Rainbows in a Bucket

Yes, masters, I have caught trout on worms and even salmon eggs, and may, I fear, do it again tomorrow if the weather's nice (and if no one's looking, of course, and the fish won't take any sporting artificial flies). If the weather's threatening, so that it doesn't seem wise to drive 90 miles north to the nearest trout stream, I may just snag a few carp from the Iowa river near home instead.

That I, who am relatively pure--or anyway self-righteous--as a hunter of birds, should be so infinitely corrupt when I approach a trout stream causes me more concern than it might seem worth. It's that my character is weak, rather than shameless. And just to show there's good stuff here, if one can get to it, I might tell you that I've given up carp snagging--snatching them illegally out of the water with an unbaited treble hook, that is--since I learned that one's permitted to shoot them with a bow and arrow. The arrow is barbed, the bow has a simple reel on it, aiming becomes no more than a matter of general direction if enough carp are congregated close to the surface. Once I impaled three indignant fish on a single chance arrow; as my friend Con Carter says, it seems like too much fun not to be against the law.

So, you see, I'm very nearly a redeemed man on carp. Further, I fish correctly for crappie with weighted streamers; for bluegill with feathered popping bugs; for bass, pike and walleye with plugs and casting rod. It's with trout that I break down, the fish toward which ethical behavior is so rigorously and traditionally codified that the approved way of catching them seems more a ceremony than a method, a ceremony with which, at (continued on page 94)Rainbows(continued from page 91) home in winter when the streams are frozen, I wistfully identify.

The pricks under which my trout-fishing conduct becomes so deplorable are those inflicted by the old barbed arrows shot into carp snaggers from the bowstring stretched between illusion and reality. Around the next bend of the trout stream, up past the rapids at the pool, I had always expected (if I saw a fellow fisherman at all; I hoped not to) a knight, parfit and gentil, let alone compleat. He was to be a lean and stream-wise intellectual of fishing, gracious, something of an aristocrat in his quiet way, with bamboo fly rod, battered hat and heirloom creel. The hat would be stuck with dry flies and I would pause, hushed, to watch his style as he stood there in waders, calculated the current, selected a fly and, having tied it on, made his studied and impeccable cast.

I have never seen him. At long intervals, I see a man something like him; a little more often I see a man like me, trying to be like him, though actually we might more efficiently be trying to emulate Con Carter. Con is one of a new sort of expert, trained to compete for today's trout in today's streams, against the currently prevalent kind of competition. This competition is represented by what I more generally see at a pool above the rapids than a knight, a Quixote, or a brilliant young technician: She is a cheerfully aging rural housewife, stout and red-faced, very likely in her print dress, sitting on a canvas stool about four feet away from a two-tone sedan, who arrived by a road through the woods I never knew was there. She is waiting placidly as her husband puts a cheese-flavored marshmallow on the rather large hook at the end of the line on her spin-casting rod. There are three or four fair-sized rainbow trout floating belly up in a bucket of water between them.

My old-school fly-fisherman still exists in the East, or so I gather from reading, and has a somewhat more rugged, mountain-climbing counterpart in the far West; actually, there must be men who fish well with a fly rod in all parts of the country, and I honor them all. They must find their pleasure, I would think, at the comparatively few streams and rivers where trout still spawn naturally and grow up wild. But in the majority of our streams today there swims a troutlike fish, mass-produced in hatcheries, whose habits and responses are so different from those of a wild trout that the lady with the marshmallows might outfish anybody, at a certain time; these hatchery fish simply don't know that a fly floating naturally in the current is more appropriate and safer food than a gelatinous, cheese-flavored chunk of stuff, weighted and lying on the bottom. This is especially true in the first few days after stocking, when the fish are still lying in uneasy schools, like suckers, at the pool bottoms, waiting for the man with the food basket to come along as he has on all the previous days of their lives in the hatchery tanks.

