The Longest Silence Read Free Page A

pool. I had always approached this place with care because trout soared around its upper parts and if a cast could be placed very quietly on the slick bulge of water, a take was often the result. I crept up, but no trout grazed under its surface waiting for my Lady Beaverkill to parachute in.
    Salvation, though, was around the corner. The deep, shadowy color of the pool seemed to hold a new glint. I stood erect. There was nothing near the top of the pool for me to spook, but clearly trout were deep within it, moving enough to send up their glints.
    I remembered the brooky in the minute fissure of stream when I’d been grouse shooting, and I recalled how steadily he had held except to intercept a free-swimming nymph in the icy water. It occurred to me that something like that sudden lateral movement and return must be what was sending these messages to me from this large pool in the Pere Marquette.
    I tied on an indeterminately colored nymph and shot a cast up to the head of the pool. The nymph dropped and sank, and the point of my floating line began its retreat back toward me at current speed. About a third of the way back, the line point stopped. I lifted and felt the weight. A couple of minutes later, I trapped a nice brown trout against the gravel at the foot of the pool with my trembling hands.
    This was before I had learned the thrill of the release, of a trout darting from your opening hands or resting its weight very slightly in your palms underwater, then easing off. So three nice trout went from the pool into my creel and then, after a decent interval, into my mouth.
    Anyway, the connection was complete. And even if I couldn’t always put it together, I saw how it was with nymphs. Years of casting and retrieving made it difficult to slackline a tumbling nymph—the forms of manipulation in trout fishing are always so remote—but Irealized that fishing a nymph invisible under the pools and runs on a tensionless line was not inferior in magic to fishing a dry-fly.
    Later we found a long beaver pond covering many acres of ground in a dense mixed forest of pine and conifer. I had a hunch that good-sized brook trout had migrated down from the stream and into the pond.
    Beaver ponds are a mixed blessing, providing only a few years of good fishing. After that the standing water turns sour and the size of the average fish gets smaller as his head grows proportionately larger. But this pond was only a couple of years old, with a soft bottom covered with drowned leaves.
    I had some trouble locating the pond but ended up tracking its source through the cedars. It was almost evening when I got there, and huge columns of light came down through the forest. There was a good hatch of mayflies in progress along the stream, with small trout rising to them and cedar waxwings overhead hovering in the swarm.
    The pond was perfect. Some dead trees stood ghostlike in its middle, and the pond itself inundated small bays around the watertolerant cedars. Best of all, big, easy rises were in numerous places, slow takes that produced an actual sucking noise.
    I cautiously waded for position. The pond was so smooth that I anxiously anticipated the fall of line on its surface. I had a piece of inner tube in my shirt and I used it to thoroughly straighten my leader.
    Every time I moved on the soft bottom, a huge cloud of mud arose, carried behind me and then filtered down through the beaver dam. It was a cool summer evening and I was wearing a flannel shirt; I shivered a little and tried to keep from looking up when one of the big rises opened on the pond.
    I tied on my favorite fly, the Adams, a pattern that exemplifies my indecisive nature. The Adams looks a little like all bugs. It’s gray and speckly and a great salesman. My fly box is mainly Adamses in about eight different sizes. In the future, I mean to be a fine streamside entomologist. I’m going to start on that when I am much too old to do any of the two thousand things I can