Bart Chatelain is shoeing a horse, wielding the arcane tools of the farrier with the skill of a surgeon performing an arterial graft. He's the head wrangler for this backcountry camp.
His teenage assistant, Mike Boyd, is lolling in his bunk, morning chores done, reading the magazine that every red-blooded teenager drools over: Bugle, publication of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
Outfitter Jim Schell is saddling up, ready to take the other dudes on a day-ride adventure in the Bighorn Mountains. He pauses between stories to sluice the ground with Copenhagen. His wife, Deb, is redding up the dishes for the camp swamper.
Breakfast lies comfortably in my stomach--fluffy pancakes, eggs, sausage, and bacon...and a trout, fresh-caught the day before. Catch- and-release is admirable, something I practice religiously. Except when breakfast is involved.
The camp deer is browsing within a few feet of the little tent with the sign that reads "Cowgirls." She flicks a foot at pesky flies and gazes placidly at me with movie star eyes. Michelle Pfeiffer would kill for those eyes.
And I am stringing up a fly rod. Let others ride horses to the promised land. There is a small brook trout stream not 100 yards from me, Duncom Creek, which tumbles down the valley toward the distant Little Big Horn and, ultimately, to Montana where the mother river has become synonymous not with trout fishing, but with the slaughter of the Seventh Cavalry.
Gen. Custer wasn't thinking about trout fishing on June 26, 1876, when he sighted the Little Big Horn. Just goes to show what can happen when you mix up your priorities.
I CHOOSE MY FLY CAREFULLY (one I can see on the water, never mind whether it will catch fish). The most visible dry fly in my limited box is a No. 12 hair-winged Adams, tied by a friend. It has deerhair wings instead of feathers. He calls it a Bastard Adams. He also ties a Bub Fly (Bub stands for Big Ugly Bug).
I have a small aerosol can of fly floatant that has been in my vest for years, no doubt with ozone layer-eating freon as the propellant. Begging pardon for polluting the environment, I spray at the fly, miss and coat my watch face with floatant which probably will eat the crystal right off it.
I speak to evil powers in words they can understand, each with four letters.
Duncom is no different than dozens of other trout streams that lace the Bighorns. There are six such streams within a mile or so of Schell's wall tent camp. All have brook trout, some have cutthroat, some rainbows. Duncom is strictly brookies, at least where I will fish.
There's a mile of fishing to a canyon where the creek suddenly stumbles over steep drops, not quite falls, but close. From there to the valley, Duncom is a tumbling, confused little creek, no longer in control of itself. But up here, in the high valley, the creek curls and sprints through short rapids, pauses in little pools, offers pockets of deep water, lazes around sandy bends, and always talks to you, whispering secrets that, if only you listened a bit harder, you could understand.
I know going into the game that I won't catch a wall-hanger, if I were into hanging dead creatures on walls. I'd rather have a stream to myself and know I will catch a dozen or more trout than to ride three hours with a bunch of other anglers and hope to sting one big fish.
DUNCOM'S BROOKIES ARE NAIVE, two hours by horse from the nearest road, farther than that for hikers. Brook trout aren't sophisticated even where they're heavily fished-for; these backcountry brookies are, in the words of a trout biologist friend, "as dumb as a bucket of rocks."
Fishing won't be as good in the morning as it will be later. Brookies, as much as they admire cold, clean water, will wait to feed until the sun warms the water a bit.
Maybe because they're pouty and cold, the morning brook trout are as spooky as horses in snake country. Walk up on the stream and you'll see them scooting for safety. So much for that "bucket of rocks" theory--you won't see a bucket of rocks sprinting for cover.
The horse parade passes uphill from me and everyone waves. "Happy behinds!" I shout as they jounce off for six hours in the saddle. If horses were as narrow as bicycles, they'd appeal to me more.
I spend a couple of hours sneaking on hands and knees to casting position, dapping the dry fly from a kneeling position, making long casts where I can. It's tough to get much of a drag-free drift on the little creek. Lucky to get a foot or two.
I TRY EVERYTHING--swat the fly down repeatedly in hopes a trout will think there's a hatch on and be driven to a feeding frenzy. I skitter the fly back upstream, let it dead drift down.
Sometimes it works, mostly not. This is not (I tell myself) because the trout are sophisticated. They're just cold. I'm not inclined to cheeseburgers with special sauce when I'm sulky and chilled either--I want to get warm and then think about a Big Mac.
I try a nymph for a little while, but nothing takes. Or so I believe--I'm not a perceptive nymph fisherman. You have to have the fingers of a safecracker and the eyes of a goshawk to see and feel the tender takes of a nymphing trout. I like fish that bust the fly like a defensive back sandbagging a receiver.
The dries will work if I just persist. And it won't make much difference what I use. These are not the finicky fish of Yellowstone's Firehole, where matching the hatch is an art. To a brook trout, a hatch is whatever falls in the creek, except for me. And I'm trying very hard not to fall in, a feat I usually accomplish at least once every trip, because this is cold water, snowmelt most of the year. I figure my survival time would be about three seconds.
