Nothing but Blue Skies

25

The sun was just coming up. They could make out the light in the tops of cottonwoods. And dropping smoothly out of sight was the pale disc of the moon with its wonderful discolorations. It was like being in a big church in the middle of the week and the only light was in the high windows. They put their rods together and leaned them against the hood of the Buick. Frank opened the bag of doughnuts and set them out and Holly poured coffee from the steel thermos.

“It’s already warm,” she said. She screwed the lid back on the thermos and set it down decisively. The steam curled up from their cups. There was a dusting of powdered sugar from the doughnuts on the black paint of the hood.

“It was good we started early.”

Holly turned her head and listened. Then Frank heard it, a coyote insinuating a thin pure note that seemed to fade into the sky. He could almost feel himself carried with it into a pure blue place. “Are you going to take a net?” Holly asked. She still cocked her head in the direction of the coyote. She smiled to indicate that she had heard it. The little wolves had been here for thousands of years.

“I don’t think so. The lanyard always stretches in the brush and fires the damn thing into my kidneys. You know what, though? Maybe I better. Think if we hooked a big one somewhere we couldn’t beach it.”

“Gosh this coffee is good. Didn’t that ’yote sound pretty?”

“Beautiful.”

“Beautiful … That’s right, beautiful.”

Frank went ahead and found a cow trail through the wild roses with their modest pink blossoms. The cottonwoods left off quickly and they were on a broad level place. Here and there were stands of cattails, water just out of sight. And while they threaded their way on a game trail through the brush, they could hear waterfowl chatting among themselves about their passage. When they were almost to the stream, they walked under a huge dead cottonwood, a splendid outreaching candelabra shape festooned with ravens who nervously strode their perches and croaked at the humans beneath them. One bird pirouetted from his branch and, falling like a black leaf, settled on the trail ahead of them. They stopped and Frank tossed his last piece of doughnut. The raven hopped up to it, picked it up in his beak, flew back with it to his roost. “This isn’t his first day on the job,” said Frank.

Before they reached the edge of the stream the sun was upon them. There was no bank as such, just the end of the wild roses and an uplifted ridge of thorn trees where magpies squawked at the intrusion. But they could hear the stream, which emanated not far away from a series of blue spring holes at a water temperature that stayed constant, winter and summer. Frank loved to arrive at a stream he knew as well as this one. You could strike it at any point and know where you were, like opening a favorite book at a random page.

They stopped at the edge and gazed upon the deep silky current. A pair of kingbirds fought noisily across the stream, and on its banks were intermittent pale purple stands of wild iris. Holly said, “Ah.” For some reason she looked as small as a child in her chest waders; whenever she stopped, she stood her fly rod next to her as a soldier would, while Frank flicked at the irises with the tip of his. He stared at the steady flow of water.

“Nothing moving,” Frank said. “Needs to warm up.”

“Where is the otter pool from here?”

“Well, right above us is the long riffle —”

“With the foam buildup in the corner?”

“Yup, and then the long ledge with the plunge in the middle of it.”

“Okay, I know where I am now. Otter pool right above that.”

“Holly! We’re a little foggy on details.”

“I’m a history major. The foreground erodes for history majors. We like an alpine perspective.”

They worked their way along the bank, blind casting to the undercut far side, hopscotching upstream until they could hear the shallow music of the riffle. Frank tried to watch Holly without making her self-conscious. She was an accurate close-range caster, her line a clean tight loop, and she had the ability to slow the line down, almost to the point of its falling when she was presenting the fly. She soon hooked a fish.

“What have you got on?” Frank asked as she fought the fish, her rod in a bow. The fish jumped high above the pool as they talked.

“Elk hair caddis. Just something that floats.” She hunkered next to the bank and slipped her hand under the fish, a nice trout of about a pound. She let it go, stood up and smiled at Frank while she cast the line back and forth to dry her fly.

