First Trout
Decades later, I still get mail addressed to, “Master Billy.”
It is a tribute of sorts to the corporate entity which has treasured my custom all these years– to its longevity. We only ever did business the once, but like the Mafia, they never forget.
Originally, I received the card with its punch-out numbers in the mail at a time when I had active subscriptions to Tarzan comics, Boy’s Life and Field & Stream. I lived in a major city, the son of a man who never cast a fresh-water line or fired a weapon in peace time. But I had a collection of dull hunting knives with gorgeous handles. Our hound-dog was of mixed ancestry, with a nose wily to find hidden candy and not much else– a chocolate hound. Upland game consisted primarily of pigeons and starlings, while the wet-lands of the day still sported fine specimens of two-inch, native lined-dace. I did not know anyone who had ever seen a fly rod, much less an outdoors space large enough to swing one. Yet, I tied my own flies with a little vice clamped on the dining room table--windigo-looking mojos, hairy with deer tail and hackle, half surgical swab, half dust-bunny, in imitation of the spring shedding of hairy mammoth, late of these woods.
So, when I was offered the once-in-a-lifetime, unequaled, never-to-be-repeated, nonpareil opportunity to get my foot in the door of prosperity by selling friends of family, members of the scout troop, interested neighbors, school chums and my brother and my sister chances to win a genuine closed-faced spinning reel, fifty yards of monofilament and a spinning rod– well, I was not dilatory in seizing the golden ring as it was presented.
The deal went like this: the cardboard was covered with little, numbered dots. You selected one and recorded it, then used a pencil to punch it out. Underneath, it concealed a figure, which told you how many cents you would have to pay. At the end, I was to punch out the big round one in the corner and determine the winner by comparing the numbers of all the lucky entrants with that. I was then to send in the winner’s name and address, along with the money gathered up, to the company which still graciously addresses me as Master Billy (good Lord, is that a remnant of slavery, with us still?)
There was endless recrimination associated with this thing. The scout who lucked onto a punch-out informing him that he had to pay eighty-six cents reneged and wanted to keep punching until he had hit on a more reasonable sum, something under a dime. Goodness, we were thrifty in those days! I refused on the grounds that I already had a bunch of un-paid punch-outs and I doubted that I could sell that many to my little sister. She was a sport, but her credit was shaky– cash flow problems. All this was educational enough, in the field of small business management, and education is known to be expensive. When I finally identified the winner, with Solomnaic impartiality, it turned out to be a kid I hardly knew, who had never fished in his whole life. I had never fished in my whole life either, nor had any of my friends, but we were going to, whereas, my friends pointed out, this kid wasn’t. Very unlikely, at any rate. And he was not my friend, not a real friend, my friends pointed out one after another. My brother, a big hitter in the punch-card lottery, had bought sixteen or so numbers. Didn’t that count for anything? What had this so called winner bought– one? And he wasn’t even family!
And finally I had my package to cut open with my lamination-handled skinning knife. The rod was a little shorter than I had pictured, but I was open to new perspectives. The great whip in the distal end would surely compensate. This was not a surf casting rig, after all. These new fiberglass sticks made the old cane rods of Isaac Walton’s day look huge and cumbersome..., or so I had read. A couple of my hand-tied flies actually were heavy enough to be cast, where the prevailing westerlies were taken into proper account. But, I thought, I could not always depend on fishing with a fresh breeze at my back. A one ounce sinker, though...I could shoot that thing up and over a maple tree. Fetching it back got wearisome. It was the era leading to the space program, so there may have been something in the air. Anyway, Sandy-next-door and I proved that you could cast right over a pair of three-story duplex houses with full basements. We proved that slate roofs dislike lead sinkers and we found out a lot about how pendulums work by swinging that sinker smartly against his mother’s second story window on the far side. We found out a bit about how a number of things in the social sphere work, as well.
