Bo fishes the way he wants to, floating line, sheer, good-natured steadiness. When he fished Tierra del Fuego, he fished the same way, even though some of the dredgers in his camp were having more activity. Though it didn’t get to him, it would have gotten to me. I’d have dredged. Bo calls Tierra del Fuego the land of the T-300 and the black Bunny Leech, a place to be fished “no more than once in ten years.” He has a tolerant but persistent approach to his fishing. I spent a week with him a year ago on the Sustut River in British Columbia and in all our conversations he neglected to mention that just before we met he had caught an Atlantic salmon of more than fifty pounds. I had to read it in The Atlantic Salmon Journal, where it was given the same emphasis ordinarily accorded land speed records.
Therefore, when Yvon and I came upriver to pick up Bo, waiting with Spey rod furled at his side, we responded to his beaming statement, “I just caught a huge fish,” as if to a joke. I said, “Are you sure it was a steelhead?” Mildly exasperated, Bo told me that of course it was a steelhead, with a big red stripe down its side. From his description, it was indeed a large fish, well over twenty pounds, a big male that never jumped but crossed the river at will more than once, which made me wonder if I’d inadvertently deprecated his moment of triumph. All steelheaders are cruelly incredulous about fish caught “around the bend,” even if the catch was witnessed by Mother Teresa.
There were anglers on the other side of the river. On a steelhead river, fishermen one doesn’t know are more or less the enemy; these made a great point of not observing the fight. Later, when Bo bumped into them, they wanted to know if it was a dying chinook he’d snagged. I was beginning to see why he hadn’t mentioned the fifty-pounder. On the great rivers, salutes can be rare.
THE FIRST TIME I fished the Dean was more than ten years ago, when El Niño conspired with the gillnetters to reduce the run to a smidgeon. A friend had invited me to join a group of what at first sounded like angling conceived on an imperial scale. It was and that was the problem. The first issue was finding a way to load his cases of wine and foodstuffs, his PVC sewer pipe filled with rods, onto the plane to Bella Coola.
We stayed on a sort of ministeamer in the Dean channel with a helicopter on deck. We had three-wheelers on the shore. We would ride in the helicopter up the river to the pools. Below us, the Totem anglers and other groups of real fishermen jumped up and down and gave us the finger. I cringed in the chopper and was afraid to get out when it landed. Anyway, never mind, there were no fish. So we persuaded the young pilot to take us about the countryside. We descended upon a grizzly bear who jumped up as though to catch a giant moth. Every living thing hated our alien technology. Finally, we went fishing for the lowly pink salmon, caught hundreds, and the pain began to lift. Back at the ship, our leader, a manic-depressive director of angling tours, tied hundreds of Green Butt Skunks, awaiting the run; he could no longer speak. We set crab traps from the side of the ship and pretended that a seafood dinner was all we were after, up the Dean channel with all this gear. The leader tied flies; the helicopter pilot suggested crazy side trips to run up some billable hours; the real fishermen were poised on the beach to kill us; the steelhead waited around the Queen Charlottes without any immediate plans. Finally, a friend and I talked the helicopter pilot into flying us back to Vancouver. No one had the heart to go upriver again, soaring over the countless fists and fingers.
The coast swam by under our plastic bubble windshield. As the sun shone in, the tension began to leave me and I fell asleep. The other anglers joined us at the hotel later that night. When I looked in on them, they were all in their underwear surrounded by Chinese prostitutes; it didn’t seem the right time for fish chat.
All winter long I received upward-revised bills from the manic depressive. But that wasn’t the true debt. For years, I ran into visitors to this beautiful river. “You were on that goddamn ship?” they’d inquire. “In that helicopter?” Ever since then I’ve been trying to treat the great river right, trying to get out of its debt. I was the guy who’d farted in church. It would be a year before I was restored to grace.
THE SHOOTING woke us up. A grizzly sow and her three large cubs had come into a camp and they were fighting over something in the yard, cuffing each other into the sides of the cabins. During the rest of the night, the guides tried without luck to send them on their way. Only sunrise sufficed, by which time the four seemed consumed by guilt from their all-night party. They slipped into the brush on the west side of camp and moments later were racing over the round stones of the river bar on their way out of Dodge.
Bears are exhilarating. They’d been around before, and in a previous year had even chewed up the proprietor’s airplane. This year, more than a few were dining on spawned-out salmon: an easy life on the verge of winter, but grizzlies did not require ease. If necessary, they would ascend the high, exposed scree slopes and snatch a mountain goat who thought he could safely watch the passing seasons in the valley below. Their rare excursions into camp certainly gave new piquancy to late-night trips to the outhouse. But this was the British Columbian wilderness, and anything that starkly contrasted with our everyday world, like the grizzly bear, the raven, the wolf or the eagle, was welcome. To the robust cubs backing around the cabins with garbage sacks and low growls, I wished to say, Have at it.
I was back on the Dean. As always with anadromous species, the question was whether or not the fish were in. These days, any delay in a run fills the angler with the fear they may not come at all. River fish that are subjected during part of their life cycle to the rapacity and lawlessness of high seas commercial fishing face a serious question of survival.
The steelhead of each river system are separate races, their characteristics derived from deep time in a particular place. Dean River fish are known for their speed and wild strength and they will come to a dry-fly better than other strains, though the depth and clarity and prevailing temperatures of the river itself have much to do with this.
I caught a small fish on the first day, then fell into a long dry spell. Casting from daybreak to sundown, wading deep in clear green water as it sweeps past the gravel bars and wooded foothills, is stirring exercise. And with a floating line, the pleasures of casting are alone fulfilling. But when the second day rolled around and I had not moved a fish, I could feel the slight clench start — the clench that suggests you might never hook another steelhead if you cast for a thousand years. Suspecting I’d sinned against the river with ship and helicopter, I sat down on the rocky abutment of an old logging bridge where tame winter wrens explored for insects in the sunny cracked stones. Half of the second blank day was over and I knew I was pressing. For some reason that’s hard to pin down, pressing won’t work on steelhead. Covering the water is all-important, but so is fishing out each cast, mending and controlling fly speed. Elements such as fly speed and the look of the fly making its small V-wake on the surface require a delicacy born of composure. An effective steelheader must control his temperament and master his touch through long hours of disappointment and the wild conditions of Northwest coastal rivers.
The boat dropped me off at the top of the most beautiful steelhead run I had ever seen. I had a quiet moment to look the water over and tie on my favorite steelhead fly, the October Caddis. There was a sparkling chute of white, boulder-strewn water at the head that quickly dissipated in the deep, flowing pool. Across from me was a high rock wall covered with lichen. A ribbon falls descended its face and made a circle of bubbles in the water below. The tailout was a shoal of small stones where the entire Dean River rushed toward the sea, accompanied by impossibly rare music.