At the broad ledge they were each able to take a side of the stream and fish at the same time, casting up into the bubbled seam beneath the rocks. Holly pointed to the plunge at the center and said to Frank, “After you, my boy.” Frank cast straight into the center of the plunge. The fly barely had time to land before he hooked a rainbow that blew end over end out into the shallows and held for a long time against the curve of his rod, a band of silver-pink ignited by the morning light. Soon Frank had it in hand, a hard cold shape, gazing down at the water while he freed the hook. Frank let it go and rinsed his hand. He looked upstream and said, “The otter pool.”

“You forgot to thank me for that fish.”

“Thank you, Holly.”

The sun was still too low, and so they waited quietly before they started upstream. The tall sedges grew down so close to the bank that it was necessary for them to stay in the stream to get up to the otter pool. They waded in the center where the current had scrubbed the bottom down to firm sand. Frank was in over his hips and Holly was almost to the top of her waders. She held her rod up in the air and pressed the top of her waders to her chest with her free hand so that water couldn’t splash in. They made two great V’s in the current. “This is the moon,” said Holly, “and I’m on tiptoes.”

“Smell the cold air on the surface of the river.”

“Stop,” said Holly, peering closely at the water. They were on either side of the thread of current and mayflies were starting to appear, unfurling their tiny wings and struggling to float upright. Every few seconds one would come by, some still in their nymphal stage, the case just beginning to split and release the furled wing; others were sailing upright like pale yellow sloops.

“Ephemerella infrequens,” said Holly.

“Little sulphurs,” said Frank.

“Pale morning duns,” said Holly, “like I told you last night.”

Frank hung on to his old names for flies, had never learned the Latin of Holly’s generation of anglers. “Pale morning dun” was the compromise, reasonably objective compared to the sulphurs and yellow sallies and hellgrammites and blue-winged olives of Frank’s upbringing.

At the bend, the wild irises looked as if they would topple into the stream. The narrow band of mud at the base of the sedges revealed a well-used muskrat trail, and on this band stood a perfectly motionless blue heron, head back like the hammer of a gun. It flexed its legs slightly, croaked, sprang into wonderfully slow flight, a faint whistle of pinions, then disappeared over the top of the wall of grasses as though drawn down into its mass.

Around this bend was the otter pool, so called because, when Holly was twelve, she and Frank had watched a family of river otters, three of them, pursuing trout in its depths. Holly took the position that the otters were just like their family: one otter was Frank, one Holly, one Gracie. When the three seized the same trout and rent it, Holly cried, “Oh, poor trout!” and sent the otters into panicked flight upstream.

They stopped quietly at the lower end of the pool, which was wide and deep and surrounded by aspens and cottonwoods. At the top of the pool was a rocky run that looked like a watery stairway. It enlivened a silvery chute of bubbles that didn’t disperse until a third of the way down the pool. The movement of water folded into a precise seam of current only at the end of the pool. All along the seam, trout were rising and sipping down the mayflies under a tapestry of reflected cottonwood leaves.

They stopped to watch. “Hm,” said Holly.

“An embarrassment of riches.”

As they watched, a fish rose about halfway up the pool, a quiet rise that displaced more water than the others, sending a tremor out toward the sides of the pool. Holly grabbed his arm.

“See that?” she asked.

“Mm-hm.”

The fish rose again and, in a minute, again.

“Has it got a feeding rhythm,” Holly asked, “or is it just taking them when they come?” The fish rose again, its dorsal making a slight thread against the surface.

“I think it’s on a rhythm. There’re just too many bugs coming off now. What kind of leader have you got on?”

“Twelve-footer, five-X,” Holly said. “You’re not going to make me cast to that thing, are you?”

“Didn’t I thank you for that last rainbow?”

“Can I get by with this tippet?”

“You’ll have to. I hate to take the time to change it now. I don’t know if you could hold this fish with anything lighter, assuming you make the cast.”