The literature of the day was divided on the subject of sinker fishing with bread, but tended to come down on the side of artificial lures to be drawn through the water. Spinners. It was near Biblical, the consistency of concept and implementation—first the line spun off the spool and then the lures would spin through the water. I sent away for a kit to make my own.
What I received was a number of alchemical-looking vials full of colored plastic beads, metal propellers and tear-drop spoons. Hula-skirts were provided in a bundle. Tubing and stiff metal shafts pre-bent to loops at each end in thin wire were to hold all this. There were some suggested combinations on a sheet of paper which came along in the box, but I could tell they were simplified for beginners, whereas I had been tying my own flies for a long time. A later fondness for Hindu temples was foreshadowed by this essay in adumbration. I figured if one bead is good, how-many-can-you-get-on-there is better. It would look like a whole smorgasbord of salmon eggs to the fish– drive them wild. They wouldn’t have sent me little metal propellers, if they weren’t a good idea; it stood to reason. I had seen pictures of experimental airplanes with propellers front and back and I drew deeply upon my sources of inspiration. Definitely, hula- skirts and propellers were a bad mix. So live and learn! Propellers and spinning spoons, though...hey-hey! I designed various gyrating lures to entice fish in different ways. I had the lure which a fish would think was a raft of multi-colored, gem-cut salmon eggs drifting up the current and fighting madly to escape a whirling caviar spoon. I had the lure that closely resembled a small wounded fish, say an anchovy on its pizza, thrashing about to avoid notice. I liked the squid-devouring-a-frog-motoring-upstream-look you could get with a hula skirt, plastic tubing, a few tasteful beads and a propeller at the front. They had provided some rather twee, single hooks with the kit, but you could put treble-hooks on these things. Way to go! I spent a lot of time pulling these lures at different speeds through our inflatable wading pool to see if all the spoons revolved the same direction, or whether careful placement could make them spin in opposite directions. To this day, I wonder. Fragile things, those old wading pools.
All this was as hopeful and as futile as what I would later go through with magazine center-folds– all preparation, no fish. Then the Boy Scout troop obtained the right to camp on Old Man Kuffus’s farm in far-flung parts, right next to where it said on the map, “Here be Dragons,”– now suburbs. And there was a stream—a nameless brown branch of the Brandywine, which wound slowly through a tiny valley with wooded slopes. The meadow was kept open by frequent floods which would back up from a narrow tunnel, bridged by the cindery railroad embankment at the downstream end of the field. This stream had a mud bottom, not much shade-producing cover and the sleepy disposition of a tom-cat at noon-time. When it did wake and show its stuff, it would swell up chocolate-and-cream and, paradoxically, go from foot-pace through the meadow to a pool standing by the empty railway. This, I knew held trout.
Strangely, the Fish and Game Commission concurred with my belief...or felt that if this creek did not hold trout, it ought to, so once a year, in the spring, they stocked it.
I helped slog in all the boxes and duffel we thought we needed in order to spend a weekend Scouting in the wild. I pitched tents; I dug latrine pits; I excavated sumps, which were covered with twigs and grass to (for some reason) catch grease. I spread my sleeping bag in the heavy, canvas pup-tent on an army-surplus poncho, the better to be filled with damp grass clippings and hot bugs by nightfall. I assisted to gather squaw-wood for the dinner fire– about a six foot pile. And, when all the excitingly onerous chores were accomplished and the Scout-master, like Achilles, had retired to his enormous, walled and zippered, stand-up tent to brood, I was free. Free to take up rod and reel and sneak Indian-foot by stream side, looking for the dimples of rising trout. As far as my knowledge then extended, trout were the only fish with actual dimples. I was at my least fussy. I’d catch anything.
I tied on a huge, corroded snap-swivel from a salt-water outfit, using the fancy knot required for monofilament. I had practiced for months until I could loop a line tight in nothing flat. I had a friend who could tie the carrick-bend and the bow-line-with-a-bight. The former was of use somehow sailing clipper ships and the latter could be used to lower a man over the side. But when was he ever going to lower himself over a side? Everybody learned the hang-man’s noose and four lines of “Danny Deaver,” but I could splice lines with blood knots and save big money on leaders by tying snelled hooks directly onto my line.
