He could remember an argument about it with Hopkins, but not which side he
had taken. He dedded to bring it to a boil. He remembered now that was
Hopkins's way. He had once argued about everything with Hopkins. While he
waited for the coffee to boil, he opened a small can of apricots. He liked
to open cans. He emptied the can of apricots out into a tin cup. While he
watched the coffee on the fire, he drank the juice syrup of the apricots,
carefully at first to keep from spilling, then meditatively, sucking the
apricots down. They were better than fresh apricots.
The coffee boiled as he watched. The lid came up and coffee and grounds
ran down the side of the pot. Nick took it off the grill. It was a triumph
for Hopkins. He put sugar in the empty apricot cup and poured some of the
coffee out to cool. It was too hot to pour and he used his hat to hold the
handle of the coffee pot. He would not let it steep in the pot at all. Not
the first cup. It should be straight Hopkins all the way. Hop deserved that.
He was a very serious coffee drinker. He was the most serious man Nick
had ever known. Not heavy, serious. That was a long time ago. Hopkins spoke
without moving his lips. He had played polo. He made millions of dollars in
Texas. He had borrowed carfare to go to Chicago, when the wire came that his
first big well had come in. He could have wired for money. That would have
been too slow. They called Hop's girl the Blonde Venus. Hop did not mind
because she was not his real girl. Hopkins said very confidently that none
of them would make fun of his real girl. He was right. Hopkins went away
when the telegram came. That was on the Black River. It took eight days for
the telegram to reach him. Hopkins gave away his. 22 caliber Colt automatic
pistol to Nick. He gave his camera to Bill. It was to remember him always
by. They were all going fishing again next summer. The Hop Head was rich. He
would get a yacht and they would all cruise along the north shore of Lake
Superior. He was excited but serious. They said good-bye and all felt bad.
It broke up the trip. They never saw Hopkins again. That was a long time ago
on the Black River.
Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was
bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was
starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He
spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire.
He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and
trousers, sitting on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers
for a pillow and got in between the blankets.
Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire, when
the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly
quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close
to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas,
over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a
satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again
under the blanket. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy.
He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.
Part II
In the morning the sun was up and the tent was starting to get hot.
Nick crawled out under the mosquito netting stretched across the mouth of
the tent, to look at the morning. The grass was wet on his hands as he came
out. He held his trousers and his shoes in his hands. The sun was just up
over the hill. There was the meadow, the river and the swamp. There were
birch trees in the green of the swamp on the other side of the river.
The river was clear and smoothly fast in the early morning. Down about
two hundred yards were three logs all the way across the stream. They made
the water smooth and deep above them. As Nick watched, a mink crossed the
river on the logs and went into the swamp. Nick was excited. He was excited
by the early morning and the river. He was really too hurried to eat
breakfast, but he knew he must. He built a little fire and put on the coffee
pot.
While the water was heating in the pot he took an empty bottle and went
down over the edge of the high ground to the meadow. The meadow was wet with
dew and Nick wanted to catch grasshoppers for bait before the sun dried the
grass. He found plenty of good grasshoppers. They were at the base of the
grass stems. Sometimes they clung to a grass stem. They were cold and wet
with the dew, and could not jump until the sun wanned them. Nick picked them
up, taking only the medium-sized brown ones, and put them into the bottle.
He turned over a log and just under the shelter of the edge were several
hundred hoppers. It was a grasshopper lodging house. Nick put about fifty of
the medium browns into the bottle. While he was picking up the hoppers the
others warmed in the sun and commenced to hop away. They flew when they
hopped. At first they made one flight and stayed stiff when they landed, as
though they were dead.
Nick knew that by the time he was through with breakfast they would be
as lively as ever. Without dew in the grass it would take him all day to
catch a bottle full of good grasshoppers and he would have to crush many of
them, slamming at them with his hat. He washed his hands at the stream. He
was excited to be near it. Then he walked up to the tent. The hoppers were
already jumping stiffly in the grass. In the bottle, warmed by the sun, they
were jumping in a mass. Nick put in a pine stick as a cork. It plugged the
mouth of the bottle enough, so the hoppers could not get out and left plenty
of air passage.
He had rolled the log back and knew he could get grasshoppers there
every morning.
Nick laid the bottle full of jumping grasshoppers against a pine trunk.