At such times, the majority are caught. The survivors move out, and become somewhat stream-wise. These survivors are not necessarily easy to catch; nevertheless, I am not convinced that the classic method that applies to wild trout is the most effective way to bring them to the creel. This classic way would be: Study the water; move carefully and in concealment to a point where the place most likely to harbor a trout may be cast to; use a fly that resembles in size, shape and color the particular form of insect life on which fish in this stream may be feeding today; and present this fly so artfully that it seems to have arrived over the feeding station naturally. In contrast, Con Carter moves fast from pool to pool to outdistance other fishermen, may peer in to assure himself a fish is there, and, when he uses artificials, favors things that look as if they hatched from Easter eggs.

Con grew up catching these hatchery survivors, and is the best at it of anyone I know. I have watched him closely through several seasons, and will herein reveal and illustrate such of his fishing secrets as I understand, hoping that knowing them will do you more good than it has me.

I will also reveal, in an account of the same curious fishing trip I have chosen as illustrating the way Con works, a secret of my own. It is guaranteed to enable you to do what I have done just once: Pay close attention to my words, follow my example without deviation, and you will positively catch a limit of trout on dry flies in less than half an hour. There is nothing to add to or qualify this guarantee except to forewarn you that, having so triumphed, I felt a good deal less pride in that limit of fish than I have felt about trout caught on worms. Or even salmon eggs.

The trip that was to make a successful, if somewhat shamefaced, fly-fisherman out of me began on a very hot day last summer. I had decided to drive up to the northeast corner of Iowa, near the Minnesota border, to a place I had never been before called Westerly Creek, where I would fish, sleep on the bank and fish again in the morning. According to a book our Conservation Commission publishes called Iowa Fish and Fishing, Westerly Creek is the longest stretch of trout water in the small part of this state to which the original range of the brook trout extended, an area in which natural reproduction may still, if very rarely, occur. It was not that I thought I would catch a native fish, but it did increase my anticipation of the stream to know that a hundred years ago, when the land lying west of it was prairie, and the upper Mississippi River into which it drains an insufficient barrier to the men who were coming to plow the plains, strip the timber, erode the land and silt the streams--in a time the oldest farmers around there might still remember as their boyhoods--wild trout swam in Westerly Creek, Waterloo, French, South Bear, Little Paint, Buck, Joy Springs and Ensign Hollow. The oldest farmers must have caught them, playing hooky from the one-room schools, as Indian kids must have before them. Cave-man kids, for all I know.

The brookies were there through all the world's life until the instant of it that is the past hundred years in which we wiped them out and, seeing our mistake early, began replacing them with production models. Hatching fish for those streams, according to the book I've mentioned, started as early as 1872, and by now the manufacturers stock a more complete line than was ever offered here by nature--in addition to the brookies there are brown trout, whose native range is Scotland and Germany, rainbows which began in the Rocky Mountains, and a hybrid brook-brown whose native range is the cross-fertilization tank.

The first I saw of Westerly Creek, turning off a secondary road onto an unpaved one, was disappointing. We were still below the point, a town called Brinkley, where the map indicated that trout fishing started, and that was hopeful; the water looked clear, and that was hopeful, too. But the creek moved slowly, spread out flat and shallow between level meadows, and not even turning often. By the time I reached Brinkley, though, things looked a little more promising. The banks were cut deeper, twists came more often, and the bed of the stream was two or three feet below the surface. There was a bridge at the edge of town, and under it the pool looked quite deep--eight feet, perhaps--but murky and not very fast, a good place for turtles.

Still, on the bank near the bridge was an infallible sign that trout ought to be present--a small green sign put up by the Conservation Commission reminding anglers that a special, two-dollar trout stamp must be purchased and fixed to one's license before fishing any area so posted. I cheered up. Between this sign (continued on page 182)Rainbows(continued from page 94) and the Minnesota border were eight and a half miles of stocked water. I remarked to the dog who rode with me:

"There ought to be some kind of action up there."

Then I drove into town and took the customary first step in fishing unfamiliar water; I stopped at the only tavern, went in and ordered a beer. Occasionally this produces information about local conditions, or favored baits, but all I learned that day was that the hatchery truck hadn't been seen for three weeks. The farmer who said this said it crossly, as if he were speaking of an unreliable food-delivery service.

