Trout Quintet Read online

  Books by Steve Raymond

  Fly Fishing—Nonfiction

  Kamloops: An Angler’s Study of the Kamloops Trout

  The Year of the Angler

  The Year of the Trout

  Backcasts: A History of the Washington Fly Fishing Club, 1939–1989

  Steelhead Country: Angling for a Fish of Legend

  The Estuary Flyfisher

  Rivers of the Heart: A Fly-Fishing Memoir

  Blue Upright: The Flies of a Lifetime

  Nervous Water: Variations on a Theme of Fly Fishing

  Fly Fishing—Fiction

  Trout Quintet: Five Tales of Fly Fishers and Trout

  Civil War History

  In the Very Thickest of the Fight: The Civil War Experience of the 78th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment

  Copyright © 2016 by Steve Raymond

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Tom Lau

  Cover illustration and frontispiece by Al Hassall

  Print ISBN: 978–1-5107–0626-2

  Ebook ISBN: 978–1-5107–0627-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Joan

  for everything

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prelude

  The Man Who Came Back as a Trout

  No-Fly Zone

  An Honest Angler

  The Nehallis Incident

  One Size Fits All

  PRELUDE

  FOR MORE than fifty years, I’ve been fly fishing for trout and writing stories about it. Nearly all those stories have been nonfiction—nothing but the truth. This, I know, flies in the face of popular tradition, which holds that virtually every fisherman is a liar, or at the very least is prone to great exaggeration. I have known enough anglers of both types to understand how those stereotypes took root and why they persist. Nevertheless, for my part I have always tried steadfastly and carefully to stay within narrow factual bounds in nearly everything I’ve written about fly fishing for trout. The few exceptions—several brief works of fiction—have been clearly labeled as such.

  Yet one can keep doing the same thing only so long before it starts to wear a little thin. I decided finally to take a break and try more fiction—not a full-length novel, but a collection of stories, all still about anglers and trout. Once I started, I discovered how much fun it was to give my imagination free rein for a change and let it roam over the trout-fishing waterscape in any direction it chose to go. Here you have the results.

  Whenever I read a fictional work by someone else, I always wonder where the author got the idea for the story. Most never tell. Maybe they want to keep their source of ideas a secret, like anglers protecting the locations of favorite fishing spots. Or maybe it’s because they really don’t know. I suspect it might be the latter, because that turned out to be the case for some of the stories in this book; when I tried to trace their origins, I found a few clues, but mostly I simply didn’t know where the ideas came from.

  Take the first one, “The Man Who Came Back as a Trout.” Sam, the hero of the piece, is astounded to find himself suddenly reincarnated as a trout. After exploring his new surroundings, he discovers his home is the same stream he fished most often when he was still a human, and the anglers he fished with are now fishing for him! Most are old friends, and he’s not worried about them because they release all the trout they catch. But there’s another who’s despised by everyone because he always kills his limit, and Sam knows he must steer clear of him at all costs.

  I’ve never heard of something like this happening to anyone; even if it did, it would be impossible for a reincarnated soul to communicate with the world of the living, as Sam learns to his intense frustration. So where did such an idea come from? I’m neither a user nor abuser of controlled substances, so if it came from my imagination, as appears to be the case, it came without any external stimulation.

  Or there might be another explanation: Perhaps I was a trout in a former life and I’ve been reincarnated as a writer.

  The second story, “No-Fly Zone,” is a little different. As a young newspaper reporter I covered many criminal trials, and I suppose some of those experiences helped inspire this tale about a down-and-out fly fisher who has the bad luck to be the first person arrested for violating a draconian new law restricting fishing in his local waters. The prosecutor wants to make an example of him and send him to prison for a long time. The public defender, who also is the narrator of the story, tries to get him off on grounds of temporary insanity. The jury, however, has different ideas, and comes back with a verdict that surprises everyone, even the judge. The courtroom scenario came from memory, but my imagination again pleads guilty for providing the rest of the story.

  It has been a long time since I was drafted to serve on a committee established to come up with a definition of fly fishing that would be acceptable to everyone. It turned out to be a disaster because the committee quickly discovered there was (and still is) almost universal disagreement about what really constitutes legitimate fly fishing. That unhappy experience was surely in my mind when I conceived the third story in this collection, “An Honest Angler.” It’s the saga of a man who has strong convictions about the ethics of fly fishing and is determined to persuade everyone else to adopt his way of thinking. His first target, the editor of an influential fly-fishing magazine, is finally convinced to “upgrade his ethics,” but ends up paying a heavy price as a result. Except for the unhappy memory of the abortive committee, most of this story again is a product of my imagination, which appears to be in overdrive after all those years of writing nonfiction.

