Ronin Journal

Inside a cramped trailer along the Fall River, old Two Dogs began whelping five pups from the young bitch. He had raised the temperature to 75 degrees and sweated as he worked. One came out backward and he had to turn it to save it. But there were no dinks, which meant no drownings, and he was grateful.

All the pups had the black-and-white markings of a border collie save a big red female. The young bitch mother did her part, too. She chewed the cords, ate the placenta and licked each pup clean. The pups pulled at her teats and her milk dropped.

“This is the way it should be,” Two Dogs said as he stroked his salt-and-pepper beard. “A perfect whelping.”

He had come to the Fall River to sit quietly in his boat, tie the right flies and present them to rainbow trout lazily feeding in the spring creek. The young bitch wasn’t supposed to birth the pups for another week, but Two Dogs’s life seldom went to plan.

Two Dogs hadn’t slept since the whelping began sometime in the early evening. He was intent on watching the young bitch care for her pups. She was panting hard and anxious and he feared she might panic and cast her motherly instincts aside. But the young bitch gently stepped around her pups and made sure each got their fill. At one point, without thinking, she flashed her fangs at Two Dogs for coming too close to one of the pups. He grinned and nodded. Everything was working.

The trailer had become as hot as a sauna, or so it seemed, and Two Dogs longed to open the window and let in the cool night air but knew the pups needed the warmth of a natural den. Hours passed, and he lost track of time. With the pups asleep, his mind drifted to his pram and to the slow-moving river just outside. He imagined dimples on the water, fish rising in the warmth of a spring evening.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the young buck along the river …

Two Dogs was waiting patiently ever since the birds had alighted on the trees — harbingers of the hatch — and after carefully positioning his pram just above the run. It began like a dream within a dream. A cloud of green drakes appearing, birds swooping and feasting, swirling rainbows, and the sun low on the horizon. Fish after fish took his fly. He could not recall how many he caught and released or lost or their size. All he could remember was the moment and how happy he felt in it.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the young buck along the river, silent and still after spotting Two Dogs in his pram with his border collie, Blu, standing rigid at the bow. Blu and the buck were staring at each other intently, their bodies seemingly frozen in recorded time. And so Two Dogs began to maneuver the pram toward the buck, slowly, slowly, with hardly a sound, and dog and deer creeping closer and closer, halfway across the river, and closer still, and, now, noses only a few feet apart and still locked in. Then after a time the buck moved off and Blu laid down and went to sleep. Animals exist in the wild places, Two Dogs thought, which people are not allowed to visit but only observe from afar.

He wandered to another time in his pram when he spent a whole summer day with hardly a fish. He could see them in the clear water through polarized glasses, in schools of a dozen or more, and for hours watched them sway in the slow current. At midday, he took off his shirt, laid down his rod and his body, and gazed upward at trees silhouetted against the sky, his left hand resting on Blu’s head. He could feel the warm summer sun on his face, spreading like a blanket over his chest and arms, warmer and warmer, hotter and the trailer heater thrumming and he opened his eyes.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, old Two Dogs won’t abandon you.”

When the morning light broke, Two Dogs felt confident he could finally take a few minutes away from the pups. He stood up. The young bitch sounded a low whine, jumped off the bed, and laid her body across the door.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, old Two Dogs won’t abandon you,” he said. “Go back and check on your pups, and we can both go out for some air.”

The young bitch understood and took stock of the sleeping pups. Then she followed him out the trailer and into the crisp morning breeze flowing through the Cascades. Two Dogs set out a chair on the river bank, filled his briar pipe with mildly sweet tobacco, the young bitch laying beside him, her eyes never leaving him, and they took in the sunrise together through puffs of smoke.

“Many men go fishing all of their
lives without knowing that it
is not fish they are after.”

Henry David Thoreau

The small cataraft bounced in the choppy waters of the Trinity River as the old man with a ponytail stared intently into the shadows along the bank, hoping to spot torpedo shapes in the depths. The steelhead, with noses pointed upstream, had followed the great schools of salmon more than a hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean to feed on eggs laid in the redds and to spawn themselves.

The old man had been after them his whole life.

He spun the cataraft against the current and pulled strongly with both oars, as he neared a turn along an imposing concrete wall. Above the wall was the road and below, rushing water lapped into a deep run. The two tubes of the cataraft, which looked like giant bananas, rolled back and toward the sandy shore opposite the wall. In one of the saddle bags was a rain jacket and extra fishing gear; in the other, rice balls with sour plums, fish cake and bottled water. He planned to have his lunch here at “The Wall” (also known as the “Jap Hole” among locals), one of the best spots along the five-mile float for holding steelhead in the fall.

The old man had fished this hole hundreds of times since the early 1970s. He knew it well and saw that the water was high now and with a bit of color from the rains last week but still good enough to fish. He saw friendly faces, too, as he ate his lunch in quiet among the red and yellow leaves of the trees and familiar birds. His longtime fishing friend hooked his last steelhead here before cancer caught up with him in 2000. In the following year, a dozen of the old man’s disciples came to the Trinity River to catch and release wild steelhead in his friend’s memory.

The old man bowed to the fish.

So the old man baited his hook with a berry — salmon eggs wrapped in silk — tapped the free-line button on a classic Johnson reel and cast out into the moving green water.

The hit came on the fifth cast at the 10 o’clock position, not fast and sharp like a trout but heavy. The old man bowed to the fish. Steelhead around these parts often mouth bait and let it go on the first pass, he once told me, mimicking the mouthing motion with his hand. That’s why you must give the fish time and some line to mull it over, he said. But the eggs are rapturous, irresistible, ancient. And then the second pull.

The old man yanked the rod back and to the side, where it abruptly stopped, hooking the fish in the corner of the mouth. He could feel the full weight of the fish and the slow swaying of its tail.

For the first few seconds fish and fisherman hardly moved, as if in a silent greeting. Then the old man flipped the clicker-switch on the reel, which acted as a kind of drag, and turned the corked butt to the fish creating a bow in the top part of the graphite fly-rod. The pressure sent the fish slicing toward the surface and into the air. The old man bowed again, releasing line pressure as the fish whipped its tail to and fro, trying to throw the hook or cut the line with its teeth.

The fish made a half-dozen bursts as the old man played the angles and kept a bow in the rod. It’s a matter of pressure, he said, just enough to make the fish work for its freedom yet not too much or else the fish will be lost forever. But the fish is crafty, sometimes charging the fisherman, turning and diving into nearby snags.

He lingered at “The Wall” for a moment …

The old man worked the fish for fifteen minutes before beaching it. The 27-inch steelhead had the pointed top jaw of a buck, his scales silvery, which the old man referred to as “chrome,” meaning the fish hadn’t been in the river for very long. The old man removed the hook with a pair of needle nose pliers, briefly took stock and let it go. He lingered at “The Wall” for a moment, as the wind picked up bringing a chill into the valley. For some reason, he didn’t want to stay and pushed the cataraft back into the current and floated away.

He died in January of 2005, after a risky surgery proved to be just that, and three months shy of his annual pilgrimage to the Situk River in Alaska, which he called, “the best steelhead fishery in the world.” I shook his hand two days before the ill-fated surgery, and he told me to keep writing. Tougher men wept upon hearing the news of the great naturalist and fisherman Takenori “Tak” Tsuchiya’s death. An English translation of a famous haiku poem by Basho Matsuo graced the casket:

Spring departs.
Birds cry
Fishes’ eyes are filled with tears

Basho Matsuo