For my weapon of choice here, I selected the five-bead, propeller-and-spooned spinner with two sets of treble hooks, the aft of which I had dressed with simulated cut squid for verisimilitude to a wounded menhaden making its escape in a small power boat. This, I figured, ought to bring the lunkers out for a good look, if nothing else. My practice had been dedicated to the one-ounce-sinker class of competition and early on I had a bit of trouble getting the little spinners out there, until I found reference in a story to split-shot. With a few of them pliered onto the line ahead of the lure, it was really a waste to be casting across the twelve foot breadth of the stream and into the grass on the other side. I needed scope, even though I was standing well back from the bank, so as not to tread on the vaults of earthen caverns along the stream in which the wily natives lurked. Flipping my lure out into the brown water and drawing it back seemed singularly unpromising, with only the solitary fresh-water muscle for witness. No dimples. Flies, yes, but were they May-flies? Stealthy as an Indian with his tackle box, I made my way downstream, casting at intervals and retrieving with breath as bated as the end of my line. The sun sank spires of light through the water and I knew I trod on holy ground.
Where the stream dived beneath the rail-line there was a dark tunnel, a concrete semi-circle you could glimpse light sky through. The banks drew apart and lowered at this point, as if getting ready for cows to come down to drink. I had wondered about it: the magazines always had trout living under things and bridges were a prime spot to find them. But why did trout want to live like trolls under a bridge anyway? They were already cold and wet, so shelter could hardly be of interest. Better, I thought, for them to station themselves in the center of the open stream, where they could snap up bugs as soon as they fell in. Was I thinking like a fish, or did I just think I was thinking like a fish?
I crept to the edge and peered keenly, as best I knew how without ever having seen anyone peer keenly, just in time to be rewarded with a silver flash as something fled back under the bridge. I couldn’t tell whether it had dimples, but by the bourne that bore me, I knew it for a fish.
Raising my rod, I brought it back to two o’clock behind me and snapped it forward in one smooth motion, releasing the line with my thumb on the reel-tab of the little closed-face reel
at precisely the right moment...or just a little before. The line arced in high under the bridge and instantly sprang to coils on the brown surface of the water as the lure began to sink. The coils
would add to the spinning effect, I thought. As I retrieved through the silent water, I held my breath, rod tip down. The lure was visible as a glittering dot half way back, when suddenly that pale flash appeared near it. I gave a jerk to the line, but the massive, old lunker had not struck. I felt safe in assuming it was a massive, old lunker.
I re-cast on the same diagonal into the dark under the railroad tunnel and cranked the lure back. Like the bold-faced caption beneath a glossy picture of dark woods and white water, I felt the strike and raised my rod-tip to strike in return. By all that was holy, I had a fish!
The little stem connecting the reel to the shoe, which clamped in turn to the seat on the rod handle snapped right off with the impact. My reel fell into the stream, but I grabbed the line
and my right hand remembered to keep the rod tip elevated. I was conscious of the four-pound test strength of my line and wondered whether I should let out some slack. But then I started to pull in the yards of nearly invisible thread by which I was separated from and connected to the fish. Holding the rod over my head, I pulled on the line with my left hand and stepped on it, so that I could reach for another arm’s length. Around my ankles, the coils accumulated, binding me loosely to long grass and standing milkweed.
“Hey,” I screamed, “I got one!”
In mid-stream, the fish swooped like a kite in March, fighting for all it was worth, nor would I often again have as much as that was worth at the time. I side-stepped my way down the muddy cow-slope to half-meet the fish. On the low edge of the water, the mud was swollen with liquid and took my heavy foot more willingly than it gave it back. In fact, on the third, knee-deep step, the mud would not give my sneaker back at all. I used a circular motion with the rod-butt to wrap the monofilament about my chest, under my arms, since I could not step on it any more. Grabbing, staggering and waving the rod in tip-high circles, I drew the fish and myself to a place of meeting in a foot of water at the stream’s edge.
