Lines on the Water by David Adams Richards Page A

or rock.
    “There’s a fish there,” he whispered to me one morning, just below Stickney Pool, where the salmon always hold hard to the left bank before they enter Stickney itself. It is a deep leisurely part of the river between Stickney and the flat above Cedar Pool. I had often seen fish take here, and I believed him, but for the life of me, I couldn’t budge a fish or make one show. And by this time I had taken fish.
    “Change flies,” he whispered urgently. “Put on that Bear Hair you have.” Which showed that even though his eyes were poor, just by a glance he knew the flies I had.
    I did and I fished. Let my line follow the angle over the huge rocks beneath the run, watching the little blackfly move, waiting at every second with an anticipation that Mr. Simms had produced in me. The fly moved in the current towards the fish.
    “Now,” he said.
    And I tensed. But the fly moved across that clean water in the sun and wasn’t disturbed along the three-inch spot we were both watching.
    “Ah,” he said, spitting, and holding the canoe fast with the pole. “Try ’er again, Davy. Jot yer fly over it, move it a little.”
    I flubbed the cast. He waited. I began to get anxious. To jot my fly would be a new experience though I wasn’t skeptical that was what was needed. I brought the rod back, checked my leader, looked over at him.
    “Try ’er again, she’s there.” He whispered in the urgent way a guide does early in the morning. The sun warmed his old sweater and touched the peak of his cap. His face, looking at the water, was as captivated as a child’s.
    I threw a better cast this time at forty-five degrees above the fish. The fly would come right over its nose, I felt. The line went out, and the fly floated down and touched the current. My fly began to arc. I watched it. There is a point when you know the fish must take—right NOW. I tried to jot it as Mr. Simms asked. But all I managed to do was make a ripple. The fly went past that point by a centimetre, then two, then a foot, then two.
    “Must be me,” I said.
    “Try ’er again,” he said. There was not a breeze in the air, no other fisherman in sight. Only the sound of the rapid above us and the occasional knock of the pole against the gunnel of the canoe.
    I tried twice more. Both times we waited, watched the flyskirt over the hidden rock, move away from the dark spot on the rock’s far side we were both watching in anticipation.
    “Give ’er here,” he said.
    I handed the rod to him. He braced the pole, took the rod in the other hand, holding the canoe fast in the water, and threw the line. It went towards the rock. He moved his wrist back and forth, the line trembled, the fly looked like it was jumping up and down on the water. The fly dotted along for a second, two seconds, three—
bang
. The rod bowed, the line began to zing from the pull of a young salmon.
    “Here you go,” he said. “I’ll pole it in.”
    I might say that sometimes that works and a lot of times it doesn’t. In fact, I watched him try it again a few times after this with no success at all. The truth remains, if a fish is going to take, it will take.
    As we sat on the shore, he made up tea with seven bags in a two-cup pot, stirring it with a stick. And then later we poled back into the rapids and moved downriver.
    He was growing old, and the world was changing. He was well over sixty that summer. He had an old camp, with an old flat-iron stove and three cots. He had a pin-up picture of a young woman selling lubricant from the late fifties, dressed in Levi’s shorts and a halter top. He had some rods on the walls, a trophy or two, his diary. If he was there when you went tohis camp, the door was always opened. No one bothered him. He would walk over the hill to his own little stretch and fish. It wasn’t a great pool, but like so many home pools, once a person became familiar with it, knew where the fish were and had some luck, it became a place to invest their