Rapidly he mixed some buckwheat flour with water and stirred it smooth, one
cup of flour, one cup of water. He put a handful of coffee in the pot and
dipped a lump of grease out of a can and slid it sputtering across the hot
skillet. On the smoking skillet he poured smoothly the buckwheat batter. It
spread like lava, the grease spitting sharply. Around the edges the
buckwheat cake began to firm, then brown, then crisp. The surface was
bubbling slowly to porousness. Nick pushed under the browned under surface
with a fresh pine chip. He shook the skillet sideways and the cake was loose
on the surface. I won't try and flop it, he thought. He slid the chip of
clean wood all the way under the cake, and flopped it over onto its face. It
sputtered in the pan.
When it was cooked Nick regreased the skillet. He used all the batter.
It made another big flapjack and one smaller one.
Nick ate a big flapjack and a smaller one, covered with apple butter.
He put apple butter on the third cake, folded it over twice, wrapped it in
oiled paper and put it in his shirt pocket. He put the apple butter jar back
in the pack and cut bread for two sandwiches.
In the pack he found a big onion. He sliced it in two and peeled the
sil
ky outer skin. Then he cut one half into slices and made onion
sandwiches. He wrapped them in oiled paper and buttoned them in the other
pocket of his khaki shirt. He turned the skillet upside down on the grill,
drank the coffee, sweetened and yellow brown with the condensed milk in it,
and tidied up the camp. It was a good camp.
Nick took his fly rod out of the leather rod-case, jointed it, and
shoved the rod-case back into the tent. He put on the reel and threaded the
line through the guides. He had to hold it from hand to hand, as he threaded
it, or it would slip back through its own weight. It was a heavy, double
tapered fly line. Nick had paid eight dollars for it a long time ago. It was
made heavy to lift back in the air and come forward flat and heavy and
straight to make it possible to cast a fly which has no weight. Nick opened
the aluminum leader box. The leaders were coiled between the damp flannel
pads. Nick had wet the pads at the water cooler on the train up to St.
Ignace. In the damp pads the gut leaders had softened and Nick unrolled one
and tied it by a loop at the end to the heavy fly line. He fastened a hook
on the end of the leader. It was a small hook; very thin and springy.
Nick took it from his hook book, sitting with the rod across his lap.
He tested the knot and the spring of the rod by pulling the line taut. It
was a good feeling. He was careful not to let the hook bite into his finger.
He started down to the stream, holding his rod, the bottle of
grasshoppers hung from his neck by a thong tied in half hitches around the
neck of the bottle. His landing net hung by a hook from his belt. Over his
shoulder was a long flour sack tied at each comer into an ear. The cord went
over his shoulder. The sack flapped against his legs.
Nick felt awkward and professionally happy with all his equipment
hanging from him. The grasshopper bottle swung against his chest. In his
shin the breast pockets bulged against him with the lunch and his fly book.
He stepped into the stream. It was a shock. His trousers clung tight to
his legs. His shoes felt the gravel. The water was a rising cold shock.
Rushing, the current sucked against his legs. Where he stepped in, the
water was over his knees. He waded with the current. The gravel slid under
his shoes. He looked down at the swirl of water below each leg and tipped up
the bottle to get a grasshopper.
The first grasshopper gave a jump in the neck of the bottle and went
out into the water. He was sucked under in the whirl by Nick's right leg and
came to the surface a little way down stream. He floated rapidly, kicking.
In a quick circle, breaking the smooth surface of the water, he disappeared.
A trout had taken him.
Another hopper poked his face out of the bottle. His antennae wavered.
He was getting his front legs out of the bottle to jump. Nick took him by
the head and held him while he threaded the slim hook under his chin, down
through his thorax and into the last segments of his abdomen. The
grasshopper took hold of the hook with his front feet, spitting tobacco
juice on it. Nick dropped him into the water.
Holding the rod in his right hand he let out line against the pull of
the grasshopper in the current. He stripped off line from the reel with his
left hand and let it run free. He could see the hopper in the little waves
of the current. It went out of sight.
There was a tug on the line. Nick pulled against the taut line. It was
his first strike. Holding the now living rod across the current, he brought
in the line with his left hand. The rod bent in jerks, the trout pumping
against the current. Nick knew it was a small one. He lifted the rod
straight up in the air. It bowed with the pull.
He saw the trout in the water jerking with his head and body against
the shifting tangent of the line in the stream.
Nick took the line in his left hand and pulled the trout, thumping
tiredly against the current, to the surface. His back was mottled the clear,
water-over-gravel color, his side flashing in the sun. The rod under his
right arm, Nick stooped, dipping his right hand into the current. He held
the trout, never still, with his moist right hand, while he unhooked the
barb from his mouth, then dropped him back into the stream.