I knew I had it. It called for a net, but I just grabbed, dropping the rod in the stream. Avarice never had a tighter grip. It was beautiful, twelve inches of graphite and silver, with dark purple spots in a river down its sides. I was afraid to let it go, even when I forced my way through mud, cow-parsley and restraining webs of monofilament to a distance of ten feet from the bank. At four-pounds-test per strand, that festoon would have held a Gulliver.
“Well, I’ll be a Dutchman,” the Scoutmaster said, which was true. He drew the famous Bowie knife, to which rumor attributed the taking of several Pacific islands during the war, and offered to cut me free. But I protested and eventually untangled and rewound every foot of that line, nearly. He treated my catch with proper respect and used his famous blade to clean it, which I had no notion of how to do at all. I did want to save the skin, bones, head and fins so that I could have the thing mounted by a competent taxidermist, but somehow, he and I both forgot about that.
This was my first experience with the reading of entrails. Drawing them forth, the Scoutmaster informed us all that it was a Rainbow, that it was a year old, that it had been stocked a few weeks before, had been raised on green pellets and would probably strike at anything. And that it was female. He showed me the roe and asked if I wanted it for dinner. I didn’t.
It was years before I realized that the metallic taste came from eating my half out of the crumbled aluminum foil, in which it had been grilled on the coals. At the time I thought it was the tiny, silver scales. I had a whole half of the fish; the Scoutmaster had a third of the second filet; the Assistant Scoutmaster had a quarter; the Junior Assistant Scout Master had a sixteenth, and I fed the troop’s multitude with the remainder. It was a miracle.
That was my last trout; Machiavelli says never to return where you have been great. And for that same reason, I don’t respond to mail addressed to Master Billy any more.
It is a tribute of sorts to the corporate entity which has treasured my custom all these years– to its longevity. We only ever did business the once, but like the Mafia, they never forget.
Originally, I received the card with its punch-out numbers in the mail at a time when I had active subscriptions to Tarzan comics, Boy’s Life and Field & Stream. I lived in a major city, the son of a man who never cast a fresh-water line or fired a weapon in peace time. But I had a collection of dull hunting knives with gorgeous handles. Our hound-dog was of mixed ancestry, with a nose wily to find hidden candy and not much else– a chocolate hound. Upland game consisted primarily of pigeons and starlings, while the wet-lands of the day still sported fine specimens of two-inch, native lined-dace. I did not know anyone who had ever seen a fly rod, much less an outdoors space large enough to swing one. Yet, I tied my own flies with a little vice clamped on the dining room table--windigo-looking mojos, hairy with deer tail and hackle, half surgical swab, half dust-bunny, in imitation of the spring shedding of hairy mammoth, late of these woods.
So, when I was offered the once-in-a-lifetime, unequaled, never-to-be-repeated, nonpareil opportunity to get my foot in the door of prosperity by selling friends of family, members of the scout troop, interested neighbors, school chums and my brother and my sister chances to win a genuine closed-faced spinning reel, fifty yards of monofilament and a spinning rod– well, I was not dilatory in seizing the golden ring as it was presented.
The deal went like this: the cardboard was covered with little, numbered dots. You selected one and recorded it, then used a pencil to punch it out. Underneath, it concealed a figure, which told you how many cents you would have to pay. At the end, I was to punch out the big round one in the corner and determine the winner by comparing the numbers of all the lucky entrants with that. I was then to send in the winner’s name and address, along with the money gathered up, to the company which still graciously addresses me as Master Billy (good Lord, is that a remnant of slavery, with us still?)
