Mornings

Every morning around ten, for thirty-one days, we'd stash our gear in the huge tan Suburban and head for the river. We'd head up the first hill, onto the highest bench, then rattle along the single rutted lane across the fields of wheatgrasses spotted with dark-green weed and sweet clover and pale-yellow prickly pear. There were always clusters of antelope in the fields. Often they would watch us — inert, wary, turning slightly so as always to be facing the car — until we came close enough to be a threat, though we were no threat. Often there were several spindly legged fawns with them, bom several weeks earlier; Herb had seen a doe drop one in the narrow road and he had stopped and watched and then gone around them. "Not enough meat to make a decent sandwich" he once said in his deep voice — the words always curt, final — watching a newborn antelope scamper away, already quick and lithe. Overhead, curlews with long curved beaks canted away, shrieking, and often we saw their chicks, which had no beaks yet, scuttling from us into the grasses.

Every morning, at the bluff that ended the last bench, we would stop the car and get out, and then look down into the valley, stretching off in front of us as far as we could see, with several braids of the river meandering through it like a blue ribbon stretched out casually upon a great green and tan rug. Except for the willows on the inner rim of the bench, near the headwaters of the East Branch, and the ragged line of cottonwoods in the distance, there were no trees: the river lay open and exposed and I knew at once that it would be hard to fish, with no cover, no breaks from the sun, with every movement of rod or line or person taken to be one of the trout's great predators here — pelican, osprey, kingfisher, merganser, heron, gull. An anthropologist who visited compared it to the Serengeti Plain, and it has that same broad fertile space.

We'd have the whole day, from then until dark, to fish the river. We could fish it anywhere we chose — miles and miles of it. We could fish it as hard or in as leisurely a manner as suited our fancy. We could go back to the ranch for lunch, or pack in a sandwich or some elk sticks, or fish straight through, hard, intently. Sometimes Pat, Herb's wife, and Mari would bring down lunch in the other Suburban.

I soon realized that Spring Creek was the most interesting river I had ever fished or could imagine; and I learned that it was loaded with secrets that would take exceptional skill to learn. At first I felt very privileged to be fishing the river, but soon my thoughts turned chiefly to where we'd fish and what the fishing would be like and when it would come and what fishing we'd already had. Within a week, the days blurred and I had to concentrate to separate them, keep them in sequence, though I have had no trouble finding in my brain the full and vivid picture of a hundred moments, most of the fish I raised for the month I was there. Those were halcyon days and they changed my fly-fishing life forever.

From the top of the last bench the river looked blue, though up close it was green and blue and a dozen variants of amber, umber, coral, and beige; it was really colorless as water in a glass, pure spring water, but it took on the hues of its bottom and of the banks. Sometimes the crystalline water was slow and moody or flat; then there were the fifty or so great bends of the West Branch, some tight, some broad as avenues; there were riffles and chops and pools and tails and swampy runs and brisk runs and shallow flats a couple of hundred feet across, all in dozens of configurations, so that there were thousands of different fishing chances. Everywhere, the water was the clearest I'd ever seen, water in which the auburn, spotted forms of the trout and the wavering, hairlike masses of elodea and watercress were ghostlike. The river held trout large enough to make my eyes pop — mostly browns, all wild, with a scattering of rainbows — which would rise to flies the size of gnats. Nursed on the muddy, milky waters of the Croton watershed near New York City, where I had fished with worms and spinning lures, it all spooked me silly. The river seemed quite beyond the meager talents I thought I could bring to it.

When the wind did not ruffle the surface of the river too harshly — giving it a slate, opaque cover — the water was so translucent that you could see distinctly to the bottom of the deepest pools. What I could see in some of them, five to eight feet down, wavering like living shadows near the bottom, sent shock waves through me.

We would stop at the final bluff to look for the blue herons, which pecked holes in even very large trout and killed many smaller fish. They were astonishing hunters and several times I saw one result of their efforts: a beautiful, wild brown trout with a hole right on the top of its back, as if someone had shoved a pencil down an inch or so, very hard. Herb did not like them. "They can't even pick up some of the larger trout they stick," he said. After I'd seen three with that raw pencil hole in their backs, I felt the same, let the Audubon Society be damned. If there was a heron hunting, it would usually whirl into flight, its gigantic wings flapping heavily, merely at our appearance more than several hundred yards away. I never saw one until it was in flight, and at first mistook the six or seven pairs of sandhill cranes that nested in the valley for herons — though the sandhills traveled in pairs, the herons always alone.

We'd look for several minutes from the bluff, standing quite still and sometimes shivering from the early cold, and begin to think about the day and the weather and the flies and what had happened the day before and which section of Spring Creek we'd fish that day. Then we'd head down the last hill.

Now there was nothing to think about but the fishing. It was a truly remarkable river, but on a given day you could catch nothing; during the weeks I was there, three people — all fine fishermen — got skunked. Once I got none; Herb always got fish. Flies might hatch upriver but not down. The sun might be too bright, the wind too strong, relentless. The large pool on the East Branch might explode with feeding fish or remain perfectly placid, as if it did not contain a trout. The Two Islands Pool might go berserk. The Great Horseshoe Bend — as distinguished from many lesser Horseshoe Bends — might look barren, or might have one, three, or thirty fish rising. But once I had looked into several of the deepest pools I knew something of what the river contained, everywhere, and a shiver of expectation ran through me every time I looked at the water, anywhere, or pitched a fly into it, and still does even now, years later, whenever I think of Spring Creek.

In the deep pools, when the light was just right, you could see fifty or sixty wild browns, of all sizes — a few ten-inchers, a whole slew of fish between fifteen and nineteen inches, and a few old alligators that would go twenty-five or more. Sometimes,...