Free Lines on the Water by David Adams Richards Page A

itself was dark. He knew he didn’t want to twist an ankle in here.
    He didn’t get too many feet until he came to a giant windfall just over waist high. He managed to sit upon it, looking back towards the direction he had come in, still hearing the river faintly, and heaved himself over it. It was a three-foot drop on the other side into a dark undergrowth. And he fell headlong into it, fish and rod in hand, onto the stomach of a giant black bear.
    “It gave me a fright,” he said.
    The bear had crawled up in there to die some time that spring, far away from the tracks of man, thinking never to be found.
    Later, and in almost ink dark, Peter made it out to the logging road, both fish in tow, and walked the eight miles back to his car.
    We ran the Norwest with canoe twice my first summer. We usually ran the river after a rain, and with the water dropping. With the water dropping the fish would take, the grassy banks seemed more fertile, and the runoffs propelled twigs and leaves into the water. But the more the water dropped, the more it cleared. By mid-morning the sky would be hot enough, tempered with small distant clouds. The flies were ferocious, and made me think of writing a song to them. There is a song called “The Little Blackfly.” There is also a poem about blackflies by Alden Nowlan. Nowlan describes hating them so much it almost turns to love.
    On my first canoe trip I hooked a grilse above Wilson’s Pool on a Red Butt Butterfly. I was with Fred Irving. He pointed to a small run and said, “Throw your fly there.”
    I did—and
bang
.
    But I lost it because I was overanxious. That is, I tried to pull the fish into shore and turned away from it when it jumped. It wasn’t that well hooked but hooked well enough to land if I’d had the patience and experience. When the line went slack I felt for the first time that inescapable loss mixedwith old and ancient desire. Tolstoy’s character Dolohov in
War and Peace
once said about bear hunting: “Sure, everyone’s afraid of a bear—but once you set eyes on him your only fear is that he’ll get away!”
    Everyone might feel empathy for the salmon as well, but when you hook one you have this desire to never lose it.
    Later that month Peter and I took a tent with us. We camped halfway along the Norwest run, at Cedar Pool, and pitched a tent in the dark. We were both sunburnt and tired. We had been on the river many days at that time. I had even had a fish or two to show for it. We cooked up supper in silence and crawled into the tent, assuring ourselves that the first light would wake us, and we’d be in the pool before anyone else. Our rods were ready to go as we drifted off to sleep.
    We were awakened by shouts of excitement.
    We sleepily got up and went outside. Already the morning was warm, and three people were in the pool, with two more canoes parked on either side of our tent. A woman of about forty-five had a fish on, and was playing it at the lower part of the pool. The other two people had already taken fish, which rested in the fish bed they had made. One was a salmon about ten pounds, the other a grilse. The woman had watched the fish come for the fly once, rested it, and threw back to it again.
    They picked up their fish and congratulated each other. Then nodding to us, packing their fish in the canoes, they headed downriver.
    “Nice morning,” Peter managed.
    The pool was dead after that, even though we had it all to ourselves. And we packed up and went back up in the afternoon. We came to a camp that overlooked the river. It flowed below us, as Peter sat on an old couch and spoke to me about his working the pool. It would be better to throw a line as close to the bank as possible. He pointed to a rip, three-quarters of the way down, and told me he had seen a fish there. I could see nothing, though I looked for ten minutes.
    As he spoke, unknown to him, a mouse scampered out of the couch and climbed up on his shoulder, listening to his