There was endless recrimination associated with this thing. The scout who lucked onto a punch-out informing him that he had to pay eighty-six cents reneged and wanted to keep punching until he had hit on a more reasonable sum, something under a dime. Goodness, we were thrifty in those days! I refused on the grounds that I already had a bunch of un-paid punch-outs and I doubted that I could sell that many to my little sister. She was a sport, but her credit was shaky– cash flow problems. All this was educational enough, in the field of small business management, and education is known to be expensive. When I finally identified the winner, with Solomnaic impartiality, it turned out to be a kid I hardly knew, who had never fished in his whole life. I had never fished in my whole life either, nor had any of my friends, but we were going to, whereas, my friends pointed out, this kid wasn’t. Very unlikely, at any rate. And he was not my friend, not a real friend, my friends pointed out one after another. My brother, a big hitter in the punch-card lottery, had bought sixteen or so numbers. Didn’t that count for anything? What had this so called winner bought– one? And he wasn’t even family!
And finally I had my package to cut open with my lamination-handled skinning knife. The rod was a little shorter than I had pictured, but I was open to new perspectives. The great whip in the distal end would surely compensate. This was not a surf casting rig, after all. These new fiberglass sticks made the old cane rods of Isaac Walton’s day look huge and cumbersome..., or so I had read. A couple of my hand-tied flies actually were heavy enough to be cast, where the prevailing westerlies were taken into proper account. But, I thought, I could not always depend on fishing with a fresh breeze at my back. A one ounce sinker, though...I could shoot that thing up and over a maple tree. Fetching it back got wearisome. It was the era leading to the space program, so there may have been something in the air. Anyway, Sandy-next-door and I proved that you could cast right over a pair of three-story duplex houses with full basements. We proved that slate roofs dislike lead sinkers and we found out a lot about how pendulums work by swinging that sinker smartly against his mother’s second story window on the far side. We found out a bit about how a number of things in the social sphere work, as well.
The literature of the day was divided on the subject of sinker fishing with bread, but tended to come down on the side of artificial lures to be drawn through the water. Spinners. It was near Biblical, the consistency of concept and implementation—first the line spun off the spool and then the lures would spin through the water. I sent away for a kit to make my own.
What I received was a number of alchemical-looking vials full of colored plastic beads, metal propellers and tear-drop spoons. Hula-skirts were provided in a bundle. Tubing and stiff metal shafts pre-bent to loops at each end in thin wire were to hold all this. There were some suggested combinations on a sheet of paper which came along in the box, but I could tell they were simplified for beginners, whereas I had been tying my own flies for a long time. A later fondness for Hindu temples was foreshadowed by this essay in adumbration. I figured if one bead is good, how-many-can-you-get-on-there is better. It would look like a whole smorgasbord of salmon eggs to the fish– drive them wild. They wouldn’t have sent me little metal propellers, if they weren’t a good idea; it stood to reason. I had seen pictures of experimental airplanes with propellers front and back and I drew deeply upon my sources of inspiration. Definitely, hula- skirts and propellers were a bad mix. So live and learn! Propellers and spinning spoons, though...hey-hey! I designed various gyrating lures to entice fish in different ways. I had the lure which a fish would think was a raft of multi-colored, gem-cut salmon eggs drifting up the current and fighting madly to escape a whirling caviar spoon. I had the lure that closely resembled a small wounded fish, say an anchovy on its pizza, thrashing about to avoid notice. I liked the squid-devouring-a-frog-motoring-upstream-look you could get with a hula skirt, plastic tubing, a few tasteful beads and a propeller at the front. They had provided some rather twee, single hooks with the kit, but you could put treble-hooks on these things. Way to go! I spent a lot of time pulling these lures at different speeds through our inflatable wading pool to see if all the spoons revolved the same direction, or whether careful placement could make them spin in opposite directions. To this day, I wonder. Fragile things, those old wading pools.
