Bill Browning was making this movie about trout fishing in spring creeks and he was using me as a model because I had a fairly clean fishing vest and was planning to go fishing anyway.
"This is to be pretty delicate," Bill said. "Use a light rod and kind of sneak up on the fish."
First we had to have the background stuff of me squinting at a Number 18 Light Cahill and trying to thread it on a 6X tippet and rigging up a little rod with one of those cork reel seats that uses only a couple of little rings so that the reel falls off into the water now and then, usually when I have a fish on.
Bill used quite a bit of film on the background scenes but I looked pretty good because I had the right kind of hat and my waders were practically new. This was out in Montana and we were going to use Armstrong Spring Creek because the hatches were fairly predictable in those days and it was unlikely I would have to rush back into Livingston to ask Dan Bailey what the fish were doing.
My wife Debie had to do the ironing or something and she said she'd drive out to the creek about noon and bring lunches and fish a little herself. When she checked my fly box before letting me go, Bill should have noticed who knew about spring creeks but he was too busy fiddling with his movie equipment.
The hatch came off right on schedule and Bill set up his tripod so he could cover me in the background and the rising trout in the foreground. They were taking those duns as if there was no tomorrow and the rise circles were overlapping each other. I was fishing to a fairly deep run between waving columns of underwater vegetation and sometimes I could actually see a fish tipping up lazily, taking a fly with a couple of quick tail movements, and then riding back a little to settle down to its feeding station again.
Since I'd hear the camera purr from time to time I was keeping my backcast high and covering the water directly between me and the lens. I was being very stealthy, had not fallen in, and was putting the fly down in pretty good shape. I waded carefully and kept hunched over a little, evidently to the amusement of the trout, for they wouldn't take my Cahills at all.
To keep morale up I gave Bill a running account of my casting tactics, pointing out a curve to the left when it occurred accidentally and designating which trout I was casting to. He mumbled something about the light being fine and that he was really in clover if he could find someone who wanted to buy a few hundred uninterrupted feet of trout rises.
Finally, I raised a fish. It was about eight inches long and it attacked the fly with a splatter, evidently driven to unreasoning anger by my repeated interference with the flow of naturals. I played it as if it were the largest catch of the year and only yanked it clear of the water once. Bill started the camera but turned it off quickly and said rather testily that he needed something around two pounds.
That was when Debie arrived with the sandwiches and asked a little too cheerily how we were getting along. She waded into the creek upstream from me and said she would try for a fish that lived tight against the bank opposite the camera.
"He does a lot of rootin' around over there," Debie said, "and he weighs about two pounds."
"Atta' girl, Debie!" Bill said, with his eye plastered to the finder and the lens aimed at me. "You get in there and catch him!"
Having completely given up on hooking a two-pound trout by that time and just going through the motions, I mentioned to Bill that Debie was almost exactly the same distance from the lens that I was and he wouldn't even have to refocus if she hooked something. Bill indulgently panned over there to check and came back to me and the fish that were gulping naturals around me.
"Try that one over there to the left," Bill said, and I obediently extended the line slightly and did so. My back was aching a little from standing in the same place so long and I morosely viewed a muskrat paddling past my waders, well down in the clear water.
The fish Bill had indicated came cautiously up to my fly, refused, and stirred a little boil as it left. Bill sighed audibly.
"He's there all right," Debie said, concentrating on the opposite bank. "He just made a bubble. I'll use this thing I tied up last night."
"Yeah, that's good, Debie!" Bill said, getting a few feet of me blowing on my fly.
"I'm gonna' throw almost straight at him," Debie said. "Here he comes! There he is! Watcha know? First cast!"
A two-pound brown trout made drowning-calf sounds and jumped over an emergent bank of wet water growth. Browning swung the lens over there, Debie landed the fish and I began taking down my rod.
"Let's see, now," Bill said. "We'll have to shoot all of this over again with Debie stringing up her rod and with the fish rising between her and the camera..."
* * *
There are people who do not see bubbles made by trout, there are fishermen who strafe nymphers with dry flies, and those who turn sadly away when they cannot match a hatch. There are also schemers like Gene Decker. We went fishing for "gulpers." The gulpers, Gene explained, would be busy in early morning and they were, cruising just beneath a placid lake surface and regularly taking tiny spent insects. I inspected the little flies that carpeted the surface.
