Hostages to Fortune Read Online Free PDF Page A

them and he rose to the trout, coming out of hibernation to find them still there and himself still there with them. Here he was once again but now his sap ran sluggish.
    Sunlight struck the tops of the hemlocks making the raindrops among their needles scintillate like a shower of emeralds and providing him with illumination to scan the surface of the long quiet pool with which Section Seven began for any hatch of insects there. Not that he would have known which of his many flies to match it with if he were to see a hatch, unless it was one of the half-dozen commonest varieties. How his by-guess and by-gosh approach to fly-fishing had exasperated Anthony! A fisherman for so much shorter a time than his father, Anthony could nevertheless tell you the Latin name and which of your artificials to imitate it with for any of the myriad insects the stream bred.
    Between the two schools of fly-fishing, as in everything else, there was a generation gap. He never knew it until Anthony told him, but he was a presentationist. To him the important thing was not the pattern of the fly so much as it was the accuracy and the delicacy with which it was presented to the fish. Oh, even his sort recognized that there were times when your artificial had to be realer than the thing itself if it was to fool the fish into taking it instead of one of the swarms of naturals coming off the water. But most of the time he relied not upon the exactness of his imitation but upon his skill in stalking the fish and casting the fly. When Anthony called him a presentationist he was calling him an old fogy.
    Anthony was an imitationist. He was one of the new breed of scientific anglers. With the same intensity he applied to everything, he had plunged into the vast field of trout stream entomology. Not that he was any the less skillful in presenting his fly for all that, but when he did so it was as near a copy as could be made from fur, feathers, and tinsel of the one he had caught on the wing and identified out of the hundreds known to him. The demon of encyclopedic knowledge had always beset that boy. He would, if you insisted, tie and sell you a gaudy Royal Coachman imitative of nothing in nature like the one his entomologically innocent father had just selected, but he would both pity and scorn you.
    Well! If presentation was what he must rely upon, then Lord help him! His first cast of the day looked like his first ever. The line fell upon the water like a serving of spaghetti. It was not that the line was kinky. It had been but he had attended to that. Wound on the spool of the reel, long unused, it had been coiled like a spring when he removed it last night. Looking for something to occupy himself with at the witching time when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes forth contagion to this world, he had dressed the line and looped it loosely on pegs on the clubhouse porch to relax and straighten. The kinks were in him. It was years since he had made so sloppy a cast. Instead of annoying him it tickled him. It tickled him so he laughed aloud. His inexpertness had carried him back momentarily to an earlier, more carefree time in his life. Then he stood listening to the silence as though for the call of some uncommon bird to be repeated and identified. It took a while for him to realize that the once familiar, now forgotten sound had been that of his own laughter.
    By one o’clock in the morning it had been evident that this was turning into another of his nights. As drugs to induce sleep were forbidden to him, the passing of the eye of the storm was his signal to get up and in his pajamas creep downstairs so as not to disturb the slumbers of his fellow club members whose tranquil snores penetrated their bedroom doors. He knew what he would find downstairs, but the reality was no more to be dreaded than his lone pillow thoughts about it. The reality, being real, and thus suggestive at least of other, alternative realities, would even be