“Assuming I make the cast …”

A light breeze moved across the water and turned it from black to silver, a faint corrugation that obscured everything that was happening. “Right-hand wind,” Holly said gloomily. Then it went back to slick black. “Am I going to line those little fish, trying to reach him?”

“I think you’ve got to take that chance,” said Frank, easing over to the bank in a slight retreat to the ledge where the heron had stood. “If you think about them too much, it’ll throw you off.” The fish fed again. Even Frank had a nervous stomach. Holly stood and stared. Frank said, “I’m going to try to get up the bank where I can see this fish better. Why don’t you try to get in position?”

Frank left his rod at the side of the stream and pushed his way through grass as tall as his face until he got up onto the top of the bank. He worked his way back through the brush until he could look back and see the pool glinting through the branches. Then he got on all fours and crawled to the slight elevation alongside the pool. By the time he reached it, he was on his belly and perfectly concealed. He could see right into the middle of the pool. “Ready to call in the artillery,” he said.

“I can’t even see you,” said Holly.

“Nothing going on.”

“Do you think he’s gone?”

“No.”

Small fish continued making their splashy rises. Frank could see well enough to make out the insects. He rested his chin on the backs of his hands and didn’t have to wait long. He tracked a dun mayfly out of the bubbles at the head of the pool, then another, then another. When this one reached mid-pool, a shape arose, clarified into a male brown trout with a distinct hook to its lower jaw and sipped the fly off the surface. It was a startlingly big fish, leopard-spotted, with its prominent dorsal fin piercing the surface. The low pale curve of its belly appeared to grow out of the depths of the pool itself. It sank almost from sight, but even after it had fed, Frank could make out its observing presence deep in the pool, a kind of intelligence.

“See that?”

Instead of answering, Holly began to strip line from her reel. She had the fly in her hand and blew on it. “I’m just going to cast,” she said. “I’m thinking too hard. How big?”

“Big.”

“Oh, I wish I hadn’t asked.”

“You have the fish marked pretty well?”

“Yeah, here goes.”

Frank could see her false casting, but the fly tailed the loop, turned over too soon and hooked on the line. “Shit!” Holly brought her line back in and cleared the fly.

“You’re rushing, Holly. You’re turning it over too soon. Cast like you always do. Don’t press.” She started again. “Slow, slow.” And she did, resuming her elegant cadence. The curve of line opened. The fly floated down and the fish arose steadily from the depths. “Whoa whoa whoa,” said Frank. “Don’t strike, he’s taking one in front of yours. Let the current take your fly away.” The fish eased up, made a seam as he broke the surface, then sank. Frank heard a pent-up breath escape from Holly while he watched the heavy fish suck an insect down. The fish held just beneath the surface, both the dorsal and tip of his tail out of the water; his gills flared crimson and a faint turbulence spread to the surface from either side of his head.

“Try again while he’s still up,” Frank said, and an instant later Holly’s fly fluttered down from above, right in the feeding lane of the trout. He could see the fly rock around on the bright hackles Holly had wound on the hook last night, slowly closing on the fish. The trout elevated slowly and the fly disappeared down a tiny whirlpool in the water. “There,” said Frank, not too loud, and the thin leader tightened into the air, a pale cool spray the length of it. “You’ve got him!”

Frank stood straight up out of the brush as the trout surged across the pool. Holly held her rod high with both hands and said, “Oh, God God God God God.”

“Let him go.”

“I am letting him go.”

“Don’t touch that reel.”

“I’m not touching the reel!”

Frank got back below the pool and waded out to Holly. The reel was screeching. She was looking straight ahead where the line pointed. There was a deep bow in the rod. She moved her face slightly in Frank’s direction. “I’m dying,” she said. The fish started to run and the click of the reel set up a steady howl. “I am going to die.”

Frank wanted to take some of the pressure off Holly. He moved his ear next to the screeching reel and looked up at her. “Darling,” he said, “they’re playing our song.”

“Daddy, stop it. This is killing me!”

“I thought this was supposed to be fun.”

