A Hunter’s Redemption

There are days when Nature’s signals are muted, but all her wild creatures heed the call.

I did not carry a cherished bamboo rod on this day, still reeling from the damage some wild Catskill brown had wreaked on my fifty. I carried another veteran, the rod that was my limestone springs companion, a slender eight-foot Winston boron rod.

I missed the bamboo, but I adjusted my casting to the very light, quick feel of the Winston, coaching myself to ease up on the power, less my casts strike the placid water with trout spooking force. I lost myself in the hunt, slipping softly through the early morning mist.

The day began in beauty and solitude, though the fishing seemed to tell me that the Red Gods intended to punish me once more. I hooked two, briefly, the hook pulling out quickly on both of them. The short moments of contact telegraphed size and strength, two more missed opportunities, and then solitude was sacrificed to the whims of the Red Gods.

I changed the fly, thinking that might perhaps change my luck, and it did. This season’s now months long low water had me thinking about another variation on the theme of the beetle imitation. I went back to a Cumberland Valley staple in construction, then modified it in concert with the use I had in mind. The Soft Touch Beetle was born, with a pair of them tied on a size 12 hook, for hungry hunters.

Dissecting bits of cover throughout some known trout lairs, the long beetle performed as designed, even when fired under and around cover and foliage with the quick flexing boron rod. The first take was soft and confident, and tightening quickly convinced me I was working with one of the trout lost on that disastrous day the Mills fell.

I urged him from the protection of his lair with the rod heavily bowed, so he ran against the drag down river and away. Ah, what’s this? The Winston wears a modern reel, one with a staunch drag that impeded his retreat, though I missed the sweet music of an old Hardy. Still, he tested every fiber of the rod before I swept the net beneath him.

Straightened along the graduated midline of the mesh, his full two-foot length was confirmed; a little redemption for this hunter of the mists!

The beetle impressed on it’s first trial, so I fluffed and dried it’s hackles and continued. A fifteen-inch brownie found he was big enough to get that big beetle into his mouth, pulling so hard he fooled me until I got him close enough for a look. After taking a short break, a rise showed in that same location, and he took it again! I swear it was the same fish.

Returning to the hunt, I sent the Soft Touch to inspect one of those quizzical haunts where great boils have been noted from a distance, with nothing save a sprat or two ever being caught there. The soft, confident ring bulged the surface, and I was in it from the hookset. A hard charger, intent upon breaking my tackle, and it took every trick I had to keep him from the edge of destruction. Netted, he was a dark bronzed warrior, barely an inch shorter than that two-foot mark!

My new beetle was looking somewhat chewed, even after a rinse and dry. I massaged a bit of floatant into it’s herl and hackles and continued the hunt. Grabbed again, I felt one very hard pull before the fly came away, checked the hook and cast again.

The fishing was patient and surgical, and my concentration was rewarded once more. The next beetle eater leaped high when he felt the steel, then again and again he vaulted skyward, a brown that must have rubbed fins with a Delaware rainbow. A prodigious fighter, he too was eventually led to the net, and exceeded twenty inches.

There was another, a two-foot trout I have never seen before. In the net I found that my reaction had been slow, for the fly had caught him in the skin beside a pectoral fin, as he spit the fraud before I struck. A spectacularly colored brown, I offered my apologies and released him. He cannot be counted, for he was not fairly caught, but it is a bit miraculous to have four trophy browns sip that same fly in less than four hours of fishing.

The energy of that amazing morning propelled me through an uncharacteristically long day. I fished nearly nine hours, something I have not done often in my golden years. Some more trout were caught, a few missed, though none like those that left a glow in my heart that morning. On my last cast with that poor chewed and bedraggled beetle, I saw a tiny wink at the end of a long, long cast to the shady bank. I reacted a bit hard, my nerves still firing with the energy of redemption and left the fly where it was. I felt nothing and assumed it had been one of the juvenile trout I had encountered later in the day along that last reach of water. Perhaps, perhaps not… it was a magic fly after all.