All this was as hopeful and as futile as what I would later go through with magazine center-folds– all preparation, no fish. Then the Boy Scout troop obtained the right to camp on Old Man Kuffus’s farm in far-flung parts, right next to where it said on the map, “Here be Dragons,”– now suburbs. And there was a stream—a nameless brown branch of the Brandywine, which wound slowly through a tiny valley with wooded slopes. The meadow was kept open by frequent floods which would back up from a narrow tunnel, bridged by the cindery railroad embankment at the downstream end of the field. This stream had a mud bottom, not much shade-producing cover and the sleepy disposition of a tom-cat at noon-time. When it did wake and show its stuff, it would swell up chocolate-and-cream and, paradoxically, go from foot-pace through the meadow to a pool standing by the empty railway. This, I knew held trout.
Strangely, the Fish and Game Commission concurred with my belief...or felt that if this creek did not hold trout, it ought to, so once a year, in the spring, they stocked it.
I helped slog in all the boxes and duffel we thought we needed in order to spend a weekend Scouting in the wild. I pitched tents; I dug latrine pits; I excavated sumps, which were covered with twigs and grass to (for some reason) catch grease. I spread my sleeping bag in the heavy, canvas pup-tent on an army-surplus poncho, the better to be filled with damp grass clippings and hot bugs by nightfall. I assisted to gather squaw-wood for the dinner fire– about a six foot pile. And, when all the excitingly onerous chores were accomplished and the Scout-master, like Achilles, had retired to his enormous, walled and zippered, stand-up tent to brood, I was free. Free to take up rod and reel and sneak Indian-foot by stream side, looking for the dimples of rising trout. As far as my knowledge then extended, trout were the only fish with actual dimples. I was at my least fussy. I’d catch anything.
I tied on a huge, corroded snap-swivel from a salt-water outfit, using the fancy knot required for monofilament. I had practiced for months until I could loop a line tight in nothing flat. I had a friend who could tie the carrick-bend and the bow-line-with-a-bight. The former was of use somehow sailing clipper ships and the latter could be used to lower a man over the side. But when was he ever going to lower himself over a side? Everybody learned the hang-man’s noose and four lines of “Danny Deaver,” but I could splice lines with blood knots and save big money on leaders by tying snelled hooks directly onto my line.
For my weapon of choice here, I selected the five-bead, propeller-and-spooned spinner with two sets of treble hooks, the aft of which I had dressed with simulated cut squid for verisimilitude to a wounded menhaden making its escape in a small power boat. This, I figured, ought to bring the lunkers out for a good look, if nothing else. My practice had been dedicated to the one-ounce-sinker class of competition and early on I had a bit of trouble getting the little spinners out there, until I found reference in a story to split-shot. With a few of them pliered onto the line ahead of the lure, it was really a waste to be casting across the twelve foot breadth of the stream and into the grass on the other side. I needed scope, even though I was standing well back from the bank, so as not to tread on the vaults of earthen caverns along the stream in which the wily natives lurked. Flipping my lure out into the brown water and drawing it back seemed singularly unpromising, with only the solitary fresh-water muscle for witness. No dimples. Flies, yes, but were they May-flies? Stealthy as an Indian with his tackle box, I made my way downstream, casting at intervals and retrieving with breath as bated as the end of my line. The sun sank spires of light through the water and I knew I trod on holy ground.
Where the stream dived beneath the rail-line there was a dark tunnel, a concrete semi-circle you could glimpse light sky through. The banks drew apart and lowered at this point, as if getting ready for cows to come down to drink. I had wondered about it: the magazines always had trout living under things and bridges were a prime spot to find them. But why did trout want to live like trolls under a bridge anyway? They were already cold and wet, so shelter could hardly be of interest. Better, I thought, for them to station themselves in the center of the open stream, where they could snap up bugs as soon as they fell in. Was I thinking like a fish, or did I just think I was thinking like a fish?
