Fort Smith, Mont.
Our guide rumbled into the yard at 5:30 a.m., all diesel roar, crunching tires and enthusiasm, with his big drift boat rattling ponderously behind him. We loaded up, climbed into the truck and were off in the chilly dark. It was a lot like leaving hunting camp in November to deploy through the woods, shiver and wait till daylight. But I wasn’t quite sure why we were doing this.
At the boat ramp, the usual: backing into the river just below the Yellowtail Dam on the Bighorn River; letting the boat into the water, dropping the anchor and driving the truck to a parking spot; climbing in to settle down and wait for whatever came next.
What came next was wishing that back in Montpelier I’d packed my light fleece shirt. Between me and the morning dew was only a polyester undershirt and a fleece jacket. But a slight reddening in the eastern sky gave promise of eventual relief. Hanging in that sky was the last visible crescent of the waning moon, with the bright landing light of Venus shining above it.
Steven, our guide, was peering anxiously at one shore of the river, and as he and Baird (my oldest fishing buddy) talked, I finally figured out the reason for our early start. They wanted to be the first at a particular spot, where on days like this a very special mayfly rises to the surface, molts and takes off on its last act, the mating flight. It’s called the trico, short for Tricorythodes, and it must have been discovered by somebody with super powers of observation and great eyesight. It’s no bigger than a green pea — often smaller — with diaphanous wings.
But the trout love them, and swarm to the surface to gobble as many as they can get before the hatch ends, as mysteriously as it began. Trout fishermen are just as busy, too, casting trico imitations in frantic attempts to match the dead-drift motion of the real thing, and hoping an impetuous trout will grab them without an inspection. Happily, many do.
After the frantic hatch, there’s a period of quiet waiting. We sat nibbling on bits of our lunches. Above our heads pulsated an unbelievable, translucent cloud of adult flies, shimmering in the sunlight as they mated, laid their eggs, died and fell to the water: the famous “spinner-fall.”
The spot that Steven had tried so hard to get to first was a low, grassy island with a good, strong current flowing through the narrower of the two channels around it. Baird picked a spot at the head of the run, and I waded toward a little rough spot of swift water below a pile of snags. The spot was literally no larger than two single beds pushed end to end, but in that space at almost any time there were between half a dozen and two dozen heads popping out of the water to gulp spent tricos. The fish attached to those heads — brown and rainbow trout — were all about 18 inches, well-fed and strong. I could reach the spot easily, but each cast had about a two-second life before the drag of the line in slower water gave it away as a fake. There was an even bigger fish among the mob — the guide guessed it was a rainbow; we called him Big Blue — that hung back in a quiet eddy beyond the melee and wouldn’t be tempted to join in. He reminded me of the eldest oyster in Carroll’s Walrus and the Carpenter, “(who) did not choose to leave the oyster-bed.” He was on to me, and I couldn’t tempt him.
Like many other sports, fly fishing often involves hours of futile flailing in search of as little as a few minutes of exciting activity. The Bighorn is as close to an exception to that as I’ve ever experienced. Relatively undisturbed in the middle of the huge Crow Indian Reservation (and not far from the Little Bighorn battlefield), it seems to have either preserved or recovered its pristine ecology and enjoys a complete food chain: alkaline waters nourishing aquatic plants and uncountable zillions of invertebrates; happy trout that gorge upon the invertebrates and grow stronger than any others you may experience elsewhere; ospreys and eagles that raise broods beside the teeming rapids; and delighted fishermen practicing catch-and-release. Not to mention the full-service lodges and guides that accommodate fishermen from everywhere. It’s a little Eden.
It didn’t seem that way the next morning, which dawned with wind and pouring rain. We breakfasted thoughtfully, donned our rain gear and ventured out. But within half an hour we were somehow soaked through, shivering and dispirited. We punted and went back to camp, where Baird answered emails. I stayed in my long johns to dry them and surfed the Dish network, which proves FCC Chairman Newton Minow’s 1961 description of TV as “a vast wasteland.” I snoozed.
But noon brought us clearing skies and warm temperatures. Baird recalled our guide and we went back out onto the river. It was another of those near-perfect experiences: large trout lurking in the swift water and under the banks and shooting out like cannonballs to grab our microscopic offerings. I’m pretty sure we lost as many of them as we landed, but it didn’t matter; I call the loss a “remote release.” We were looking for my buddy Baird’s favorite setup — a riffle with trout that you can see waiting for a snack. He loves to sneak up on them and try to entice them to strike. That’s the image of the trip that’ll stay with me: a perfect sunny afternoon, two ospreys soaring and flapping overhead, a comfortable swivel chair for me in the boat, Baird creeping stealthily up toward the riffle. Than a careful cast, a flash of gold, and a powerful rainbow tearing off down the river.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