"Nobody can match a little thing like that and have a hook in it," I announced. It was about that time Gene hooked a fish. I wanted to see his fly, which was a sort of fuzzy clump and quite large.
"Those little things are so thick," Gene said, "that sometimes they get bunched up in wads by the breeze. This fly represents a whole wad of them and a fish thinks he can get a whole mouthful at one gulp."
Why, sure.
There are those occasional times when a trout would really like to better himself and is taking a natural hatch only because there is nothing more nutritional. If only I knew when they felt that way I could save myself all sorts of pawing through tiny unnamed bits of fuzz and feathers.
One acquaintance who is a pretty well-known angler was very nearly ostracized when he became too practical on a day when the browns were eating Number 22s on a limestone brook in Pennsylvania and were evidently sick of the whole setup. He was a guest and while observing the deft operations of those experienced on the stream and getting a rundown, partly in Latin, my friend noted that he kept kicking up grasshoppers as he trudged in the footprints of the masters. He tied on an enormous thing called a Joe's Hopper, slapped it on the mirrored surface, and found that the learned browns went for it like shoats after bran. He said he was treated coolly after that and sat a little apart from the others at lunch.
* * *
Having read hundreds of pages about how real trout fishermen lie on bluffs and observe the activities of unsuspecting lunkers below, I gave it a serious try in the Black Hills several decades ago. The real reason why I was lying on the boulder instead of fishing was that I had tried everything in my fly box, had produced one half-hearted strike, and had noted the methodically rising fish were taking something I could neither see nor name. I had given up the matching game and had been throwing a bivisible that reminded me of a cockleburr.
There were some beautiful trout in the deep pool immediately beneath my bluff and they were feeding actively, taking something from the surface film or from immediately below it. One especially burly specimen was larger than anything I had ever hooked on a dry fly or nymph and each time he came up I would shake my head in frustration and try to follow his progress back to the depths in the failing evening light.
On one such trip he made a little more disturbance than usual on the surface and as he turned back toward the bottom he produced what Ray Bergman graphically called a "satisfaction rise"--a wiggle often staged by a trout that has taken a particularly gratifying insect. Truth is, I suspect such a wiggle is mainly for the purpose of working the goody into the digestive system more efficiently but "satisfaction rise" is much more appealing.
Anyway, this fish did the same wiggle two or three times after he had gone quite deep and it became evident he was not satisfied at all but was trying to cough up what he had just taken. Finally it came out and floated to the surface. It was my big bivisible which I'd absentmindedly left floating around while I watched the fish.
* * *
The Rocky Mountain whitefish is no prize to most trout fishermen although some will say it is more selective than a brown trout. At times its dimpling rises can be taken for those of trout although a little careful observation will generally reveal the whitefish for what he is.
"Mismatching the hatch is the only way to avoid whitefish," says one guide. "You can then catch trout which aren't so particular."
Twenty years ago I waded in almost too deep in a bend of the East Gallatin downstream from Bozeman, Montana. The little river was clouded with what I took to be returned irrigation water and it was sluggish at that point. I held my elbows up to keep them dry and eyed some dimples appearing regularly near some thick brush. The current wasn't pushy but my waders had a scant two inches of freeboard and the dimples were at the very limit of my casting range. It was dusk, a few bull bats had appeared and I saw a pair of cottontails taking the evening air on some nearby short grass. A helpful man came by carrying a spinning rod.
"Those are whitefish, Mister," he said. I didn't know whether they were or not that time but where there are whitefish there are likely to be trout. I couldn't see what they were taking but I knew it had to be small. I put on a Number 20 hook with a wisp of moose mane attached, managed to drop it among the dimples, and set the hook on a rainbow. From then until black dark I caught eager brown and rainbow trout with a few whitefish mixed in, a strike on nearly every cast. The splashing sounds carried well in the evening quiet and I heard the man with the spinning rod talking to his friends.
"That guy sure is hauling in the whitefish," he said.
I have a rule never to pass up a dimple, which may be caused by a fish taking small dry flies, near-surface nymphs, or odds and ends in the surface film. He can also make a dimple when he noses down in shallow water with his tail up. Some of my dimples have been chubs in Maine and whitefish in British Columbia but there have been a lot of trout when I wasn't quite sure.
