The Snowfly Read Online Free PDF Page A

like Toscanini with his baton. College was not going to be easy financially. I had the small scholarship, which would help, but I was going to have to work as well and I needed to find something that would provide a good hourly rate so that I would not be tied up working all the time.
    â€œKeep your nose in your books,” she said. “It took your father and me a lot of effort to make you who you are and I don’t want it undone down there ”—this her term for anywhere she wasn’t.
    I had once heard her tell my sister, Lilly, to “keep your knees together and your mind on Jesus.”
    To me she said, “Jesus taught us to fish, that we might feed others. College is where you’re going to learn to fish in the waters of life, and life’s filled with temptations.” She looked me in the eye. “Steer clear of women, Bowie.”
    â€œBut you’re a woman.”
    She gave me a rare smile and a gentle touch on the cheek. “I’m not a woman, Bowie. I’m your mother.”
    I supposed that every freshman in America would be having similar talks with parents, but the Queen’s send-off left me feeling uneasy. She went to the bus with me and handed me something wrapped in brown paper, tied neatly with purple string, and a cloth sack filled with apples.
    On the bus I opened the package to find an old and worn copy of Izaak Walton’s and Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Angler. I wondered where she had found it and where she found the money for it, but it was one of my favorites and the gift made me teary. Inside the front cover she had written, “Simon Peter said, ‘I go a-fishing,’ and they said, ‘We also will go with thee.’” She added, “We are all with you, Bowie, wherever you go.”
    After my freshman year at Michigan State, I went west to Idaho to fight fires for the summer. I had done all right with my grades and scraped by financially. The chance to go west offered me an opportunity to bank enough money to take care of a couple of years of school. When I wasn’t on fire duty, I was fishing for rainbows and cutthroats and hanging out with a twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher named Rose Yelton. We met in a bar. In Idaho the legal age was still twenty-one then, but the reality was that if you were tall enough to stand at the bar you could get served. I wasn’t yet nineteen.
    â€œYou must be a virgin,” a woman said to me.
    â€œWhat?” I felt my neck go red. How did she know?
    â€œYour hair hasn’t been singed. Obviously you haven’t had your fire-cherry busted yet.” She had a mesmerizing smile and the diaphanous hair of an angel.
    We left the bar together that night and I admitted to her that it wasn’t only my fire-cherry that was intact and she kissed me and told me that she couldn’t do anything about the fires in the woods, but she could do plenty with other kinds of fires and she proved true to her words.
    Her father ran beef on a scruffy, open-range ranch near Weippe and was also a trout fisherman. When I asked him about the snowfly he grinned and shook his head.
    â€œIt’s a destroyer, son. Some men go plumb crazy chasing the snowfly.”
    â€œThen it’s real?”
    â€œI can’t honestly say.”
    â€œWhere can I find out?”
    â€œI don’t know, son. You might better put that question to Red Ennis.”
    Ennis, I learned, was a professor emeritus of history from the University of Idaho in Moscow. He had retired to a cabin on Peavine Creek up in the panhandle near Pierce. Rose and I went to visit him.
    Peavine Creek was not large by Rocky Mountain standards, but it was clear and quick, with moss-covered boulder steps and deep pools gathering wads of foam. The professor’s clapboard cabin was built at the edge; a platform jutted out to the lip of a dark pool and Red Ennis sat on the platform in a metal rocking chair, which had so oxidized to