In the next half hour I drove slowly, up to the Minnesota border and back, observing what I could of the water. Perhaps six of the eight miles had pasture on one or both sides, but there were two stretches of about a mile each that were wooded. The bed seemed to be cut through limestone; there were some pretty pools and rapids, if no falls; and in several places I saw, from a distance, fish rising, though it was impossible to say whether they were trout or creek chubs. A little more than halfway back on my return trip, I saw a man fishing, a portly man of middle age in waders who used his fly rod quite adeptly, working a nice-looking pool which, though it was in pastureland, was shaded by a big willow tree. I stopped the car, watched him fish for a moment, got out, told the dog to stay and walked over.

"Doing any good?" I asked, that being the Midwestern translation of the Eastern phrase any luck?

"Not much," he said, a correct answer regardless of how well or badly things are going.

"Catch any at all?"

The correct answer to that, as I could tell by glancing at the bulges in his fabric creel, would be a couple of little ones, followed, if one warms toward the stranger, by whatever additional information is accurate (I did get one nice rainbow, or they're feeding in the current). He chose, to my mild surprise, the lie direct: "Haven't caught a one."

It seemed pretty bad form to me, but at least I knew now what information to ask for and how to use it. "Where do you generally catch them in this creek?"

"Downstream," he said. "Toward Brinkley."

I thanked him, went back to my car, turned around and headed upstream.

About a mile up from where I'd talked to him, the creek swung close to the road. There was a gate there, opening into pasture, with a little sign on it saying please close, which seemed to imply that it was expected people would open it. There was a long, deep, rather slow pool there, and a hundred yards above it the woods started. I drove in, closed the gate and drove down through the pasture to a little clump of trees where I stopped the car and set my tent up, 40 feet or so from the water. Cows were grazing across from me; the dog needed water. I gave it to him in a bowl, to keep him away from what I hoped were carefree, unsuspicious trout, put my two-piece rod together and strung it up. At the tip of the new leader, I tied on a royal coachman--I always tie on a royal coachman, possibly because it's the only dry fly whose name I knew before I started trout fishing. It's a pretty little thing, with a red body and white wings, but if I've caught more fish on royal coachmen than on any other pattern, it could be only because I fish so often with it.

I walked to the nearest part of the stream, keeping the dog behind me (he is a Weimaraner, with occasional obedient streaks), and found myself standing on a spit of sand and pebbles. The stream was about 20 feet across here, running very shallow at my feet, but with a strong enough current opposite to have undercut the bank; a few tree roots were exposed through the undercutting, and among them a trout might well be hidden. I made my first cast, if tossing a trout fly that brief a distance may be called a cast, and landed four feet out from the bank against which I'd meant to land, for an error of about 20 percent. Still, the fly was floating nicely, so I let it go. I got the range better on subsequent casts, which comforted me a little, though I theorize that it's the first that counts--the one that lands before the fish has any reason to suppose he's being fished for. I cast four or five times, covering most of the water that looked good to me, before the dog decided to jump into the stream and cool off. I said cross things to him, but not very vehemently--I was already pretty well convinced there'd be no action from the undercut bank and I started upstream. There was some shallow, fast water next which hardly looked as if it would harbor a trout, but since such places sometimes do, I tossed up into it. It would be splendid to report that a 20-inch brown trout swirled from behind a rock, leaped three feet into the air hooking himself on my coachman, and that, as it is put in the sporting magazines, the fight was on; but no such thing happened. The fly bobbed back toward me, got wet, submerged and snagged on a rock; there being virtually no fight in rocks, I waded in and detached the hook by hand. My purpose, by the way, in citing such examples of my misadventurous ineptness with fishing tackle, is not to produce moments of traditional sporting farce to decorate my explanations; you are welcome to smile, of course, if it's your kind of comedy, but my purpose is to establish how low in caliber a trout fisherman might be and still expect to land them at will on dry flies by learning my secret.

