Lines on the Water by David Adams Richards Read Free Book Online

or a conservationist might. Not that there is anything wrong with how they might read it, or relate it to us. Biologists and naturalists have worlds of information to provide us, about the greater problems the fish stocks face, but I have not yet met one who actually feels the woods about him, like some of the fishermen and hunters I know.
    Peter, like others, is comfortable in the woods, to the degree that his being
becomes
a part of it. That is the truest testing for natural ability, in both fishing and hunting. Or any occupation.
    However, I would get to know a few pools, and then when Peter got tired of showing me I could hike out on my own, maybe even get my own truck. Of course, as always in a person’s imagination, I imagined fish, and my own canoe and truck and everything else.
    Fishing is a poetic act. There are a great many books that talk about the poetry of fishing, and yet silence might be the best way to understand it. Only to know that it is there, within each person, in an infinite number of ways. What draws menand women to fly-fishing is its testing of self-reliance, coordination, strength, and skill, combined at a variety of levels with the notion of a poetic grasp of the world. No one I have met describes taking a fish or fishing for salmon without in some way being poetic. They might not even know they are being poetic when they talk of the eddies, the falls, the way the water has flooded an area, the banks of the river, how a fish moves from its lay and rises for a fly.
    When I started that year I had no car, let alone a truck. I had to tie blood knots with one hand and my teeth. I had not been in a canoe since my uncle snapped that picture. I did not know anything of the Norwest, let alone the Little Souwest, the Sevogle or its branches. I told myself it did not matter.
    Yet it mattered very much.
    Since I was a boy I had always watched for the signs from other people when they spoke about sport. Skating is easy, they would say. Skiing is easy. Swimming is easy. Rock climbing is easy. Baseball is easy.
    “Fishing is easy,” Peter told me. But I
know
all the levels of difficulty attached to easy, when you can barely open your left hand. Then again, left hand be damned.
    The first day I went salmon fishing, since those few occasions on the Nashwaak—in an old pair of waders with an old rod,with a small plastic dish filled with four flies: two butterflies, a Black Ghost, and a Green Butt Bear Hair—I caught a grilse about three and a half pounds.
    It was a warm day in June as we drove to the Stickney Road where we could walk into the Norwest Miramichi. Peter had a Russian-made Lada truck, which you could take a sledgehammer to without denting, but which was also incomprehensibly pernickety. We parked at the gate and began a three-mile walk into Dr. Wilson’s pool. I had not seen Wilson’s Pool before then. On either side of the road the trees, stunted spruce and maple, waved slightly in the early-morning heat and beaver dams had flooded the road at various places. There were the on-again, off-again faraway calls of ravens. The day was sunny, the sky with distant nebulous clouds that seemed to dissipate before our eyes, and stretches of the road were miraged with pools of water that would fade away to nothing as we walked through them going to where the real water must be. Now and then a colourful bird would glide into a landing a few yards ahead, as silent as the mirages we walked through.
    Wearing the waders made it twice as hot, and tore at our feet. But finally we turned from Stickney Road which would lead one down to Stickney Pool, and we went, along a cooler more overgrown road, towards Wilson’s Pool where an old camp stood. The camp was still in fairly good shape, and saton a flat about twelve yards from the water. Poplars and maples grew about it, and it was dogged at the back by bog and spruce. But it had never been swept away. I stared at the river. How surely, and unconscious of us, and