Lines on the Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

trout (I was quite proud of this because it was such a hard go that day with the water low), he replied that I should have poled
up
from Lizard Brook nine miles to find the trout I was then seeking. That is, pole up
against
the current, because he had done that for years as ayoung man. The pride my friend and I had in navigating down seemed less splendid after that.
    Mr. Simms’s diary was written in pencil, and was faded. As long as I knew him he never used a pen. It was as if a pen was too grandiose. There was always an old yellow bitten pencil in his kitchen drawer, where the diary lay. The house is now gone. It has been gone perhaps for twenty years.
    The diary too might have disappeared by now. But the memories are still in that part of experience, as saddened by time as old black-and-white pictures of trout or salmon at a camp. And in the grain of those old pictures there always seems to me to be undisclosed knowledge about the men who fished those fish. Whether they took too many, were unthinking, were just, were patient, were professional. All this seems to be in the pictures though the pictures might show man and fish that have been both dead for forty years. Nothing one does, in this way or in any way, will go undiscovered. That is the secret truth about fishing or hunting.
    For a time I became Simms’s eyes and ears about who was getting fish, and he would tell me stories. He told me a story about his cousins who once stole a camp from him, and how he got back at them. It was a very interesting story and I was to relate it years later to my friend on the South Branch Sevogleone night in late July. I do not know if my friend believed this story nor am I certain that I do. Mr. Simms was a man replete with stories, about fishing and hunting and horses, and log drives, and winters, and ghosts in the woods.
    I would go back and relate these stories to kids as if it were me who had invented them. I had to do this, at that time, for I had nothing else to tell.
    But I did not get fishing salmon then or for a long while after.
    I would go over to the house and ask my father to take me fishing. He would be having his noon-hour nap, with a blanket pulled over his head, his left hand hanging down over the side of the bed. I would pick up his hand, feel the pulse, and drop it back where it was. Then I would go try to find something else to do.
    That year, in late October, just after my birthday, I had gone for a Saturday hunt with my father—while Gordon and his friend had gone with their fathers to their hunting camp on the Little Souwest. Gordon was a snob of all the right proportions and calibre. An egotist of manner even at twelve. A person who knew the right and the wrong way to do things. Even the way to talk about what one talked about
in
the woods, or about the river.
    A person then who knew the price of everything, and thevalue of nothing. A rather hard indictment to hold against a boy of twelve, but there you are. I’m not sure I knew that I held it then. But I suppose I did that day we as childhood neighbours went hunting in separate vehicles to separate places.
    We both arrived home at the same time—just about seven at night.
    They had a twelve-point buck in the back of their truck. The buck probably weighed 220 pounds. I went over and looked at it. It had been shot in the foreshoulder at dusk, as it made its way back to a rut above a little stream. Though the stream was opened there was an inch or so of snow down. The area in back of it was in gloom, with small spruce and maple cuts. It was October 24, 1961; that was the day that the buck was shot. There is always in my memory a smell of gunpowder in the fall that traces the wind and sky.
    Gordon had seen it shot by his father who now sported a three-day growth of beard.
    I saw through the dark the yellow leaves (there was as yet no snow in town, even though in the woods snow had fallen), the lights from their garage, the very palpable hint of excitement in