Above the little stretch of rapids, and feeding current to it, was a marvelous-looking place. The stream narrowed to ten feet, and deepened enough so that the water looked green in the deepest part. The green water flowed on both sides of a 45-degree angle in the stream course and at the point of the angle was a big old tree stump. There had to be a trout down there; I watched for a moment or two to see if one might be rising. When none did, I caught myself looking around on the ground for likely stones or rocks to be overturned in a hunt for worms. I reminded myself that I'd been fishing only ten minutes. Wet fly! Hell, I never catch anything on a wet fly. Nymph! Well, yeah, but, see, the current's pretty fast and it wouldn't really look natural to see a nymph moving against it. I opened my tackle box, passing up six or eight dollars' worth of wet flies and nymph flies, and dubiously took out Con Carter's favorite lure, a thing on which he has caught so many trout, he says, that he feels the same reluctance toward it that I feel toward worms.

No fishing book would ever endorse this thing, for it is an object so gaudy, so artificial, that it makes the longest, brightest peacock sword streamer fly look natural; nor can I imagine what trout take it to be. It is something called a flatfish, a miniature version of a plug used quite extensively on casting rods for bass fishing. Con is extremely particular about his flatfish; the only model that will do is the F-4 size (not even the smallest available), and it must be yellow with red spots, though there are one or two streams, he says, in North Carolina where black with red spots will work. The F-4 is a little under two inches long, slightly curved, and flattened at the front, so that when it is in tension against the pressure of water at the end of a line, it wobbles busily, as no minnow, frog or salamander ever could. In shallow water, Con fishes a flatfish just as it comes from the box, on about eight feet of level leader; in deeper water, he weights the leader about four inches above the flatfish with a single split shot. It was thus that I now rigged mine.

Con can land a flatfish in the birdbath in my yard from 30 yards away; I doubt that I could rely on making it first try into a bathtub from 10, though I comfort myself that a fly line is designed to float bits of feather through the air, not to handle things that exceed its own weight. I walked above the stump and did what I always do with a heavy lure, dropped it into the water and let the current carry it down to where I wanted it. Then I took up the slack and started to inch the flatfish back toward me, and I have no idea what I may have been thinking of when something slapped it, knocking it nearly to the surface. There was a brief gleam, about four feet down, and that was all. Apparently my agitation, which was partly annoyance with myself for inattention and partly excitement that there was a trout down there, was communicable, because the dog began to bark. I got him quieted, and repeated my flatfish maneuver. I did it, in fact, again and again. I told myself finally that I would try 5 more times, and tried 15. Then I snatched the lure off, turned over 20 rocks, finally found a worm, tied hook and worm to leader and drifted that through, tensed for a strike. It didn't come. When I had done it often enough to drown the worm, I looked through my tackle box, sighed, decided there was nothing there that could tempt the fish out again. Con says he thinks trout strike a flatfish out of anger, and I saw nothing there that looked like it would make a trout mad. OK. He saw me. I just happen to know the way to get to him when he calms down; let's go on.

The dog got up and trotted out in front of me; I called him back. He has an excellent eye for trouty-looking places, and a strong liking for swimming in them just before I get there. Not that the next place should have been one--it was the deep pool by the gate, possibly 40 yards long altogether, through which the water moved quite slowly. According to the trout books, it might have two fish, one feeding near the tail where the current picks up, the other feeding at the head where the current enters, before it slows down. The beaten-down grass on the banks, and the fact that the pool swung in near the road, read very differently: This was a most popular and productive fishing place, being a natural one for the hatchery truck to discharge fish, since the driver would be spared from walking. In Iowa today there may be 50 or more trout in pools like that.

I found another worm, hooked it on and let it drift in, sink and settle--worms found at a stream are best; look like what the fish see daily; should be presented as if they had fallen naturally into the water; and are carried along without drag by the current. I watched my fly line. A fly line floats. Only the long leader goes under, making the line itself serve as that piece of equipment no trout fisherman would sanction--a bobber.

