Free The Signal by Ron Carlson Page B

over the lake. From here they could see why it was called Spearpoint, the tip at the other end where the outflow departed. The glacier was riddled with soot and the walking was sure-footed, the surface neither slush nor ice. “This is all airliners,” she said, kicking at the dirt.
    “Probably,” he said. Smog, coal fire, airliners. They stepped down to the lake edge of the glacier, now twenty feet above the surface of the lake, and the curtains of sunlight ran into the water a hundred feet. They could see fish moving at every level.
    “If you can see them, you can’t catch them,” she said. His old saw.
    “You can catch them,” he said. “Don’t let them see you.”
    She took his arm above the elbow. “Mack, thanks. I’m glad I came.”
    He stood on the small glacier on Spearpoint Lake. “You know, I am too.”
    They sat on their jackets, cross-legged, and Vonnie unfolded her flies, which were wrapped in a pocketed fleece case. “My god,” Mack said, looking at the array. “We’re rich.” There were forty flies, some the size of capital letters in the Bible and some as big as dimes, all of them four-color, three-material masterpieces.
    “He puts the eyes in.” Vonnie pointed to the red dots and the gold dots on the tiny flies.
    “I am admiring his handiwork,” Mack said. “Kent’s got a touch.” He pointed to a dun-feathered fellow with a red stripe. “Use this guy, I think.” He looked out over Spearpoint, a dozen moving shadows therein. “Try him. He will speak to the lonely fish below us. And I am going to throw this until they respond.” He pulled one of his linty caddis from his jacket pocket. They sat in the coarse snow and tied up, cinching and clipping for ten minutes. When they looked up again into the larger world, they mar veled again at the stony bowl of mountains, five peaks purely above the treeline, and they took great breaths of the unlimited air. Vonnie stood and measured, arm back and then forward, arcing her line in a full billow out like a compass so that it snaked down and kissed the surface and ran out slowly, pulling the airborne fly on its invisible leader fifty feet from shore where it landed in a silver dot which became a ring and then two on the mystery of the water. Mack stepped down the glacier thirty feet and drew his cast shorter, the big fly almost splashing where it hit. Then they both saw something remarkable. Three fish darted from the dark, zig ging left and right, urgently ascending through the lighted panes of water, unmistakable in their intent, two racing toward Vonnie’s fly, a wonder, and both splashing there, the first sound in the cirque of the mountains that wasn’t the wind or the faint harmonics of intercontinental planes. As they struck, the other trout took Mack’s fly, smacking his tail like a shovel, racing away with his prize.
    “Holy shit,” Vonnie said. Their rods bent and bobbed, both reels giving line in these first moments. They had been taken by the place, the desperate beauty of fishing from the glacier so far above the water, and they hadn’t considered this part. They’d made a mistake, and it was apparent in that first second. The glacial ledge was still fifteen feet above the lake, too far for landing anything.
    Mack gave line and walked the edge quickly marching, his rod aloft around the edge of the snowfield to where, when it tapered to ten feet, he could slide off onto the rocky bank in a small cascade of the old snow. Now he adjusted his drag and reeled it tight again, the fish fighting and the rod flexing as if alive. He was good now, but the fish was out sixty yards. Vonnie had trouble though, her fish had plunged and she was stuck up in the snow. “I can’t get around there,” she said.
    “Wear him out,” Mack said. “I’ll come back when I get this guy.” For every three turns he could take, the fish took one back. “Wish I had some lemon drops,” Mack said. His father always had a pocket of the hard candy and