He hung unsteadily in the current, then settled to the bottom beside a
stone. Nick reached down his hand to touch him, his arm to the elbow under
water. The trout was steady in the moving stream, resting on the gravel,
beside a stone. As Nick's fingers touched him, touched his smooth, cool,
underwater feeling he was gone, gone in a shadow across the bottom of the
stream.
He's all right. Nick thought. He was only tired.
He had wet his hand before he touched the trout, so he would not
disturb the delicate mucus that covered him. If a trout was touched with a
dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot. Years before when he
had fished crowded streams, with fly fishermen ahead of him and behind him.
Nick had again and again come on dead trout, furry with white fungus,
drifted against a rock, or floating belly up in some pool. Nick did not like
to fish with other men on the river. Unless they were of your party, they
spoiled it.
He wallowed down the stream, above his knees in the current, through
the fifty yards of shallow water above the pile of logs that crossed the
stream. He did not rebait his hook and held it in his hand as he waded. He
was certain he could catch small trout in the shallows, but he did not want
them. There would be no big trout in the shallows this time of day.
Now the water deepened up his thighs sharply and coldly. Ahead was the
smooth dammed-back flood of water above the logs. The water was smooth and
dark; on the left, the lower edge of the meadow; on the right the swamp.
Nick leaned back against the current and took a hopper from the bottle.
He threaded the hopper on the hook and spat on him for good luck. Then he
pulled several yards of line from the reel and tossed the hopper out ahead
onto the fast, dark water. It floated down towards the logs, then the weight
of the line pulled the bait under the surface. Nick held the rod in his
right hand, letting the line run out through his fingers.
There was a long tug. Nick struck and the rod came alive and dangerous,
bent double, the line tightening, coming out of water, tightening, all in a
heavy, dangerous, steady pull. Nick felt the moment when the leader would
break if the strain increased and let the line go.
The reel ratcheted into a mechanical shriek as the line went out in a
rush. Too fast. Nick could not check it, the line rushing out. the reel note
rising as the line ran out.
With the core of the reel showing, his heart feeling stopped with the
excitement, leaning back against the current that mounted icily his thighs,
Nick thumbed the reel hard with his left hand. It was awkward getting his
thumb inside the fly reel frame.
As he put on pressure the line tightened into sudden hardness and
beyond the logs a huge trout went high out of water. As he jump
ed. Nick
lowered the tip of the rod. But he felt, as he dropped the tip to ease the
strain, the moment when the strain was too great; the hardness too tight. Of
course, the leader had broken. There was no mistaking the feeling when all
spring left the line and it became dry and hard. Then it went slack.
His mouth dry, his heart down. Nick reeled in. He had never seen so big
a trout. There was a heaviness, a power not to be held, and then the bulk of
him, as he jumped. He looked as broad as a salmon.
Nick's hand was shaky. He reeled in slowly. The thrill had been too
much. He felt, vaguely, a little sick, as though it would be better to sit
down.
The leader had broken where the hook was tied to it. Nick took it in
his hand. He thought of the trout somewhere on the bottom, holding himself
steady over the gravel, far down below the light, under the logs, with the
hook in his jaw. Nick knew the trout's teeth would cut through the snell of
the hook. The hook would imbed itself in his jaw. He'd bet the trout was
angry. Anything that size would be angry. That was a trout. He had been
solidly hooked. Solid as a rock. He felt like a rock, too, before he started
off. By God, he was a big one. By God, he was the biggest one I ever heard
of.
Nick climbed out onto the meadow and stood, water running down his
trousers and out of his shoes, his shoes squelchy. He went over and sat on
the logs. He did not want to rush his sensations any.
He wriggled his toes in the water, in his shoes, and got out a
cigarette from his breast pocket. He lit it and tossed the match into the
fast water below the logs. A tiny trout rose at the match, as it swung
around in the fast current. Nick laughed. He would finish the cigarette.
He sat on the logs, smoking, drying in the sun, the sun warm on his
back, the river shallow ahead entering the woods, curving into the woods,
shallows, light glittering, big water-smooth rocks, cedars along the bank
and white birches, the logs warm in the sun, smooth to sit on, without bark,
gray to the touch; slowly the feeling of disappointment left him. It went
away slowly, the feeling of disappointment that came sharply after the
thrill that made his shoulders ache. It was all right now. His rod lying out