Sunday. Sore from the previous day's climb, we sit on the deck and watch the cirrostratus bloom over the Tetons, promising rain by the afternoon. Down from Montana, Ed and Nancy are interested in finding some equine property. Chrislip, my climbing partner and on holiday between consulting jobs, will be heading back to Colorado soon. Touched by having three old friends visit at the same time, I momentarily indulge myself and imagine this northwestern corner of Wyoming as the center of the continent.
But after three pots of coffee, Ed and Nancy saddle up their Volvo and return to Bozeman and Chrislip goes into Jackson on an errand. Left with an abyss of unstructured time, I drift by the study's bookshelves--too filled with other people's emotions--and gravitate to the back room where most of my time structurers lay: the road bike, the climbing and kayaking gear, and my fishing rods.
Gathering waders and vest, I hesitate a moment over the choice of rod and finally pick the two weight, which at one-and-a-half ounces, is so light and effortless in the hand that it rarely colors a day astream with purpose. In fact, throwing line with its taut eight-foot length reminds me more of blowing bubbles than of anything so scientific as duping a smart creature like a trout with a bit of feather and flotsam.
At the eastern border of Grand Teton National Park, the Gros Ventre River turns away from the road, recedes behind a swell of spruce-covered hills, and runs incognito for several miles before reemerging as a rocky channel behind the Teton Valley Ranch, our small settlement, and my house.
Few anglers fish this back bend, because to reach it one must wade the Gros Ventre above a small rapid that tumbles directly into a band of cliffs that guard a deep green pool. Even after you've studied the crossing through Polaroid glasses, and have chosen the shallowest line, the ford can be waist deep, and the current is strong. The unfit and the timid usually turn back here.
Most days, I am neither. Still, I have never much liked swimming in fast rivers. Therefore going with the flow, using my rod as a staff, and treading over the rocks with care, I quarter downstream, reach the other side without incident, and walk a gravel bar to the pools below the cliffs. Just as I pause and survey the pools, the sun emerges from the bank of lowering clouds and spreads a rich tannic light across the bottom.
Prospecting, I turn stones over in the shallows and find them teeming with the small black cases of Trichoptera caddis larvae, the second stage of the four stages--egg, larva, pupa, and adult--that take this insect from birth to death.
Most anglers, including myself, have resisted the intrusion of this sort of entomological language into casual excursions. Yet mastery of a task has always produced a specialized vocabulary.
As I've became more sophisticated in matching the insect life of rivers with imitations, a bit of Latin has become part of my workaday language. I have friends, though, who find taxonomic language pretentious, stating that it's no more than another symptom of the complex lives we live. To them, I can only say that immersion in a home always produces such lexicons. Witness the Inuit, who have scores of words for what most of us can call no more than "snow."
Holding the larvae in my palm, I remember a fishing text informing me that the order Trichoptera has about nine hundred species. Feeling inadequate, I guess that this is the genus Limnephilus, whose larvae form thick tubular cases of stone and sand around themselves. Hoping that the trout aren't as fastidious as my old Latin teacher and some other fishermen I know, I tie on two small black flies--one which I bought in New Zealand a couple of years ago and whose name I can no longer remember, and one called simply a pheasant tail. Both somewhat resemble the larvae on the river's stones.
Those unfamiliar with fly fishing may find this grubbing about on the bottom of a river while mumbling Latin flummery a bit disconcerting and certainly not in keeping with the classic view of the fly angler dropping a lovely winged imitation delicately on the surface of a placid stream dimpled by the rings of rising trout.
Yet, just as most of us eat toast rather than croissants most mornings, so too do trout, day in and day out, eat more of these plebeian nymphs and larvae than flying insects--especially in a cold climate like this one, where insect hatches come late in the spring and end early in the fall. Those skilled in plumbing the depths of a river with these homely flies take far more fish on far more days than those who hope to lure a trout to the surface for a dramatic strike.
Tackle rigged, I wade across a submerged bar and into a deep pool bordered by cliffs. Wild roses grow on ledges above me, and their bright pink petals turn in the eddies at the base of the rocks.