I waited about five minutes, then the line jerked; but I knew from the way it moved that it was the wrong fish down there. There are three sorts of indication one's line may make in our streams: If it has been stopped, but makes no further movement, it is a sucker (unless it is a snag). If it dances rapidly, in a series of short, nervous movements, travels around in random directions, it is a creek chub. If it moves slowly, stops, moves out again determinedly, then a trout has taken the worm in his mouth and is swimming into the current in order to swallow it. When one has this last, surprisingly deliberate kind of movement, it is crucial not to strike too soon.

In the big pool at Westerly Creek it was the second kind of movement, the chub kind. Still I was careful, first because what I take to be the beginning of fulfillment of fisherman's passion is in that instant when one knows that something, something alive and unknown, is lured; and next because there is, now and then, a trout that bites like a chub. So not until the line pulled tight did I strike, but it was neither trout nor chub. As a matter of fact, it was a crayfish this time, and so was the next thing I caught before, working the worm into the current at the head of the pool, I hooked a considerable fish--a big chub, 12 or 13 inches long with thorns growing out of his nose, a kind that is called a horny-head.

I decided to give up the big pool and get on upstream, into the woods, and just then noticed that the dog was gone. I looked anxiously toward the cattle, though he's pretty good about not chasing them, saw the dog lying in the shade of a bush with his tongue out, and saw next that someone was fishing behind me, casting now toward the undercut bank where I had started.

My first impulse was to slip on up the creek, calling quietly to the dog to follow so the stranger wouldn't get ahead of me; my next impulse was to call the dog very loudly and angrily, for just at the place he had jumped into the water when we started fishing, I saw the distant man lifting out a fish; my third impulse I followed--it was to walk back down the creek, for, though the fisherman was too far away for me to recognize, there was a familiar car drawn up beside mine. It was Con Carter's. He had said he might come up, after some early-afternoon duties, and since he drives fast he'd arrived very shortly after me.

We met by the stump where I had had my strike, and I said:

"What'd you get down there by the bank? Nice big chub?"

"Trout," Con said. "Or he'd have gotten to be one if I'd left him in there to grow." And he showed me, in his creel, a ten-inch rainbow.

"What'd you take him on?" I asked, foreseeing the answer.

"Yellow flatfish," said Con apologetically.

I pointed to the stump and said a trout--or probable trout--had brushed my flatfish once but wouldn't come out again.

"What else did you try?"

"About everything," I lied. Trout fishing really is bad for my character.

"Superduper?"

"Don't have one."

A superduper is a flat, shiny piece of metal bent almost double, with its outer surface laquered gold and its inner surface red. Con offered me one, which I declined.

"I'd like to see you use it," I said.

Con flipped the thing in, landing it exactly above where I'd seen the trout flash; whether he chose the spot by intuition, calculation or accident I don't know. The superduper danced and glittered in a tantalizing way, but nothing showed.

"It's a good lure for big trout," Con said. "It may scare off the little ones."

"I don't know what size he is," I said, sneakily pleased that my trout wasn't being caught.

"Think I'll go to a spinner and fly." He removed the superduper, and attached in its place a tiny gold spinner on a flexible shaft. To the spinner he coupled a brown-and-green, iridescent, heavy-bodied wet fly, somewhat larger than anything I had; it was on about a number-six hook. Con guessed it might look like a caterpillar, and that the spinner might be taken for a minnow trying to make off with it. He drifted this contrivance in under the stump, and began to twitch it back upstream toward us.

"There he is," he said suddenly.

"He hit it?"

"No, looked at it. Didn't you see him?"

I hadn't.

"We'll get him now," Con said, casting again and teasing his lure around the stump. It took three more casts, and a change of flies (brown and tan, longer and lighter bodied than the first, with a small red tail feather); the fish struck the new fly first time past. Con hooked it, played it, and was moving it toward where we stood when the dog hit the water, taking the flopping object for something to retrieve. The trout was gone, off the line and back under his stump by the time I got the dog called out. I was furious, but Con took it pretty calmly.

"Another ten-inch rainbow," he said. "There anything up in that big-looking pool?"

"I don't know," I said. "Nothing I can catch, anyway. There's some pretty water up above it."

"I drove across French Creek about twenty miles before I got here," Con said. "It's faster and clearer and has more cover, and a man told me it was stocked day before yesterday--might be some good fish there."