  I’ve known several anglers who habitually carried pistols in their fishing vests, which always made me a little nervous. I don’t know what they expected to shoot—encounters with bears aren’t all that common in most places I fish—but the memory of those pistol-packing piscators was probably in the back of my mind when I conceived “The Nehallis Incident,” the fourth story in this assemblage. It’s about two anglers whose meeting on a lonely stretch of wilderness steelhead river deteriorates into a potentially deadly confrontation. Nothing like that has ever happened to me or anyone I know, so I suppose my imagination was mostly to blame in this case as well.

  The final story is “One Size Fits All,” and I know where this one came from. For a considerable portion of my fly-fishing life I wore the same hat, simply because it was comfortable and I liked it. Inevitably, it began to show signs of wear—stains from sweat and dry-fly dressing, scorch marks from cinders emitted by the pipe I used to smoke, rusty spots from hooks of flies stuck in the hatband, and so forth. One fishing friend said the hat made me look like an itinerant preacher. Others said it made me look like a Confederate soldier.

  I wore that hat until it finally became so tattered and shapeless it would no longer stay on my head, let alone protect me from sun, wind, or r
ain, so at last I was forced to retire it. I’m not ordinarily a superstitious person and never associated any magical properties with the hat, but not long after I stopped wearing it I realized I wasn’t catching nearly as many trout as before. I thought maybe it was because there just weren’t that many trout any more, but eventually I began wondering if something more was at work, and the absence of my old hat was really to blame. By then, however, the hat had disappeared and I couldn’t have resumed wearing it if I had wished.

  That experience, I’m sure, was the origin of this tale of a boy who discovers a well-used fishing hat for sale in a thrift store. He buys it for twenty-five cents and immediately catches the biggest trout he’s ever seen. Then the hat’s original owner comes looking for it, convinced the hat has supernatural properties that brought him great fishing luck before it went missing. He tries to buy back the hat, but the boy refuses, setting in motion a complicated series of events that ultimately leads to the greatest catch either one will ever make.

  So that’s about as much as I can say concerning the origins of these stories. They were written mostly for purposes of entertain-ment—mine as well as yours—but several also have serious underlying themes, some evident, others subliminal. I hope these will stimulate thoughtfulness and understanding.

  Finally: No trout were killed, injured, or otherwise harmed in the making of this book.

  For nearly two centuries, composer Franz Schubert’s Trout quintet has been a staple of the classical chamber music repertoire. It has been called “the one piece of music everybody likes,” and I daresay anyone hearing it for the first time will understand why. As its name indicates, the quintet was scored for five instruments—piano, violin, viola, cello, and contrabass—while most chamber music in Schubert’s time (1797–1828) was written for four instruments or less. Since there are five stories in this book, all concerning trout in one way or another, Trout Quintet seemed the perfect title.

  Schubert first composed some of the music as a song, Die Forelle (“The Trout”), inspired by a poem written by a man with a similar name, Christian F.D. Schubart. Die Forelle never quite made it to the top of the charts in Schubert’s Austria, but around 1819, several years after he wrote the song, Schubert was asked by a wealthy patron to include part of it in a chamber work, which eventually became the famous quintet. The patron apparently never had the work performed in public, however, and the score wasn’t published until after Schubert’s death at a tragically young age, so he may never even have heard the quintet during his lifetime, except in his mind.

  I have not been able to find any evidence that Schubert ever was an angler, although he might have been. He was short and a bit chubby—his friends called him Schwammerl, meaning “Little Mushroom”—but lack of height and a generous waistline have never been serious impediments to becoming a fisherman. There is evidence he spent time in the northern Austrian city of Steyr, which has its own fly shop and lies in the vicinity of several lovely trout streams—the Erlauf, Salza, Ybbs and others. Schubert must have had some familiarity with one or more of these streams, if not as a fisherman then likely as a spectator. It’s easy to imagine him standing on a wooden bridge spanning a stream, listening to the sounds of the river and peering through his thick spectacles at trout rising gracefully to a hatch of fly. How else could he possibly have written music that so vividly captures those sights and sounds?

  So to those about to read this book I would offer this suggestion: Your enjoyment will be greatly enhanced if you obtain a recording of the Trout quintet and listen while you read. You’ll hear what I mean.

  —Steve Raymond

  THE MAN WHO CAME BACK AS A TROUT

  WHENEVER SAM thought about reincarnation, which wasn’t often, it seemed like a pretty good idea. The only problem with it, as far as he could see, was that you had to die first.

  Now it seemed his family thought that time had come. His son, daughter, and two sisters had gathered around, all looking sorrowful and speaking in hushed tones. His wife of more than fifty years was holding his hand as firmly as she could. Even his old fishing partner, Frank Vincent, was there. Sam thought they were making a much bigger deal of the occasion than it warranted.

