These creeks and their trout attracted early settlers and, before them, mountain men with beaver traps and the ruffed grouse and deer that lived there with the beaver. Beaver trappers came 170 years ago not knowing where they were and not caring. All they needed to remember was the way out--which was simply downstream to the flats and to the river and to rendezvous. If they never came out they stayed in unmarked graves. Or no graves at all.
Where the beaver trappers worked or wintered is conjecture and it may be that my creek had none of them at all. But I defy you to prove they were not there, for the beaver are, and downstream where the canyon becomes a valley the soil is largely a product of silted ponds of long ago--thousands of years.
The wild trout of the backcountry know no Latin and their defense is not a careful selection of catalogued nymphs and emerging caddis or mayflies but a watchfulness for strange things that move, hover, or splash. In the little high-country creeks a kingfisher's shadow remains important to fish that have only recently outgrown the bird's appetite. Backcountry trout must be stalked for they are vulnerable from nearby banks, living in a small world, and their prey is judged mainly by size. Delicate subtlety of fly pattern is seldom a problem.
There are specialists in backwoods trout fishing. My old friend Jack Ward was surprised that I didn't know his basic operating procedure for the really tiny creeks. Always had done it, he said. You just wade in above the pool you like and stir up a little mud. You cast your fly, wet or dry, downstream as the mud arrives at the chosen spot. I wanted to know why it works, thinking it involved a breakthrough in trout psychology, but Jack had no answer and seemed to think I was complicating an essentially simple operation. I do not want to complicate it further but the drifting mud means rain or disturbance, either of which may dislodge food.
The creek that slides and rattles past the old homestead is just a little big for the mud trick. In its riffles it is only a few inches deep but the outsides of its sharp bend areas are undercut, the water going under stones or roots, and when you slosh into such a place to recover your snagged fly you're surprised to find the water is almost to the top of your hip boots.
The dry fly is easiest. In midsummer it can imitate a grasshopper, but patterns are seldom important. You come up from below and study the possibilities for a backcast. Your rod is light but it isn't a treasure because the backcountry is hard on tackle.
Find the place to cast from, probably a sandy bar with deer tracks, and throw the fly where the little ridge of fast water begins to spread below midpool. The water is clear but you don't see the fish lying near the stony bottom until he has darted into position and then slowed to take the fly from below. It's good if it's a cutthroat, a "native," for that better fits the setting, but it could be a brook trout, rainbow, or brown trout, long removed from their hatchery ancestors.
If I am doing the fishing, I plot against what should be the largest fish in the pool. The deep, undercut area is harder to reach and I change position a little. The fly must land above it, and there are likely to be sweeping branches or projecting roots as it comes down to swing almost out of sight.
First, a tentative cast a little too far out, just to see if everything is working, and another that almost but not quite swings over the target area. Then I lengthen the line a few inches and make my try, which may result in the fly catching ignominiously in a branch, root, or grassy sweeper. But if nothing goes wrong it will float bouncily back within inches of the darkly shadowed undercut and I may see an indistinct gleam of color beneath it, distorted by a dozen miniature currents, before the fly is taken or refused. A refusal will probably result from some treacherous slab of current that tugs at the leader and causes the fly to make a distinct wake, exaggerating drag that sends the trace of submerged color back into darkness.
At that point I get a false sense of being a part of the scene, understanding trout and backcountry creeks, and I plan an elaborate curlicue of fancy casting which I am sure will present a new fly perfectly to the fish that showed a broad side for a magnified second. Concentration. And that is when I feel my backcast catch a tall willow or a groping pine. Reality. The fly is probably too high to reach.
Such things are scorned by those who feel success or failure may depend upon selection of a female mayfly imitation instead of a male. My tactics are backwoods crudity when observed by learned anglers casting for fish that are themselves students of entomology and wader trademarks.
There are beaver pond specialists like the late Dan Bailey.
He admitted the limestone spring creeks were more challenging in their way, but said the beaver ponds were more lonely places╤and surprising, each different, for a successful beaver dam can separate two little trout worlds. It can divide them by both size and species, and a casual fisherman who leaves one because it is crowded with stunted brook trout may walk past a big Loch Leven living in the one below it, sulking among lesser fish.
Above the old homestead, where the canyon opens up again, generations of beavers have changed the landscape by design and accident, their structural failures contributing almost as much as their successes. Where a super-dam has held there is a lake like a miniature of some TVA impoundment, the old streambed making a deep, meandering groove far out on its bottom, a place where really good trout live.
Where some over-enthusiastic toothy construction team has bungled a pretentious edifice, spring floods have broken through, the separated main timbers jutting forlornly into a little torrent of falling water. But a fisherman studies the place carefully because the waterfall has gouged out a hole at its base, a deep new pool. Put the big hair-winged fly near where the bubbles come up from the deepest part.
Mallard hens nest at the beaver ponds, quacking loudly to scare fish and fisherman when he cautiously pokes his head above a big dam to aim a cast where he thinks the old streambed probably went.
Old homesteads and the creeks that attracted them draw few fishermen. Below them are the rivers with bigger trout and the technical streams attended by learned anglers with deep fly boxes and entomological texts. Above them are the high-country creeks that draw the hikers with cleated leather boots instead of waders and the midsummer horse-packing parties who camp by icy trickles where hard-bodied little fish flash at skimpy food.
Perhaps half a mile is the magic distance. Half a mile above the larger streams the anglers with the big fly boxes and fine rods tend to turn back toward bigger water. And no muscular young hiker with a pack rod, freeze-dried provisions, and a mountain tent will stop at half a mile. So perhaps the old homesteads with the overgrown roads are visited least of all.
But the season is short. Even summer is cool in the canyon and when September anglers at lower altitude begin to splice heavier leaders for "fall fishing" and the hikers give way to big-game hunters with grinding gears or creaking saddles, the fishing falls off in my canyon as it does in many others.
The old log house seems to have settled even more, its outlines softened by snow, and there are no beaver trappers wintering in the meadows. The trout are under ice in deep holes.
This story originally appeared in Field Days by Charley Waterman.
Copyright (c) 1995 Charles F. Waterman. All rights reserved.
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