I'd hooked a lovely big grayling about midway down the rip on a #16 dry fly and a light tippet. The fish jumped once and headed down into the fast current, peeling off line and starting on the backing, of which there suddenly didn't seem to be nearly enough. The bank was too steep and overgrown for me to get out and follow him, so without thinking, I started downstream and quickly waded into a scary spot that I couldn't wade back out of: I ended up at the top of the rapids in nearly chest-deep water, unable to move an inch towards shore and in the slow but steady process of being sucked into the whitewater (where I would have gotten a brutal dunking at best, and might easily have drowned).
As luck would have it, Wally came along about then. Assessing the situation immediately, he sprinted off through the trees to find the guide, who would have to interrupt his afternoon nap to, as it was told later in the guides' shack, "save the miserable hide of the dumb American."
I didn't know how he was going to handle it, but I was immensely relieved when I saw Guy push off from the bottom of the rapids and—first things first—swing out around my line so I wouldn't lose the fish. He motored up through what passed for a channel in the rapids, deftly flipped sideways (presenting me with a fast-moving gunwale at the level of my forehead), and yelled, "Get in zee boat!"
So, I got in zee boat, scattering rods and tackle boxes, and Guy, with absolutely no expression on his face, calmly handed me my fly rod. Out in the still water of the next lake I took up the slack, and the fish came out of 15 feet of water to make one more beautiful jump before I landed him, whopped him on the head with a knife butt, and tossed him in the cooler for lunch.
One of my clearest memories from that trip is that fish's last jump. Grayling are great jumpers, usually coming out of the water three or four times before they're played out, and they do it with fantastic grace and style. They actually look like the paintings of leaping fish you see on calendars—seeming to freeze for an instant in that perfect arc before diving cleanly back into the river.
While I was dealing with the fish, Guy was examining the outboard—seems he'd dinged the scag, that blade-shaped piece of metal that protects the prop. Actually, it was broken clean off, but guides never "break" anything, though they may "ding it up a little."
If he had wrecked the boat or motor, stranding us in the middle of nowhere, it would have been my fault, but he paid me the supreme compliment of not giving me a lecture, assuming that, although I was a jerk, I was at least smart enough to know it. A lot of information can be conveyed by a single blank look.
He did, however, stop off at a local shrine on the way back to the camp. It's a pair of graves set on a low hill overlooking the southern end of Snowbird Lake, the kind of place that's chosen not so much for the benefit of the deceased as for those who'll come to visit. No one knows who's buried there, maybe French trappers or some folks from the party of Samuel Herne who discovered and named the lake on his way to the Arctic Ocean. It's clear they've been there a long time, though: The inscriptions on the wooden crosses have long since weathered away. When the camp is opened in the spring, one of the first orders of business is to send someone over to clean off the graves and straighten the markers. The hill is near the place where the fish are cleaned, across a small bay from the camp, to keep the wolves at a respectful distance.
It wasn't as heavy-handed an object lesson as it might seem; every sport is taken there once during his trip, and we'd already had a good laugh by way of writing off the incident in the rapids as a harmless screw up. Still, there was something about the timing. I guess I should have felt lucky, or realized that perhaps I'd just blown my last chance for a truly glorious death—something few of us get a shot at anymore—but none of that occurred to me until later. At the time we were tired and happy, and Wally had a world-record grayling down in the cooler. It was a pretty spot, though, just a nice, peaceful place in the north woods.
© Article copyright John Gierach. All rights reserved.
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