I crept to the edge and peered keenly, as best I knew how without ever having seen anyone peer keenly, just in time to be rewarded with a silver flash as something fled back under the bridge. I couldn’t tell whether it had dimples, but by the bourne that bore me, I knew it for a fish.
Raising my rod, I brought it back to two o’clock behind me and snapped it forward in one smooth motion, releasing the line with my thumb on the reel-tab of the little closed-face reel
at precisely the right moment...or just a little before. The line arced in high under the bridge and instantly sprang to coils on the brown surface of the water as the lure began to sink. The coils
would add to the spinning effect, I thought. As I retrieved through the silent water, I held my breath, rod tip down. The lure was visible as a glittering dot half way back, when suddenly that pale flash appeared near it. I gave a jerk to the line, but the massive, old lunker had not struck. I felt safe in assuming it was a massive, old lunker.
I re-cast on the same diagonal into the dark under the railroad tunnel and cranked the lure back. Like the bold-faced caption beneath a glossy picture of dark woods and white water, I felt the strike and raised my rod-tip to strike in return. By all that was holy, I had a fish!
The little stem connecting the reel to the shoe, which clamped in turn to the seat on the rod handle snapped right off with the impact. My reel fell into the stream, but I grabbed the line
and my right hand remembered to keep the rod tip elevated. I was conscious of the four-pound test strength of my line and wondered whether I should let out some slack. But then I started to pull in the yards of nearly invisible thread by which I was separated from and connected to the fish. Holding the rod over my head, I pulled on the line with my left hand and stepped on it, so that I could reach for another arm’s length. Around my ankles, the coils accumulated, binding me loosely to long grass and standing milkweed.
“Hey,” I screamed, “I got one!”
In mid-stream, the fish swooped like a kite in March, fighting for all it was worth, nor would I often again have as much as that was worth at the time. I side-stepped my way down the muddy cow-slope to half-meet the fish. On the low edge of the water, the mud was swollen with liquid and took my heavy foot more willingly than it gave it back. In fact, on the third, knee-deep step, the mud would not give my sneaker back at all. I used a circular motion with the rod-butt to wrap the monofilament about my chest, under my arms, since I could not step on it any more. Grabbing, staggering and waving the rod in tip-high circles, I drew the fish and myself to a place of meeting in a foot of water at the stream’s edge.
I knew I had it. It called for a net, but I just grabbed, dropping the rod in the stream. Avarice never had a tighter grip. It was beautiful, twelve inches of graphite and silver, with dark purple spots in a river down its sides. I was afraid to let it go, even when I forced my way through mud, cow-parsley and restraining webs of monofilament to a distance of ten feet from the bank. At four-pounds-test per strand, that festoon would have held a Gulliver.
“Well, I’ll be a Dutchman,” the Scoutmaster said, which was true. He drew the famous Bowie knife, to which rumor attributed the taking of several Pacific islands during the war, and offered to cut me free. But I protested and eventually untangled and rewound every foot of that line, nearly. He treated my catch with proper respect and used his famous blade to clean it, which I had no notion of how to do at all. I did want to save the skin, bones, head and fins so that I could have the thing mounted by a competent taxidermist, but somehow, he and I both forgot about that.
This was my first experience with the reading of entrails. Drawing them forth, the Scoutmaster informed us all that it was a Rainbow, that it was a year old, that it had been stocked a few weeks before, had been raised on green pellets and would probably strike at anything. And that it was female. He showed me the roe and asked if I wanted it for dinner. I didn’t.
It was years before I realized that the metallic taste came from eating my half out of the crumbled aluminum foil, in which it had been grilled on the coals. At the time I thought it was the tiny, silver scales. I had a whole half of the fish; the Scoutmaster had a third of the second filet; the Assistant Scoutmaster had a quarter; the Junior Assistant Scout Master had a sixteenth, and I fed the troop’s multitude with the remainder. It was a miracle.
That was my last trout; Machiavelli says never to return where you have been great. And for that same reason, I don’t respond to mail addressed to Master Billy any more.