Getting Back, Part 7

Had it rained, though, I'd have had a good excuse to venture into the bar in Seney and pamper myself with a smelt basket. Before I hit the Fox for the first time, I think I heated a couple of slices from the turkey "ham" I'd packed, a mass of turkey thigh meat compressed into an oval and injected with nitrates, corn sweeteners, and artificial flavors. I was wary of red meat in those days. The stuff didn't taste bad at the time (bear in mind I wasn't much more than a year beyond dormitory food), but I dread to think of having a bite now. It is amazing what we consumers can be convinced is healthy. Or, for that matter, is food. Then again, I spent a good deal of that week trying to convince trout to ingest shiny metal blades. That particular night I convinced quite a few.

Below the campground, the east branch of the Fox parallels M-77, with logging trails leading in from the highway at assorted points. I picked one of them at random and maneuvered the Cutlass over deep ruts and downed limbs to its dead end in a clearing among the spruces, the river just visible beyond. Once in the water I tied on a Panther Martin spinner with a yellow body and silver blade and began fishing upstream.

The river was narrow there, never much more than fifteen feet wide, and snag filled. Sweepers, mats of sunken brush, stumps, and in a few places wooden stakes that held up the remnants of trout shelters erected long ago. It was hard to see how fish in that river could need artificial shelter, though its environs might have been less wooded when the shelters went in. Things can change, drastically, as I could tell from the charred stumps pocking the woods along the river, evidence of great forest fires in the past.

Whenver and whyever the shelters were placed, they apparently served their purpose: trout had survived and thrived. Within half a dozen casts I'd caught one, a brook of about legal size. I had another less than a minute later, and for the rest of the night I never went longer than about five minutes without at least feeling a nip on the line. For a short stretch I hooked fish on about every other cast. These fish ran small, with many sublegal and most not beyond ten inches. However, on that night I would catch what remains the largest brook trout of my life.

I tossed the Panther Martin into a deep run that cut beneath the limbs of alders on the bank. It was undistinguishable from spots that had yielded seven or eight inch fish all night, but when my line stopped mid-retrieve, something obviously larger had come out to play. The fish darted back under the alder branches and I lowered the rod keep the line clear of them, walking ahead and reeling. The trout thrashed deep in the run before bolting upstream. I worked it close and it ran out again. It took longer to get the fish in a second time, but once I had I guided it easily into my net.

It measured seventeen inches. I intended to release it, but I had to hold it a while before I did. This helps revive the fish, but I did it mainly to savor the moment. To take in the fact that this had really happened.

I caught other trout after that one, but none stand out in memory. I'm not sure what my tally for the evening was. I must have landed twenty that were better than legal size, keeping just the first three. What does remain with me, what returns to me from time to time, is the wish I uttered walking back to my car in the darkness: that I would have many more nights like that one before I left the earth.