Gauging the distance across the seam of current, she fed a little more line from her reel. Success would count on two things. She would need to bounce the yellow stonefly off the rock hanging over the eddy, to make it act like an insect that had bumbled from its perch into the water. That she could do easily. The harder task would be to keep her line from collapsing into the current between her and the eddy, which would then jerk her fly suddenly downstream, startling her prey and sending it so deeply into hiding under the rock ledge that she’d never entice it back out today. Her gaze turned for a moment up the slope, following the cascading course of the stream from pool to pool, through forest and stone. In her enlivened flesh she felt the implacable heft of centuries that lifted these mountains and forged them into this watershed, spilling the rush of time and water down into this pool where she stalked her prey. She had learned the language of trout. She could speak with the waters of this pool, and the fish it held, in a tongue intelligible in the wild world of water and stone. Here, on this evening, she spoke fluently. Rod and arm, like a single thing, held high over the slicing current, she shot her fly out to the rock overhanging the eddy. It bounced from the stone and dropped into the eddy, barely disturbing the surface. The fly sat the surface of the eddy, hardly moving. For a moment it shone forth, a shimmering dot of blazing yellow on the dark, still water, before the fish struck.
Under the throbbing bow of her rod, the brook trout spun and dove into the depths of the pool under the churning current. The tension in her arm hummed with the song in her tight line as she knelt in the shallows and drew the fish to her. Freeing the hook from its lip, she cupped the big brook trout in her hand for only a moment, relishing the weight of this native fish that draped well over both sides of her palm. Among the descendants of the brown and rainbow trout stocked in the controlled waters of the lower Ripshin, a fish of this size would be typical, worthy of no special note. Here in the wild reaches of the Ripshin’s headwaters, an indigenous brook trout such as this one was a prize beyond account. The fish slid smoothly from Sandy’s hand, held for a moment to collect its senses, then vanished into the depths of the pool, in search of its haven under the hump of stone.
Sandy shook the water from her hand and reeled in her line. She’d arrived in time for the yellow stonefly hatch and made the most of it. The well-made fly had told the story it was intended to tell, and she had delivered the tale well. It was enough for the day. The late afternoon light in the ravine was growing dim. She waded around the tail of the pool, stepped out to the footpath, and followed the path a few yards to a break in the rhododendron. Ducking through the opening, she climbed up the embankment to where the fire road cut out of the forest and curved along the riverbed at this point. It was time to find Keefe. Sandy turned downstream.
A few hundred yards down the fire road it didn’t surprise Sandy to find Keefe at the old Rasnake homestead. Old-timers in the valley called it that, and so did Keefe on occasion. Up a slight rise from the fire road, the dense trees opened out into a clearing. In the clearing were the tottering remains of three fieldstone chimneys, all that remained of three humble cabins that housed the extended Rasnake family when they first moved into the valley after the government ran the Cherokee out. The clearing was a regular retreat for Keefe, and Sandy found him there often, especially late in the afternoon when the sun had dropped behind the ridge. Keefe’s rod leaned against one of the old chimneys, and he sat on the worn hearthstone, now caked with moss. He stared straight ahead at the other two chimneys across the clearing, his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging limp between his legs. He appeared startled when she walked up into the clearing, but immediately his face relaxed and he sat up from his slump and greeted her with the angler’s standard salutation. “Do any good?”
“Little bit,” Sandy replied, the angler’s standard response.
Keefe looked up at her from under the brim of his battered brown fedora, a grin dimpling into his face.
“That answer may be adequate for some other fool you meet on the stream. I think I merit a bit more detail, my dear.”
Sandy smiled, leaned her rod against the chimney next to Keefe’s, and sat down beside him on the mossy hearthstone. She rubbed her hand a few quick strokes across his back, as if trying to warm him if she had done it more vigorously. She left her hand on his shoulder and leaned lightly into his side.
“Well?” he said.
“Upstream, the pool down from where the fire road cuts above it. The big hemlock down on the far bank.”
Keefe nodded knowingly. “A few of the big ones in the back eddies there.”
Sandy nodded as well. “Bounced my fly off the boulder to the right, couple feet above the cutaway. Got one of those big ones.”
“Wonderful. On a yellow stonefly?”
“Yeah. I took a few from your bench. I was out.” Sandy made no reference to the flawed flies, but she looked tentatively at the side of Keefe’s face, searching for a readable sign.
“Good. That’s what they’re for,” he said.
Sandy stood and stretched, arching her back. “I’m hungry. You have anything to eat back there?”
Keefe pushed himself up from the hearthstone, took his rod, and handed Sandy hers. “I think we may be able to stir up something.”
Keefe walked a half step behind Sandy as they stepped out of the clearing onto the fire road. Sandy turned immediately downstream, and as she turned, she saw from the corner of her eye that Keefe seemed to hold back, for no more than a second, and that he expelled a shallow sigh before he turned down the fire road in step with her. Any other time she’d have noticed nothing in this moment, but now, after finding the botched stoneflies on his bench, she was on the alert. Had he found his haven in the clearing, but then not known how to return to the bungalow from there? In this place he had lived for over twenty years, this place he knew so intimately, had he been lost? For now, she would say nothing, only continue to watch for the signs that might form a pattern. Sandy took Keefe’s hand, something she rarely did, and held it close as they walked the fire road back to the bungalow. Keefe’s hand firmly returned the press of her grasp.
4
OPPORTUNITIES FOR SANDY TO GET TOGETHER WITH HER friend Margie Callander were occasional, at best, for all the usual reasons of work and family obligations. Margie worked as a nurse in the intensive care unit of the hospital up in Sherwood and did her best to manage two young sons from her first marriage, encroaching on their teenage years, and her husband of the last four years, J. D. Callander, the good-natured but overworked game and fish warden for the Ripshin Valley. That she and Sandy would both have a day off at the same time was rare, indeed. Margie agreed readily to Sandy’s proposal of meeting for breakfast at the Damascus Diner, followed by a little fishing up in the headwaters afterward.
“Oh, hell yes,” Margie had said when Sandy called. “I need a day away like you can’t believe. J.D.’s been spitting piss and vinegar for days now, and these boys will be out of school for the summer in a couple of weeks, at which point they’ll really start to drive me nuts.”
Damascus was a tiny patch of human congregation collected at a bend of Route 16 along the lower Ripshin, the road most locals referred to as the old river road. Midway between Sherwood to the north and Willard Lake to the south, it survived as a point of convergence for people driving north to jobs in Sherwood, if they were lucky enough to have them, and for fishermen towing their bass boats south to Willard Lake. Other than a few modest houses and mobile homes stretched along the bend, the meager social and economic life of Damascus emanated from two places, the Citgo station and the Damascus Diner. The Citgo station was an amalgam of gas station, convenience store, and bait shop and managed to make a go of it selling fuel, beer and cigarettes, lottery tickets, and incidentals to the locals who inhabited the homes and farms in the fields and ravines spread through the hills around Damascus. It sold more fuel, more incidentals, and tubs of night crawlers to fishermen passing through.