I'm bargaining that the pool is home to Salmo clarki, the native trout of the Rockies and my home fish. Named for the reddish-orange slash that extends along each side of its lower jaw, the cutthroat has an olive back, a yellow belly, and a pale hint of cranberry along its sides, upon which are scattered black spots.
As it happens the cutthroat's common name is a more accurate physical description than Salmo, which means to leap and which the fish rarely does, and clarki, after Captain William Clark of "Lewis and," who, like all those individuals who have been honored by having their name given to a species, merely happened upon a creature whose existence antedated that of its discoverer's by millennia.
As a sport fish the cutthroat gets mixed reviews. Those who enjoy catching numerous fish for the pan enjoy it. Those who are used to the challenge of rainbows or browns find the cut omnivorous and gullible. In fact, a study in Yellowstone National Park found that wild cutthroat trout were twice as catchable as wild brook trout (and brookies who live in the West are known for their stupidity) and about 18 times as catchable as that intellect of the salmonids, the brown trout.
Nonetheless, in the pan, few fish can rival the orange-meated sweetness of a cutthroat, and with respect to the aesthetics of the wild, few sights can match this muted-orange and yellow-green fish swirling close to your net as you stand knee deep in a stream far from the road.
As I begin to cast upstream, swallows sweep from the cliffs, twittering speedy songs. A slow processional of cumulus floats overhead--from dark canyon rim to the opposite, sun-illumined mountainside. And the breeze makes crescent-shaped patterns of tiny riffles on the pool, as if a scythe were mowing the water. Into just such a sudden bit of erectile current, I drop my lure, my object being to have it tumble freely near the bottom. I've added a pair of tiny split shot to the 10-foot leader to make sure this happens--enough weight to take the flies down to the rocks but not enough to snag them.
Of course, if the water is deep the resultant and hoped-for action is sometimes invisible. This is the case today, and I can only keep a careful eye on the end of my fly line. Any sudden twitch or dart downward can mean that the split shot has bounced over a rock or that a fish has taken the fly.
On the third drift the fly line darts, I lift the rod, and a steady throbbing pressure indicates that Salmo has taken one of my nymphs. The trout makes one fast run downstream, no more than a few feet, before shaking the hook which, because I release most of my fish, is barbless.
I throw another cast upstream and within the first 10 feet of drift hook another cutthroat who runs the length of the pool, flashes near the surface 20 yards from me, then sulks on the bottom. Walking downstream, I recover line, pleased with the heaviness of the fish. Two more runs tire it, and as I crank the leader into the guides, and reach with my landing net, I feel the sinking emptiness that comes when one's expectations aren't met by reality.
The fish that struggles in the net is Prosopium williamsoni, the mountain whitefish, or as a friend who is a fishing guide sarcastically calls it, "the prince of the river." Widely distributed in the western United States, and native to the headwaters of the Missouri River basin, the whitefish has a tubular body lacking elegance of line. It also has a short head, an overhanging snout, a blunt and suckerlike mouth, and a uniformly whitish-green color highlighted by a single pink blush on its gill plates, which isn't dermal pigmentation but gills showing through the transparent gill cover.
The whitefish takes almost every fly that a trout will, fights well, and grows larger than most of its riverine neighbors. In fact, the specimen in my hand is 20 inches long. On most streams in the United States a 20-inch trout is greeted by shouts by all except the most incurably blasÄ. Yet, I place the fish back in the river with no more than a disappointed sigh.
Perhaps if Prosopium, which means "small mask," had a nose job, or could only visit the Ralph Lauren Shop of the piscatorial world and get some pastels to liven up its drab business-white, anglers would like it more, for even when you can catch many of them, they never seem to satisfy.
This callous fact is brought home with ever more certainty as I work up through the pool and take whitefish after whitefish. I stop counting after one dozen. Yet I can't bring myself to leave. The perfume of the rose petals, the cavorting of the swallows, the gentle wind blowing the willows are too lovely to abandon--and also I wish that I could catch a trout so as to infuse a final element of harmony into the scene.
This story appears in Ted Kerasote's forthcoming book, Heart of Home: Essays of People and Nature available in the fall from Random House. Copyright (c) 1996 Ted Kerasote. All rights reserved.
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