Pieces of broken light...

scatter slowly through the cold water and fall on the shallow riverbed like hot copper coins among the stones. The Vermont sun is high overhead, but the tangle of branches shattering its glow keep this quiet corner mostly shaded. There is only the sound of water moving and the hum of another, smaller world among the grasses on the bank.

I’m standing still, momentarily supported by rocks I cannot see but know to be there. Antoine is already picking his way down the opposite bank of the river. He moves so quickly—and without a sound. I wonder at it. I’ve been an ox in the bulrush, a wounded moose clambering through the thick yellow grass in borrowed, unfamiliar waders, my camera gear swinging around and getting in the way with every step. When I first entered the water—with a splash that earned a disapproving look from Antoine—it was a relief to leave the dust and dry grass of the bank behind. Now, standing here mid-stream, I feel generally unsure of myself, and I don’t know why. I pause to consider the heavy water pushing against my legs, the odd sense of being almost dry while standing waist-deep in a river.

There’s a small tear at the knee of my waders and I’m under a steady assault, drops like small cold soldiers piling in and filling my boots, but I don’t mind because they bring a welcome chill on this hot day. I realize that I’m wearing my only pair of khaki pants, and curse myself for doing so. Surely these will be ruined, I’ve a meeting at the end of the week and only two pairs of jeans in my travel bag. I decide not to care. Bumbling along in unfamiliar fisherman’s garb, clutching my camera bag above the water, it occurs to me I must seem rather like a child on a first fishing trip trying to keep up with his father. Antoine is carrying my fishing gear and I’m embarrassed by that, though I know he’s done it as a matter of convenience. He grabbed two rods out of his truck and headed for the river before I’d even managed to get my waders adjusted, and then there’s the camera bag... At any rate, I make a note to carry my fly rod from now on, as soon as I can catch up with him.

“Ah!” Antoine suddenly says aloud, with some annoyance.

I’m surprised because he’s been silent on the walk here, as if in deep thought for the last 20 minutes. Though he’s Parisian, he reminds me of the Indians in the adventure novels I read as a child, where the white explorer was always wondering how the Native guide could traverse the forest floor in almost absolute silence. Watching Antoine, I’m again trying to work it out.

“Ah,” he says again. “They know we’re here.” 

He means the trout, of course. Yesterday I learned that trout can, in fact, hear and see better than one would expect, and I’m suddenly nervous that my stumblings in the river have ruined us. I think I hear Antoine swear under his breath, and when I finally make my way to the opposite bank and the next bend in the river comes into view, I am relieved to learn that I am not the cause. Two loons are paddling around and giggling like idiots in the shaded pool we’d been set to fish. Having scared the trout away or perhaps because they were full after eating one or two, the loons weren’t even bothering to dive. Just paddling, hooting and ruining it for the rest of us. They leave with our approach, but the trout are long gone. This means more walking.

I retrieve my fly rod from Antoine and we set off further upstream to a place he assures me will be better anyway, less difficult to fish. Having just learned to fly cast the day before on a large green lawn, the narrow confines of the river where we are and the ominously clutching ends of so many million branches overhead have me wondering what could be “easier” on this river. Antoine has gone silent again, and I struggle to make my way behind him as quietly as possible along the steep bank, alternately climbing and descending slick tangles of tree trunks and large boulders, fly rod in hand, the camera gear a frustrating weight. After swinging off my shoulder again and crashing through a stand of dried branches, garnering yet another disapproving look from Antoine, I decide the gear is a damn pain and stash it against a tree. I can come back for it later if it is needed.

It looks as if Antoine has disappeared over the next small hill, but when I get nearer I realize he’s only made it to the top and then dropped flat to the ground. He motions for me to do the same and puts his finger to his lips to emphasize silence. We’re six feet above the water and stooped low in a pile of leaves behind a tree growing sideways over the river. Kneeling here in the dirt, breathing a little heavy from climbing the bank in the clumsy-footed waders, the thick smell of the oafish rubber garment mixed with the heat coming off of my own body distracts me. Is this fishing, I wonder, remembering my childhood in Florida, standing on a bridge in the sun with the breeze coming off the Gulf, my friend and I casting our brightly colored lures as far as we could, then waiting and talking while we sipped ice-cold Cokes? Hiding behind a tree in the dense brush on the hot bank of a Vermont river, staying out of what may be a trout’s line of sight, I decide I’m not fishing—I’m hunting. Antoine’s intensity tells me I’m right.

When we first entered the river, Antoine dug beneath the water’s surface, pulled up a rock and turned it over. Several black insects were crawling on the bottom. I pulled up a rock myself and found the same type of creatures. “Now we know what they are eating,” he explained. “If you know what they’re eating, and you know how it behaves, you’re on your way to catching a fish.”