“It’s torture. Oh, God.”

The fish stayed in the pool. It might have sensed that Frank and Holly were at the lower end, and the rapids above were probably too shallow for a fish this big to negotiate. If it went that way, the light leader would have quickly broken on rocks. All Holly could do was keep steady pressure and hope the fish was well hooked and that none of its teeth were close to the tippet. She was doing her part perfectly. The fish began to work its way deliberately around the pool, staying deep. “I guess this is where we get to see if there are any snags,” she said gloomily. This fish swam entirely around the pool once, an extraordinarily smart thing to do; but it couldn’t find something to wind Holly’s leader around. And it was having increasing difficulty staying deep in the pool. Holly continued to keep the same arc in her rod and watched vigilantly where the line sliced the surface. Finally, the fish stopped and held, then slowly let itself be lifted toward the surface. For the first time, Holly cautiously reeled.

Frank undid his net from the back of his vest and held it in the water to wet the mesh. The fish was coming toward them. “Let me be in front of you, Hol,” he said quietly. When the fish was closer, he held the net underwater toward the fish. He could hear the unhurried turns of the reel handle. He looked straight at the fish from above. It turned quietly around and went back to the center of the pool, accompanied by the steady whine of Holly’s reel. “Oh, how much of this can I stand!” said Holly. But when the fish stopped, she resumed her steady work.

“We’ll catch this fish, Hol.”

“Do you think so?”

“I think so.”

“You’re just saying that, aren’t you?”

“No, I foresee the fish in my net.”

When the fish reappeared, Frank stared hard and moved the net toward it. The fish seemed pressed away by the net. Holly brought it closer and the net pushed it away but it didn’t move off quite the same way. “I’m going for it,” Holly said, and pulled hard enough to move the fish toward Frank; the fish turned and chugged toward the other bank but was unable to dive. Holly brought it back once more, and this time the fish glided toward the pressure of her rod and Frank swept the net in the air, streaming silver and slung deeply with the bright spotted weight of the fish.

“I’m so happy, I’m so happy!” Holly cried as Frank submerged the net to keep the trout underwater. “I never caught such a big fish!” He slipped his hand inside the net and around the slick underside of the trout, unveiling him delicately as the net was lifted clear. With his left hand under the fish and his right hand around its tail, he was able to hold it. The little pale yellow fly was stuck just in the edge of his upper jaw. Holly reached down to free it and the fly fell out at her touch. Frank held the fish head up into the current until the kicks of the tail became strong. “You want to do the honors?” he asked.

“You.”

“Grab,” he said. Holly took the wrist of the fish’s tail just above Frank’s hand.

Holly let go, then Frank let go, feeling the weight of the fish with his left hand and the curve of the fish’s belly with his right. Underwater, the trout seemed to take its bearings and balance itself. Then it kicked free, gliding to disappear into the middle of the pool. They began hollering like wild hog hunters, gesturing at the sky, Frank with his fists, Holly with her rod.

“I’m the champion of the world!” Holly yelled.

There seemed little point in doing anything but contemplate the bewildering size of a trout that must have rarely let down its guard in a long life. They were confident it would never make that mistake again. It was strange to feel affection for a creature finning secretively, almost below the light, disturbing the gravel bottom with an outrush of water from its broad gills. They were silent in the glitter of cottonwood leaves.

Later, as they drove home, they sang. Frank pushed off the steering wheel to belt out his small part and Holly twisted in her seat operatically.

“Hey!”

“Hey!”

“You!”

“You!”

“Get offa my cloud!”

And Holly’s visit home was over. When her plane went off in a shrinking silver spot that disappeared, he felt his chest go all fluid with emotion that rose up through his face before he controlled it. With so many of his family, people he had known, gone, to have someone he loved as much as he loved Holly poised early in her life, facing out onto the flat earth, was overwhelming. Today he had had her attention fully and he knew that wouldn’t always be true. It was hard to take that in.