  He was about to say so when suddenly everything went dark and the next thing Sam knew he was alone, drifting on a dark and silent sea. A long time passed. Or maybe it was just a short time; there was no way to tell. He waited for something to happen, a little nervous but still confident that something would happen. He wondered what his next life would be like. Maybe he’d be a great chef, an ambition he’d always harbored secretly. Or a game warden; that would be interesting. Perhaps even an astronaut.

  Wait! What was that? He thought he saw a distant flash of light. There it was again, coming closer! He heard the sound of rushing water, growing louder. He began feeling cold.

  In another instant he was surrounded by water and light, caught up in a mighty current and a blinding torrent of bubbles. Rocks, boulders, roots, branches, and trailing weeds flashed past along with glimpses of fishes. Panicking, he tried to swim for what he thought was the surface, but his arms and legs didn’t seem to work. Looking down, he saw he had no arms or legs; instead he had fins. The effort of looking turned him upside down, then sideways to the current and he was swept downstream even faster.

  “Hey, take it easy, Mac!” someone said, and he saw a sizeable trout as he hurtled past. That’s when he realized he hadn’t exactly heard the admonition; it had been more of a feeling instead, an odd sensation he traced not to his ears but rather to his flanks, to a long, sensitive line of nerves that ran up and down his sides like an antenna.

  He was still trying to understand how such a thing could be possible when the current deposited him in an eddy behind a large boulder and he somehow managed to turn himself upright. The rushing water found him again and nearly sucked him from the eddy, but with a powerful thrust of his tail—his tail?—he managed to propel himself forward, facing upstream, and find some quiet water in the shelter of the boulder. There he tried to rest, his gills—his gills?—opening and closing rapidly, then finally settling into a slower, steady rhythm. As they did, he felt strength flowing through his body.

  What the hell had happened? Where was he? What was he?

  He tried again to look at himself, but what he saw merely confused him. If he looked straight ahead he could see things pretty clearly, but then his eyes would stray off in different directions so he saw two different images at once. It was worse than when he’d tried on his first pair of bifocals. Eventually he found that if he looked back at his whole body, he could see a long, silvery shape, dark and spotted on top, nearly pure white on the bottom, with a thin, strawberry-colored stripe running down his flank.

  There could be no doubt: he had become a rainbow trout.

  Well, that was something of a relief. For a moment he’d been afraid he might be a catfish, or a carp. Or maybe even an alligator gar.

  Still, that was not exactly what he’d had in mind for reincarnation. He could scarcely grasp the fact that only moments before he had been a human being and now he was a rainbow trout. Somehow he’d been transported from his warm bed and loving family to a cold, aquatic existence in an unknown stream.

  He turned for another look at himself. Yes, he was certainly a rainbow trout. That probably wouldn’t have been his first choice for reincarnation if he’d had one. But that’s what he was, and there seemed nothing else to do but try to make the best of it.

  As he surveyed his trout’s body, he realized it was quite handsome—maybe two and a half pounds, he guessed, though he remembered occasionally exaggerating the size of trout he’d caught when he was a human. He also realized the cold water no longer bothered him. In fact, he was beginning to feel rather comfortable. He began looking around, sometimes in two directions at once, noticing the broken silvery ribbon of daylight above the surface of the stream, the nearby boulder shielding him from the full force of the river’s flow, the tiny objects cont
inually drifting past—leaves, fragments of wood or bark, squirming mayfly nymphs, and other things he could not identify.

  Maybe it was the sight of those mayfly nymphs, but Sam suddenly realized he was hungry. He saw another nymph approaching and turned to try to intercept it, but the movement carried him out from behind the boulder and back into the current, and once again he was swept downstream.

  This time it was a short trip, however, as he experimented with his fins and tail and found a combination of movements that stabilized his streamlined body and got him oriented facing upstream. Eventually he also found a comfortable balance between the current’s speed and the amount of effort required to resist it. Once that equilibrium was established, he experimented with minor movements to adjust his trim, or maybe just to see what would happen when he tried them, and soon he felt more confident in his ability to maneuver and maintain stability.

  Confident enough that when he saw another nymph drifting toward him, he tried to capture it. This time he wasn’t swept downstream, but he didn’t catch the nymph either; his lunge was awkward and his new sense of vision was still confusing. His quarry easily drifted past his open mouth and vanished.

  This is not good, he thought. I’ve got to practice this.

  So he did. Over the next few hours—or was it days?—he kept trying until he finally succeeded in catching and swallowing a nymph. He had been dreading the thought that it might not taste good, but he didn’t taste it at all; it was like pasta without any sauce. Still, he felt a sense of triumph.

  A second nymph came more easily and it wasn’t long until Sam learned how to refine his movements so he could move surely and swiftly in the direction of any drifting or swimming nymph, focus on it and catch it in his mouth. His growing confidence even inspired him to try capturing hatched-out flies he could see floating overhead on the surface, and after a few awkward misses, he had that procedure down pat, too.