without my waders. The clouds were long, thin streamers on the northern summer sky. On the cliff face above me was a nest of arctic gyrfalcons; the parents wheeled around the nest bringing food while the pale, fierce youngsters’ screams echoed across the canyon.
We had passed a place where villagers had come out and built a fire. The ground was trampled and there were empty vodka bottles and pieces of roasted reindeer tongue. These people had been here for thousands of years and had some old habits, not readily discernible to our eyes.
A fish came with a slow rolling motion and started back to his lie with my Green Highlander in the corner of his mouth. I let him tighten against the reel and raised my rod. And now we were off to the races, me running over the round rocks in wading shoes while the fish cartwheeled in midriver, the thread of Dacron backing streaming after it and the reel making its sublime music. We had earlier noted Nick Hood bounding like Nijinsky behind a fish, springing from stone to stone, and I felt more than the usual pressure to stay on my feet. But this fish was landed in a slick behind boulders. I released him without ever taking him out of the water and he flickered away into the depths of his ancestral river.
While Larsen continued to catch fish steadily, Mr. Duff started showing some of the deficits of his otherworldly auspices. He would catch fish at a good clip, then become possessed by a “hoodoo.” By this time we’d become well enough acquainted that he could share some of the special problems he experienced. A hoodoo evidently is some sort of bird, or possibly a bat. When it settles, imperceptibly, between the shoulder blades of the unsuspecting angler, it becomes impossible to catch a fish. One can hook them, but they always get off. So, for a while, the wolf’s echoing howls were less frequent. Sport that he was, though, he finally shook it. From time to time the hoodoo settled on Larsen and me. We also began to acquire some of his other problems; by midweek, for example, Larsen had begun taking great pains to precisely part his hair.
That night, when I left the dining tent with its many pleasures of good food, pleasant companionship, and a fly-tying table where the silliest notions may be brought to life, I knew I had to keep fishing. However, it had been a long day and a small nap was in order. Larsen and Mr. Duff, now transmuted into a bon vivant, refilling drinks, telling golfing stories, and smoking the very cigarette I had watched glow all week long, were in the dining tent for the foreseeable future, actively being corrupted by an English farmer, James Keith, who promoted late-night card games and a general shore-leave atmosphere.
I awakened at three, gulped the cup of cold coffee I’d left beside my bunk, and soon was walking through the sleeping camp with my rod over my shoulder. Snores issued from several tents and the sun was shining merrily. Wagtails had seized this time to hop among the tents looking for food. I noted Hood’s sixteen-foot Spey rod leaned up in front of his tent. Hood was in for the evening and there was every chance I would have the magnificent Home Pool — one of the great salmon pools in the world — to myself. I climbed down the path along a small stream, waving away the mosquitoes, and was soon casting out onto the great river and discovering how tired my muscles really were.
I caught a small grilse right away, a silver-bright fish only a day or so from the ocean. Then it got still and not a fish was rolling. Though sleep kept rising through my mind, I was in the river and the casts were still rolling out. About halfway down the pool I felt a jolting strike. After ripping forty yards into my backing, a terrific salmon made one crashing jump after another well out in midriver. Then it started back toward the ocean. I put as deep a bow in the rod as I dared and began following the fish downstream. I beached this big male on a small point, beyond which I might not have been able to follow. His lower jaw was so hooked it had worn a groove in the upper, and I was delighted to make certain this individual could make his contribution to the gene pool. I’ve always thought that it would be nice after landing an exceptional fish to go straight to bed. And so I did, drifting off in my glowing tent to a dream of sea-run fish.
We stopped in Murmansk for a couple of hours on the way out. I went to a small museum and looked at some wonderful paintings of submarines — some in the open sea, some in remote ocean coves with snow on their decks — and the portraits of their captains. This glimpse of military glory was at sharp odds with the beleaguered municipality all around us. As I looked at the cheerlessly monolithic public housing towering over raw, bulldozed ground, I remembered that the leading cause of domestic fires in Russia is exploding television sets. But no one in the world has wild, open country like the Russians, a possible ace-in-the-hole on a strangling planet. Poets and naturalists could have understood this so much more comprehensively than I did, dragging my fly rod, but without it I probably would never have gotten there or stood for a week in a river coursing through the tundra to the Barents Sea.