Brook trout aren't native to the West, but now are the dominant fish in the colder headwaters sections of all the Big Horn streams. A friend describes a brook trout as "a handful of rainbows" and surely it is the most beautiful of the trouts (technically not a trout, but a char which is the type of distinction that fisheries biologists make to confuse people like me).
Brookies are my kind of fish. I mostly slosh a popping bug in bluegill waters, so a brook trout is a fish after my own heart, a pugnacious little scrapper, more brawn than brain. John Alden Knight, he who devised the Solunar Tables, once damned brook trout with faint praise: "While there is much to be said in favor of the brook trout as a game fish, there are several things against him," Knight sneered. He cited the fish's penchant for nestling near the bottom, rather than dining at the surface, a copybook blot to a dry fly purist. Wonder what he would have thought when a foot-long Duncom Creek brookie cleared the water and stooped on my Bastard Adams like a falcon.
The worst brookie sin in Knight's view was that the fish is gullible. "Anybody who knows the barest rudiments of trout fishing can catch brook trout," Knight scoffed. "...quite stupid and easy to catch." Knight believed there were two fish: brown trout and everything else. I admire the artist's palette coloring of the wriggling little brookie and give Mr. Knight a juicy raspberry as I twist the hook to free the fish.
THE MOUNTAIN SUN IS HOT and my sunscreen is back at the tent, unapplied. So much for good intentions. I always intend to buy Christmas presents early and figure my taxes before the deadline, too. The meadows are filled with flowers because they haven't yet been cowed. Cows are the toothy scourges of the high meadows. They're supposedly limited to the amount of time they can spend chewing and trampling a given area, but even if they abide by the rules, the time is too long.
I can imagine bumper stickers: "Eat Your Wildflowers" or "Who Ever Heard Of Daisies-And-Potatoes?" But the eye needs food, too. You can't take a step without walking in the hoofsteps of a cow. Everywhere there is an opening to the creek, cows have slid down the bank, creating a mudbar from erosion.
And they damage the creek for less than $2/cow/month, about a fifth what they'd have to pay on private pasture. We taxpayers get to subsidize the other 80 percent. I look at an oozing fester where cows have cooled their hooves. I paid for some of this. If I can't make the stream right again, at least I ought to get a free shoulder of beef.
I give heavy-footed cows a John Alden Knight raspberry, then tend to my angling. It's too fine a day to grump. Presently, I run out of fishable water. Duncom, as if smelling the gentle lowlands ahead, races recklessly in plunges of 10, 20 feet, frothing and wild- eyed like a runaway horse.
There is a broad shelf of rock, like the dome of an enormous forehead, and I walk out on it, inspect it for a soft spot and find one--a pad of moss tucked in a crevice. I use my fly vest as a pillow and loll back against it.
High, white clouds tack past with ponderous grace. I can see the distant notch where the Little Big Horn empties onto the Montana plains. Eat your heart out, Custer.
There is no sound other than that of the creek, no wind, no distant airplanes, no television programs explaining family values as perceived by incomplete people, no traffic noise, nor rumbles of trains. Nothing in my ears but the distant sound of the creek, my breath, and the blood beating. It's unnerving for a while. Where is the dark noise that shades our lives?
I catch a motion and see a rock chuck atop a large, rounded rock at the edge of a short cliff. He crawls out on the rock, in the sun, sprawls, just like me. Just a couple of sloppy old rock chucks, dozing in the midday sun.
I tip my cap over my eyes.
I WAKE SOME TIME LATER, my mouth dry. I'm disoriented and dazed by the heat. Mad dogs, Englishmen, and trout fishermen...
A jet passes, etching the sky with miles of contrail and a thudding roar that eclipses the murmuring collapse of Duncom Creek as it spills down its ancient raceway.
This is a message to me written in the sky by that plane: Civilization, kid, you can't escape forever. I've been up there and looked down on the Big Horns. They were as impersonal from 30,000 feet as an aerial photograph. I didn't see any rock chucks.
I'm thirsty and hungry and a long way from home. But there are trout to be fished-for, now warmed by the noonday sun and hungry for that Adams Big Mac.
Two hours later, I'm back at camp, wolfing a sandwich, so hungry that I would have eaten if it had been built of week-old bread and haunch of road kill.
I walk out on the crest of the hill, look down at Duncom Creek. I hear it dropping over a little falls, pushing oxygen into the stream for my trout friends.
Sweet sadness: I've gloried in the bounty of the stream and it's sad to know that even if I do it again, it won't be a voyage of discovery. Streams offer another bend, another pool, another secret, but the only way to keep them new is to keep walking, drawn to peer around that next bend.
That's what pulled the mountain men over the next hill, the trailblazers through the next pass, and the rivermen around the next bend. But there's always an end.
Still...there's also always another first timer coming behind, clutching a rod tipped with a silly-looking fly, who has forgotten his lunch and his sunscreen and his canteen. In fact, he's forgotten everything sensible and modern.
All he has is a childlike wonder and a glorious adaptability to be able to nap with rock chucks.
Copyright (c) 1996 Joel M. Vance. All rights reserved.
Home | Library | Fishing | Fly Fishing