"I'll take the ten-inchers if I can get them," I said, for there is one respect in which I am an atypical fisherman: I have no exclusive yearning to catch large fish. The smaller ones are, by common consent, the best to eat. Con, who has a six-pound brook trout mounted on his wall at home, was persuaded there might be something like it back at French Creek, and decided to return there. I said, having seen two acceptable trout come out of Westerly (or one come out, and one snagged on a dog), that I thought I'd stay. With that we parted; I checked with him the following day, though, and found he'd caught a limit and among them a splendid brown, 18 inches long, which he judged from its condition must have been in the creek for several years. I wished I'd gone down there with him.

Not that I failed to catch trout. By the time Con left, there were two ladies sitting on the bank of the big pool, still-fishing with night crawlers, bobbers and weighted lines. I called the dog, went past them and on up Westerly. I fished hard that afternoon. Tried Con's fly-and-spinner method for a time, but I didn't seem able to control it as he had and nothing struck. I came, up in the woods, to a place where I saw trout--two at least--rising and splashing in the current at the head of a small pool, feeding on insects, and I threw five or six different dry-fly patterns up their way without doing anything but alarming them, for after the first few casts they began reacting to the sight of the line in the air. Come on, come on, catch one. They're feeding on flies, right? You don't know what kind, right? OK, get one on a worm, open his stomach, and see what color insects are in it. Right?

The first stone I turned over had three worms under it. I put one on a very small hook, moved up above where the fish had been feeding and lowered the worm into the current, and as it reached the place where water spilled into the pool, saw one of the fish coming up fast to meet it: the sleek spotted shape, the bullet head, the cruel intention of a predator--in the instant when a trout strikes, I sometimes think of tigers. I had him, joyfully, even with some skill as I set the hook, gave him a little line to dash away with, turned him toward me then so that he swam almost into my boot, a nice brown. I cleaned him, put him happily into my creel, and laid out his stomach on a rock. There was nothing in it except some decomposed blackish material, and one undecipherable insect leg: I had already tried my black flies, but I'm not sure I'd have gone back to flies really. I was quite happy with the way I'd caught him; I got his companion on the same worm.

The dog and I went on through the woods, cool and pleased; when I have the first fish or two, I become calmer and I fish more skillfully. I missed a trout, back on the fly and spinner again. I found more worms and caught a rainbow so small that I was certain he'd been spawned in Westerly--no more than four inches; he hadn't been hooked badly and I returned him to the creek. Far from the road, we came out of the woods into an overgrown pasture where the stream divided. In the smaller of the branches, water cress was growing and I picked some to put in the creel with the fish, to keep them moist. To the stems of the cress were clinging little black freshwater snails, a favorite food of brook trout; the arm of the stream in which it grew was six or eight feet wide, and ran straight, about two feet deep for forty yards or so. The cress grew on both sides, leaving about a three-foot channel in the center. It seemed to me I knew what Con would advise. I shortened the line until there was no more than three feet of leader dangling from the end of my rod, put about a third of a worm on the hook, and went quietly up the stream a little. Then I lowered the bait into the rapid water, and followed it along, walking; and five steps from where I started a brookie dashed out, hooked himself, and I used the impetus of his rush to flip him out of the water. If he'd got back into the cress, it would have made a hopeless tangle. It was splendid there; I lost two or three, hooked another; its stomach was full of snails.

Evening was coming, and I had four trout. I'd caught them all on worms, but I felt I'd done it properly; I started back down the creek, pretty satisfied. When I reached the big pool, the two ladies were picking up their stools and clearing the night crawlers off their hooks. I watched indulgently; a night crawler is a huge worm, seven or eight inches long and as big around as your little finger. They are fine for carp and catfish, but I was amused at the idea of anyone's fishing for trout with them. I asked the ladies how they'd done.

"I don't believe they've stocked this creek lately," one said.

"We just got four," said the other, and showed them to me on a stringer, three rainbows and a brown and all bigger than the largest fish I had.

"We got eleven last Saturday morning," the first lady said.

