All Fishermen Are Liars Read Online Free PDF Page B

pounding.
    That night Buzz’s wife, Rose, fried several chickens with rice and gravy, green beans, coleslaw and cornbread. Rose does the cooking at the K bar T—as she did at High Lonesome Ranch, another fishing outfit south of there where I’d first met these folks—and she’s real good at it. Food is important to fishermen. Success, failure and the infinite gradations in between all make us ravenous, and bruised egos at the end of slow days respond especially well to good cooking.Every outfitter knows that there are people who use a fishing trip as an excuse to do things they’d never think of doing at home. The most manageable of us simply eat too much and fall asleep.
    Buzz was quiet at dinner, but then he’s always quiet. He’s a large taciturn man with the physique of the movie version of a Navy Seal: a large neck, barrel chest and arms so muscular he can’t quite drop them to his sides. Even when he’s relaxed, he looks like he’s about to lift something heavy. He grew up in family fishing camps, got it in his blood and has guided himself for the last twenty years. Rose told me that when he announced a few years ago that they’d be running a lodge—effectively going into what’s now called the “hospitality business”—she had her doubts. But as it turned out, Buzz’s unthreatening but imposing presence and minimalist conversational style make him a more effective camp manager than the usual talkative glad-hander.
    The next morning Buzz, Mark and I drove over to the spring creek, piled into a four-seat ATV and motored up to the top end on a narrow two-track through thick willows. Like all the water on the ranch, this creek is unimproved: basically a mile of willowy marsh with beaver ponds and channels running through it. The springs run all year, but they gush in the spring and dribble in the fall in response to the river-fed water table. This late in the season the water was low and the current imperceptible. It was pleasantly cool early in the day, but the water was excruciatingly clear, the air was dead calm and the sun was bright. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky except for a few wispy mare’s tails clinging to the peaks of the Williams Fork Mountains on the eastern horizon, where they’d do us no good at all.
    Mark said most of the water would be too low to fish this late in the season and that our best shot for trout would be in the big beaver pond at the head of the creek. On the way up there, he told me they didn’t bring all their fishermen here because even in less demanding conditions it takes at least decent casting and a minimum of finesse to fish it. I think he meant that as fair warning.
    I don’t estimate the size of ponds well, but I’ll say this one covered more than one acre, but less then two. (Or maybe more than two acres, but less than three.) There’s no telling how deep it was, but by late summer the weed tops had grown to within inches of the surface. There was a small pod of apparently large trout boiling out at the end of what looked like my longest cast and a few others working above the beaver dam off to our left. Wading closer was out of the question. In water like this you’d sink to your armpits in black muck within three steps, and even if you didn’t, your spreading ripples would spook the fish.
    Buzz teetered out on the beaver dam, while Mark and I cast side by side, trying a dozen fly patterns between us with no luck: midge pupae, mayfly nymphs, beetles, ants, backswimmers, damselflies. Buzz hooked a big trout on a little grasshopper pattern, but it took him into the weeds and broke him off. I finally hooked a heavy fish on a size 20 soft hackle. It made a good run, peeling off line, then did an about-face and swam straight back at me. It was the kind of maneuver that makes you suspect that the fish not only comprehends the nature of his problem, but is also considerably smarter than you are. By the time I recovered my slack line, the barbless hook had come