Free Death Canyon by David Riley Bertsch Page A

He already made a statement to the press last night. It made it into the Daily today. Kind of disrespectful if you ask me.” J.P. was nothing if not well informed on gossip.
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    â€œYou’ll have to check the paper for the exact quote, but something along the lines of ‘If you play with fire, you’ll eventually get burned.’ ” J.P. shook his head.
    â€œYeah, sounds pretty inappropriate in the wake of a friend’s death,” Jake said.
    â€œI don’t think the two were that close, though,” J.P. said, and then changed the subject: “Hey, do you mind if I sleep in here tonight, man? I’ll call the lock guy in the morning.”
    â€œOf course not.” There weren’t any guests in the main house tonight. June was always slow. By the end of the month, some tourists would filter into the valley as school ended, but July and August were the high season in Jackson Hole.
    Jake said good night to his friend and walked back to the guesthouse. It was situated east of the main house, and so as he walked toward the front door, he could see the profile of the ridgeline that resembled a sleeping Indian chief. The sky was fading into night, but Jake could still make out the outline of the chief’s nose and forehead. The cliff bands dotted with snow gave the viewer the impression that the chief was wearing a headdress. Often, a pinkhaze hung above the skyward-facing man as the sun set behind the Tetons on the other side of the valley.
    He went through the back door of the guesthouse as he always did, so he had an excuse to check out the stream that ran behind the old building. Although he couldn’t see them in the evening’s fading light, he could hear some fish still feeding.
    Jake set his keys, wallet, and cell phone on the small table he kept by the back door. He walked into the little, drab room where he tied flies, built fly rods, and tinkered with his fishing equipment. He turned on the radio.
    The sun was nearly gone and it was now cool in the house, but Jake preferred not to turn on the baseboard heaters unless it was absolutely necessary. He crossed the hall to take a hot shower. He could faintly hear a news report about the slide and a warning to backcountry skiers to thoroughly assess the snow conditions.
    Nobody is actually going to heed the weatherman’s advice and collect snowpack data before a ski trip in June.
    The odds were too far in favor of the skier. The avalanche was a freak event.
    After his shower, Jake put on a pair of fleece pants that he had owned since he was a teenager and a long-sleeved shirt. He returned to his tying room and looked through the plastic shelves of drawers that held hundreds of different fly patterns.
    Every summer, Jake would leave dozens of flies on the overhanging trees on the river’s edge. A few would even be left in the lips of trout that were strong enough to break the leader that connected the man to the fish and some were mangled by the small pinlike teeth of the cutthroats.
    In the spring, Jake would spend a few weeks replenishing his stock. There were certain patterns he preferred to tie, and generallythese were larger and more colorful. He didn’t look forward to tying tiny, drab flecks of fish food and thus did so only when it was necessitated by the fishing conditions.
    Fortunately for Jake, Snake River cutthroats were a particularly aggressive species and they favored large, gaudy patterns. Folks often referred to the personality of the local fish by proclaiming “they think they’re smallmouth bass!” Hyperbolic, sure, but Jake sometimes thought it was an understatement. More like snook, Jackson Hole’s resident trout spent their summer days lying against the bank waiting to ambush their prey. They were more like the mammalian predators in the region, gutsy and vicious, than they were like the shy, wary, and effeminate trout of fly-fishing lore.