I was back again at the stump, disgruntled, as the ladies drove away, thinking about the trout I knew was under there. He might have recovered by now from his fright and his sore mouth. Since he was away from the pool, it argued that he'd been in the stream for a while, though, and ought by now to be wise. I considered worms, worm and spinner, fly and spinner, flatfish, but I had known all afternoon how I was going to catch him; now that I knew the night-crawler ladies had as many trout as I, there was no chance I'd reconsider.

If you have eaten red caviar, you know what salmon eggs look like. Prepared as trout bait, they are firmer and less cohesive than what may be bought at the grocer's; they are also illegal as bait in some Western states and unheard of in most Eastern ones. Actually, they are useless, at least in my experience, in Eastern states; I took a bottle with me to Connecticut one summer and tried them pretty thoroughly--not a nibble. In the far West, where salmon eggs are part of what a river normally contains, they are, I suppose, something trout feed on naturally. In Iowa, dyed white or pink or fluorescent red, they are part of what trout are trained to eat (or so I am convinced) by the hundreds of salmon eggs thrown in by fishermen in the course of a season. Now, I cannot disapprove of the notion of baiting a salmon egg on a very small hook and fishing with it in a place where a trout may be; cannot and don't. But I do disapprove of what I proceeded to do next, even though I learned it from an impeccable source, A New Handbook of Fresh Water Fishing by Lee Wulff, one of the most famous of modern fly-fishermen. I took half a dozen eggs out of the bottle and tossed them into the creek above the stump. Then I sat and smoked a cigarette, waiting for the trout to find and sample them. When the cigarette was finished, I tossed in four or five more, baited my hook with yet another and threw that in, too. I waited about a minute. The fly line moved, pulled out straight; I flexed the rod and felt, for a moment, the pressure of the fish at the other end. I failed to hook him, but once a trout has started feeding on salmon eggs he's not likely to get discouraged. Two more free ones, and one with a hook in it took him. He actually came up off the bottom to meet the descending egg, and I could watch him all the way, running upstream with it in his mouth until I hooked him. He was a pretty greedy trout.

Nor did I really feel apologetic about the way I'd caught him, though I'm not sure why. I suppose merely that I'd been fishing hard, tried a lot of things, and wanted that particular fish too much.

It was still daylight. I started gathering wood to make a little fire to cook my fish on, and it was while I was tearing a dry limb off a fallen tree that I saw the truck drive up, stop at the same gate near the big pool that I'd come in by, and the driver get out to open the gate. It was a small green pickup with a barrel in the body, and though I'd never seen one before, I was pretty sure it came from a fish hatchery. The driver brought it on into the pasture and stopped beside the creek, and I walked up to watch him. He filled a bucket with creek water, carried it behind the truck, and then reached into the big barrel with a dip net; he filled his bucket with fish, carried it to the edge of the big pool, and emptied them gently into the water. He went back to the truck for a second load and, as I came up, a third.

"How many are you putting in?" I asked.

"Fifty or so."

We stood and watched. At first the fish swam around quite frantically. Then they began to congregate in the shallowest part of the pool and to turn, facing the current.

"Tomorrow's Saturday," he said. "I expect most of them will be in the frying pan by tomorrow night."

"I expect."

"Better get your pole. They might have seen me coming up the road, and if they did they'll be here right away."

Chiefly, I was irritated. It destroyed my sense of having accomplished something to see all those new fish, easy fish I thought, lying in the same creek in which, with what small skill and knowledge I had, I'd fished successfully before they came. But finally I began to feel as children do when they see fish thick in a hatchery. "Couldn't we catch a couple?" the children say; and I trotted down to the campsite for my rod.

But it was curious. The fish, so newly in the creek, struck at first, at almost anything, but halfheartedly and, it seemed, in annoyance. The flatfish and the spinners would be followed, slapped perhaps, but not bitten at. Eventually one did take a spinner, but he was so listless as I hauled him out that I put him back in again. He swam back only far enough to join the others. When they had been in the creek 20 minutes, they stopped following the things I fished with. They simply lay there, twitching their tails occasionally, distrustful of me but without having formed the idea of hiding.

