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

the trees above it, it flowed. As unconscious of self as all great things are, as some of the best fishermen and women are.
    The river was quite full and flowed quickly, and was not as wide as I thought it would be. But then I remembered a past time long ago when, as a boy of twelve, Mr. Simms told me about this place, and how he took a salmon here, and I realized that he had described it exceptionally well to me. It was as if the salmon somehow still existed, and always would. That the river, this great Norwest Miramichi, proved to us that life was infinite and continuous.
    I looked at the camp and thought the same thing. The patched walls inside, the faint smell of bark and charcoal, the scent of sun hitting the roof reminded me of the story Mr. Simms had told about his sawed-off cousins, and how they had stolen his camp, and how he got it back. I decided I would tell that story to Peter some day. The camp stood in silence at the edge of this world. The world about us was in bloom, with wild daisies and foot-high ferns, the buds sprouted out into early leaf.
    “We’ll get fish here,” Peter told me, as I was thinking this and he was reading the water, “I guarantee it.”
    Well, guarantee is good, I thought, but since I had only cast a fly rod once or twice before, I was a little uncertain about it.
    I heard the rapids at the top of this fine pool as we walked up to it. And there is nothing more thrilling to a fisherman than that sound.
    The river was still high, over the grassy path, the water swift and beer brown flowing over the boulders that dotted the river, leaving most of them submerged, their tips like icebergs.
    As we approached the pool we could see some commotion. It was strange that the first person I would ever meet on the river was my wife’s first cousin, David Savage, and his dog, Blue. The little mutt was running back and forth on the shore, where Savage had his Norwest canoe pulled up, and at the lower part of the pool he was playing a fish. His rod was bent over, his line was tight in the water, as if it was hooked to a boulder. But now and again that line would move, as the fish moved, and the reel would sing. The fish had jumped a few times, but was now staying down, moving with the current and then turning into it. Then it would take long runs and Savage’s line would go out.
    I sat down on the bank and watched him, and had as much fun doing that as fishing. After another ten minutes, David landed the fish, a female salmon about eight pounds. He had taken it on a Rusty Rat, a small dusty rust-coloured fly.
    It seemed incomprehensible to a novice like myself that a fly that small could take a fish that large. Or that the invisible leader wouldn’t snap away. And I might have said this when he later showed the fly and leader to me. But it was a number 6 Rusty Rat and, consequently, was a big fly compared to some used later on in the summer. Also a ten-pound test would go down to a six-pound test as the water conditions got lower after June, and the summer went on.
    Another thing I was bemused by was how this water could hide fish that size, even if it was heavy darkish water that day.
    I suppose I could take a moment to think of Karen Blixen’s description of fish in her story collection
Antedote of Destiny
, and how they are perfect representatives of the best of God’s world. How they live in a kind of three-dimensional world of space and time, that there is no up or down for them, or sideways. They move as surely as any of God’s great creatures, and the salmon is one of the surest of all God’s fish. On the Miramichi, fish
means
salmon. So if you ask someone if they have seen any
fish
and they say, “No, but I got a few trout,” it is not at all a contradiction.
    People I met that day, and in the months to come, I would meet for years, and get to know some of them well. But someof them I would know only as others who haunted our rivers of grace. In the years to come, around a turn on a