* * *
We get considerable mileage out of the rise patterns but a trout is generally of fairly standard shape, swims with his back up, and takes food in the most practical way he can. The classic rise involves a fish holding almost stationary on a feeding station and moving forward and upward to meet something carried by the stream. If it is floating he simply lets it slide into its mouth with the current, sorts it out from the water, swallows it, and expels the water from his gills. He drifts slightly downstream in the take and then moves a little forward to his original stand. Since he'll be going down when the water comes from his gills he's likely to produce a bubble but he can do that sometimes while nosing a bank or underwater vegetation.
I have a smug feeling about dry-fly anglers who write how they have matched a hatch the fish had been taking quietly and achieved a "slashing strike." Unless you can convince yourself that the artificial looked more like a natural than the naturals did, the victory is a little tarnished since the fish has taken a "stranger." Had deception been perfect the artificial would have been taken exactly the same as the live flies.
I once watched a polished performer who had worked with meticulous care over a rising trout that was taking small flies from the surface film, and when he finally hooked the fish it took hard with a "glub" that had been absent from its other feeding. He shook his head.
"Might as well have caught it on a spoon!" he grumbled.
From time to time every dry-fly fisherman has been insulted by a trout which struck viciously at a dainty dry overcome by drag and making a wake like a hurrying periscope and the sting is even greater when proper presentations have failed. Joe Brooks said, "They're just chasing things." Certainly a dragging Quill Gordon looks like nothing else, certainly not a minnow. Such debacles are not to be confused with dry flies danced as "a living insect" as Leonard M. Wright described. I'm talking about plain and simple drag.
We got sidetracked on the grayling business in Canada one summer when we sincerely intended to seek bigger fish, and although the grayling is sometimes scorned as a backwoods bumpkin I cannot resist its darting rises and the flashing water it lives in.
The guide showed us the riffle, full of grayling, he said.
"Just rake the fly through it," he said, and I cast a dry fly that bounced the length of the swiftest part, riding high. I thought I saw a flick of subtle color beneath it and I tried a second time. Again the uncertain movement down below, but no strike.
"Yank it across," the guide told me.
So I dragged the little Adams and the grayling came like a miniature sailfish with his great fin slicing the riffle to take solidly. We kept catching fish that way but something was wrong and I felt more comfortable when we found a slick where they'd take a normal drift. Even there, they tended to chase the fly downstream as grayling so often do, but it was dry-fly fishing. I don't care if a grayling takes a fly differently from a trout but I want the flies to act the same.
Some angling authorities who have spattered me liberally with Latin insect names and who can recite the rise forms as listed by Ernest Schwiebert or Ray Bergman can still stand on the bank, see a veritable hubbub of rising trout and admit they didn't know what's going on.
It would take a chemical analysis, not yet performed, to list the various insects in the order of their preference as trout fare, and the fly the fish crowd each other for today may be ignored tomorrow for something else. Like others, I have stood and watched my flies coming down, ignored by trout rising wildly to something I couldn't even see, and when I sagely tell myself they're taking the nymphs just before they emerge, I remind myself that they were taking the emerged flies yesterday.
"Feeding pattern" is more complex than it sounds for every trout seems to have his own, and the learned angler who opens his fish or gouges with a marrow spoon may find two trout who were residents of the same bouncy riffle or sliding run but have been dining on completely different insects. Like a man momentarily addicted to salted peanuts or potato chips, a trout sometimes seems to forsake all other nourishment when he acquires a temporary taste for something special and it may be that a fly he chooses emerges rarely. In fact, the sages conclude, that may be one of its attractions, a break in a life which might not be too exciting, at least by human standards.
I feel humble in the presence of anglers who take samples from the stream and spend hours watching trout perform their feeding rituals, and when I am slashing away blindly and changing flies constantly I keep thinking of the Englishman who discussed trout fishing with me.
"I have been to the Rocky Mountains," he said wonderingly, "and the Americans walk right up the middle of the bloody streams. Right up the middle of the bloody streams!"
This story originally appeared in Ridge Runners and Swamp Rats by Charles F. Waterman. Copyright (c) 1983 by Charley Waterman. All rights reserved.