The day before, on the bank of the pond behind the Orvis Company’s flagship store in Manchester, Antoine had me scour the ground looking for evidence of what the fish in the stocked water might eat. Eventually, near the bridge where tourists gather to gawk at the fat, bored trout swimming below, I found a pellet of the kind sold for a quarter a handful from a turn-crank candy dispenser. Sure enough, such a machine was nearby—the local food source. Antoine had me drop the pellet off the bridge into the water, and we both peered over the edge and watched the small brown pebble splash, then sink somewhat erratically until a trout pounced on it and it was gone. Back at the classroom where I was shown films on insects’ lives, types of fishing flies and basic river etiquette, I watched as Antoine deftly tied a fly that, except for the barb-less hook inside, in every way resembled a food pellet. Returning to the pond, it took me several casts before I successfully recreated the pellet’s splash, and truthfully the fish weren’t interested until the splash occurred. When it did, I got a hit. A few casts later I was fast enough setting the hook and I caught a fish. But that was yesterday and the fish in the pond behind the Orvis store aren’t exactly street-smart, so to speak. Today, Antoine and I are staying low because the trout hiding in the holes along this river are wild, and it will take more than a pellet fly and a decent cast to pull one in.

Keeping his arm close to his body so as not to give away our position, Antoine points at a spot in the river against the far bank. “There,” he says quietly, “Under the ledge. There’s a trout. Do you see him?” I don’t, and I say as much. Antoine seems a little impatient and points again. “There,” he emphasizes in a whisper. “Right there, a big trout under the ledge.” I’m still not sure but I say yes anyway: ok, I see him. Antoine quietly motions upstream as if we’re setting up for an attack on an enemy position, and I guess we are. He takes point. We stay low and make our way just past the bend in the river where the trout is hiding, emerging by a small but convenient ledge naturally cut into the upstream side of a boulder. Standing on the ledge looking down into the deep bowl carved in the river’s corner, the water looks green and cold like a movie emerald. With the heat from inside the waders flooding up over my face, it’s all I can do not to strip down and dive in. After the methodical crawl to this position, the only thing holding me back is Antoine’s sure reaction to such a move—though I have to confess that part of me wants to jump in precisely because of that. Imagining the Frenchman’s face as I bomb into the water, disrupting trout for miles, is almost too good.

But I stand in my swampy waders, again it occurs to me “like a child,” and wait for Antoine to ready my fly rod and hand it to me. Though he taught me the required knots yesterday, he doesn’t give me the chance to make a mess of it and instead expertly secures my line with a fly resembling the insects we saw earlier on the rocks. Both of us, I think, are happy to finally have a fly in the water. My first cast is supposed to be what I learned as a “roll cast,” but it comes off as more of a shove really. Nevertheless, the line is out, the fly sinking a little and drifting with the current. “Keep the tip down, work the line, work the line.” Antoine is right there, navigating me away from branches, logs and other would-be thieves in the water.

“Let it drift past the hole… Now pull it up slowly… Now drift… Now cast again.” And so it goes. Because it’s not as difficult a thing as I’m making it, the more effort I put into remembering how and what and where, the worse I cast until finally I offer my fly a brief respite from the water by putting him in a tree. “It is ok, it is ok,” Antoine assures me, climbing over to disengage my line. “It is ok.” And I cast again. As focused as I am with casting, controlling the behavior of the fly on the end of my line and re-casting, part of me is replaying the trek to our fishing spot, the walk from Antoine’s truck through the woods, the tall yellow grass and the bushes with their razortooth thorns, the weight of the water against my legs on the several crossings, and the smooth cold feel of the stone I unearthed. I dwell on the fact that the insects I saw crawling will be dead within the day, either eaten by a trout or as a result of their natural mortality should they actually manage to surface, fly to a low-lying branch, eat, mate and descend again to give birth and then die. A destiny fulfilled within 24 hours, containing all the elements of a rich life that could span a number of years—everything except for friendship, which is one of the best parts of living.

During my musings, Antoine informs me I’ve missed several opportunities to catch a fish.

“This is not the pond,” he says. “If you feel anything—anything—move the line, lift!” I vow to concentrate more, and it’s not long before, sure enough, I sense something and lift the rod. “Good,” Antoine says, though I’ve hooked nothing. A few more times, however, I fare better and manage to find weight when I lift. And then I don’t know what to do.

The hook is small, and Antoine has trimmed the barb off because we’re not out to hurt fish, we’re out to catch fish. The object isn’t to drag the fish in so much as it is to match his every turn and tire him out, more like bullfighting than tug of war. If there’s any slack in the line, the fish will slip off the hook and that’s that. But keeping the line tight isn’t easy, especially when the fish is wild, and this one is.

