Sandy strung her rod and tied on the last yellow stonefly pattern in the fly box she carried in her vest. This one fly would likely be all she required for the evening’s fishing, but if she’d made it in time for the hatch and the brook trout were hitting, it would only be foolish not to have a few extras of this deadly fly pattern. She had a few yellow stoneflies in the emergency case in her purse, but it was simpler to step to Keefe’s tying bench and grab a couple. She knew he’d been tying this pattern in preparation for the season.
On Keefe’s tying bench she found an ample supply of newly tied yellow stoneflies, hooked in neat rows into a square of tattered foam board, at least a dozen of them. Sandy pinched one from the foam board, placed it in her fly box, and reached for one more. The second fly was tied with the same degree of expertise and identical to the first. But it was tied backward. The yellow dubbing was wrapped around the wrong end of the hook shank, making it impossible to thread the tippet through the hook’s eye, and the tinted squirrel-hair hackle swept away from, not over, the hook itself.
Sandy examined the small placard of flies more closely. Three neat rows of yellow stonefly patterns. At first glance they all seemed tied with Keefe’s usual precision. On closer inspection she found one more, perfect, except that it also was backward. Sandy set the card of flies back on the bench and dropped onto the chair. Keefe had always been prone to moments of reverie and distraction. And he’d certainly tied this particular pattern so often that he could do it almost automatically. That, combined with one of those moments of distraction, could easily be responsible for the faulty flies. After all, it was only a couple of them. Then again, it could signal something more. Sandy, scrolling back through her memory, couldn’t think of any other signs that might, with this incident, begin to shape a pattern. This was simply a fluke, something that could be reasonably explained. Then again, so much of their time was spent apart, when a telling moment would be unnoticed by her. And there was that one time. She had tried to push it to the back of her mind, but it pushed its way forward nonetheless. About a month or so ago, as she was getting ready to leave Keefe’s place, he’d offered her the key to the fire-road gate, so she could let herself through. The entrance to the fire road was barricaded by a pipe-rail gate. To pass onto the fire road required a key to the huge, rusting padlock that held the gate closed. Aside from forest service personnel and game wardens, the only ones with a key were Keefe and whoever owned the other house along the fire road, a weathered, crumbling structure of brown-painted cinder block and plywood a half mile downstream from Keefe’s. “Some fellow from down in North Carolina, I think,” Keefe had told her. “Never seen him.”
That time a month past, Keefe had dug the key out of the clutter on the coffee table and held it up for her. She’d had her own key to the gate for nearly four years by then.
When, with some uncertainty in her voice, she had reminded Keefe of this, he shook his head, chuckled, and tossed the key back onto the coffee table.
“Of course. Wasn’t thinking, I guess. What do they call it? A senior moment?”
They’d both laughed it off and thought no more of it. It could be nothing. Nothing at all. A moment of distraction. Could happen to anyone of Keefe’s age. Anyone of any age, for that matter. But she’d keep a closer eye on him now, watch for the signs.
Sandy put the defective flies in her fly box, along with one more of the good ones. Stink continued to lick the squirrel tail as she gave his ruff a quick scratch, picked up her rod, and left the bungalow. She crossed the clearing to the streamside footpath and turned upstream, in search of the yellow stonefly hatch, brook trout, and Keefe, in that order.
Keefe at His Workbench: Yellow Stonefly
Unwinding from the spool, each turn of the yellow drubbing thread tight and contiguous with the turn it follows. Turn after turn along the shank, beginning to hint at a body, accumulating into a simulation of the thorax of Suwallia pallidula, so favored by Salvelinus fontinalis. Tiny shock of hair from a squirrel tail, bleached and dried, every bit as good as elk hair, more fitting for being native to this place. The strands are bound to the body, ragged and unshaped, then tufted and trimmed to the swept-back likeness of the translucent double wings. Different strands, divergent shapes, various textures, wrought into an alternative configuration. A believable shape to tell a truthful tale in a fraudulent form. A practical beauty. A beautiful lie. An aggregate woven around that which gives it reason and function, woven around the . . . around the . . . the thing . . . What is the name? Must it have a name? Did it ever have a name? Woven around the thing that carries the shape yet is at the same time the core and purpose of the shape. The thing . . . it must have a name, somewhere in its delicate curve. The thing that anchors the design crafted to duplicate and deceive.
3
THOUGH THE SUN WAS WELL BEHIND THE RIDGE, THERE remained more than enough light filtering through the newly leafing trees, and the cooling air still held much of the day’s warmth. The stonefly hatch was largely spent. Here and there, a few stragglers remained on exposed rocks or flitted through the air around Sandy, their tiny yellow bodies floating within the blur of their four translucent wings. She’d made it just in time to cast her simulated yellow stonefly into the dissipating flurry of real stoneflies. The trout would still be stirred up.
Sandy moved from her observation blind behind one of the larger boulders along the stream and stepped in a half crouch into the shallower water at the edge of the pool. She waded in with a seamless grace her gait could never match on land, barely stirring the water from its natural course. Stripping only a few feet of line from her rod, all that was required, she targeted the back of the pool. A single slight flick of her wrist set the line in motion and dropped her fly on the tongue of current feeding into the tail of the pool. The tiny yellow fly rode the surface of the water for barely a second before the fish hit it. As brook trout will do, the fish took the fly hard and fought fiercely. Time and familiarity had not diminished Sandy’s awe and respect for these small creatures. This degree of ferocity in a larger species of trout could have snapped her line handily, and Sandy never forgot that. Her rod bowed in a deep arc, and Sandy held it high, leading the scrappy fish quickly but smoothly into the shallower water around her legs. Cupping the fish in her hand, she slid her hook from the trout’s bony upper lip. Its speckled back glistened a deep blue-green across her wet palm; the bright orange of its abdomen and ivory-tipped belly fins would be brighter still during the fall spawning season. Sandy released the fish back into the stream, where it disappeared instantly into the safety of deeper water.
The pool was alive and responsive. This she had learned, yet she limited her disturbance to the tail of the pool. Now she could move to the head of the pool, to the churning chute of water pouring in from the pool above, to the swirling back eddies under the overhanging rock ledges where the bigger fish waited.
Slowly, cautiously, keeping to the left of the current, she waded toward the head of the pool and set her sights on the back eddy to the right of the chute. The rushing water cut through the opening and fanned out through the pool. The back eddy formed behind the more agitated water. Beneath a huge hump of stone that bent to the water, the back eddy swirled