It was the following morning that I made my record. I knew where 50 fish were; it barely occurred to me that I might ignore them, go off along the stream fishing as I had the day before for the resident trout ... through the woods, thinking out the problems, using what fishing technique I could. There were 50 trout in the pool! The ladies might be on their way this very minute. I gulped coffee, jammed my rod together, tied on my last royal coachman, told the dog to stay in the car and trotted to the pool.

It was swirling with trout. They had waked up hungry, and were dashing about, free for the first time in their lives, missing breakfast for the first time, too. They were leaping, pushing one another out of the way, at whatever may have been in the pool or on its surface--bits of leaves, sticks, possibly even an authentic bug or two. There I stood, a tyrant with a fly rod, smiling at the disorder and gullibility of liberation, and cast my fly at random onto the center of the pool. Three of the mob were after it instantly, and the one who won swallowed it so firmly there was no need to hook him. Out he came, a 12-inch rainbow, and instead of dashing off in terror at his thrashing, there were fish who followed him across the pool.

The coachman took a second on the second cast. On the third, a fish struck, but I was slow to strike back and lost him. On the fourth I snagged a tree behind me on the backcast and lost the coachman. I tied on a gray Wulff fly, which floats very high in the water; it took a fish. I deliberately changed to yet another pattern--I cannot now remember which--and it worked, too. There was a lull, then, during which I cast without answers three or four times; then they began to feed once more, even more violently than at first, and a tiny black gnat fly on a number-20 hook caught a big limp brown, the biggest fish of the day. The final fly I do not know the name of--it was a gaudy, machine-tied thing in yellow, blue and red which I kept in my fly box only because one of my children bought it for me once with allowance money, getting it off a card of 15-cent crappie flies in a country grocery store. It was sensational. A rainbow met it at the surface and leaped clear out of the water, winning it from the others.

There were my six fish; they had been caught in less than half an hour; I had moved less than 20 feet. And you have the secret: Take your dry flies to the hole where the green truck stops, give the fish one night to grow confused and hungry, and you can make your trout-fishing grandfather look as slow as the buggy he drove to the unstocked brook in the woods, six miles from home.

• • •

I think of two people when I remember how gracelessly I caught those fish. One was an Englishman, a very pleasant man who visited the university where I teach and who, when I met him, said he'd like to see the countryside. I took him walking along the bank of the Iowa river, our carp and catfish water, and found he was quite excited that we were free to carry along a fishing rod. He was one of those brilliant, profoundly educated men of a recent sort in England, as I understand it, who have managed to come up from working-class origins through sheer intellectual power, taking advantage of the scholarships and the entree that the post-War labor government opened up in that stratified country. It was a wonder to him that we were allowed, any of us, to angle freely almost anywhere we liked. He took the rod I offered in his hand, and it was the first time he had ever held one; something nibbled, down in the muddy water--a bullhead, I imagine, which is a small and not very desirable sort of catfish. His pleasure at having had a bite seemed so great that, though I couldn't tell him quickly enough when to set the hook to catch whatever it was, he was still strongly gratified. And when I said it was a shame we didn't have more time, we might have gone trout fishing, he could barely believe it.

"But those rights are terribly exclusive in England," he said. "Of course, if you're very rich, you can rent them sometimes."

The second person whom I think of was a hipster, in outlook and vocabulary, at any rate, a young man who worked in advertising in New York. He and his wife were visiting mutual friends near where we summered in Connecticut, and I was surprised to have him ask to go trout fishing with me. His equipment explained it; it was good equipment and had been given him by his wife's father. It was important enough for him to show his wife that he could bring home trout, just as her father had, so that he got up at the very unhip hour of 5:30 to do the dry-fly bit with me.

He was tense, full of self-doubt and overeagerness, and when we caught the first trout of the morning, using a little device called a Colorado spoon, his relief was rather touching. We caught six more that morning, a couple on dry flies, and I recall what he said when we had cleaned them and laid them out on the bank:

"Like, dad, they've really cooled the trouting scene, haven't they?"

Like, masters, they really have.