Almost immediately my fish—a little rainbow trout that’s fighting like a mad cat on a leash—tries to dive under a log. “Don’t let him do that,” cautions Antoine, who’s already heading down to a spot on the bank with a net. “He’ll snag the line and snap it. It’s his trick.”

I gently steer the end of the rod away from the log and manage to compel the trout to move in a different direction, but in my happiness over this small success my attention lags for a split second and the line goes slack. I immediately lift hard and am hugely relieved to find the weight still there. I learn later that by pure luck I’ve managed to re-hook the fish, which had in fact almost escaped. A bit more of this and finally I’m able to guide the fish toward Antoine and into his net.

When I finally bend down and look at the trout in Antoine’s hands, I’m surprised. Beautifully colored, but smaller than I expected, no longer than 8 or 10 inches. “He put up a fight, non?” asked Antoine. “It is because he is wild.”

We gently remove the hook and release the little flash of color back into the river. Antoine lets me keep the fly.

Afterthought

Antoine is a beautiful soul, and his patience with my beginner's incompetence was very much appreciated. Of the remarkable moments I shared with him during a day of fishing, two stick out:

#1

The riverbank had grown quite wide and so Antoine and I were walking side-by-side, moving to fish a new spot. I'd been pondering how much I didn't know about fish and about fishing and I'd started to wonder how good a fisherman Antoine really was—and how much that really matters. It's a fish, I thought. There's some element of luck to this, right? I put my musings to Antoine and he stopped walking. He set his bag down, walked to the river's edge, looked over at me and said in his marvelous French accent, "And now, I will catch a fish." Then he cast his line into the water and pulled out a trout. Just like that. Maybe I counted to three in my head, but really, I've never seen anything like it in my life. Who needs luck?

#2

We'd packed up and were headed back to town in Antoine's truck when he said he wanted to show me a beautiful part of the river. We turned off the main road and came to a little bridge where, some distance away, we could see two men fishing. It looked to me like they'd had some luck as there was a large brown trout laid out on a rock behind them, and when we stopped and got out one of them gave a quick wave in our direction, friendly and acknowledging. "Idyllic," I thought, these Vermont fishermen, waving to each other and fishing on a beautiful day. But when I looked over at Antoine I knew immediately that something was wrong. He was muttering "no, no... I must call, oh no..." one hand on his hip, the other moving from his lips to his hip to his forehead as he looked around and kept staring back at the men. He might have called to them, asked what they were doing, but they were too far away to hold a conversation. And by now he had his mobile phone in hand and had dialed someone. He was trying to keep his composure, and I don't know if it was for my sake or if he's naturally like that, but he was growing more agitated by the second. Eventually a man on a four-wheeler rolled up, had a quick word with Antoine and then started moving toward the men, who hurriedly were packing their things to leave. Antoine and I left as well, and he seemed quite disturbed, so much so that I kept quiet and let him drive. After a time we pulled up to a tackle shop, parked and went in. One of the women working there said something like, "Oh hi Antoine! How ya doing?" At which point he said, "You know they killed Martin," and the room grew silent. It wasn't "Martin," I don't think. I just made that up because I can't remember the name. But he said they'd killed someone and everyone went quiet. I looked over at him, startled, and saw that there were tears in his eyes. Then he pointed to a picture on the wall, a photo of a large brown trout, and explained that the fish the men—"the idiots"—had pulled out of the river and thrown on a rock was a trout that all the local fishermen knew. Martin. Old, ancient by trout standards, Antoine explained that he would be infested with worms and useless for eating. But as a genetic asset to the river, a long-surviving warrior who helped to populate the Battenkill every year with wild, strong genes, he was invaluable. The men had been illegally fishing on private land (Antoine's friend's, and that's who he'd called) and beyond some stupid story or a trophy on the wall, there was no point to killing the fish, who was needed by the river. More than that, the trout was a kind of reassuring presence, a friend even, that top local anglers caught from time to time and then released. One master playing chess against another in the park, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, a way to keep sharp. It deserved a more noble end. Feeling bad about Antoine's sudden mood shift and the reason for it, I asked if he wanted to join me and my then-girlfriend (now wife) for dinner later and he said ok. That evening, when he walked into the restaurant with his shoulders fallen and his eyes tired, my girlfriend said he looked as if he'd lost a family member, and maybe he had. He talked about the fish for a little while before we moved on to other subjects, his work as a ski instructor, our shared love of motorcycles, what it's like living in a historic house (which he did), and all things considered it was a pleasant evening. If I recall correctly, I made a point of ordering steak.