Tim Weed
novelist, lecturer, outdoorsman, and independent scholar; made the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize Shortlist and named to Bank Street College of Education’s list of the Best Books of 2014; his short fiction and essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Craft, Colorado Review, The Millions, Fiction Writers Review, Writer’s Chronicle, Backcountry, and many others; co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program, serves on the core faculty of the Newport MFA in Creative Writing
The sun rises over the cockscomb arête; it will be another clear and windless day. As they eat breakfast in the rich dawn light the camp robbers watch them, big solemn jays with clean, grey feathers and wise-looking whitish heads, perched on spruce branches at the edge of the meadow. Occasionally one of the birds emboldens itself to come forward for a scrap of egg or a crumb of last night’s bread.
Tommy asks his uncle to teach him how to fly-fish, and after breakfast the man obliges, setting him up in the meadow beyond the tents to cast a line with no fly tied to the tippet. Jack watches for a while, then walks over to the Jeep to get his air-powered BB gun.
Later, out on the lake, Tommy’s uncle ships the oars and lets the boat drift. “Careful not to slap the water with your line,” he urges. Tommy casts, concentrating on the rhythmic motion he learned in the meadow—back-stroke, pause, forward-stroke, pause—letting the line straighten out fully before reversing direction.
“Very good, Tommy,” his uncle says, grinning. “But don’t forget to let the fly touch the water sometimes. If you want to catch any trout, that is.”
Tommy lets the line settle and watches the fly drift on the glassy surface. It looks insignificant, a tiny fleck of lint on the shimmering expanse of lake. In the background is the periodic, muffled gasp of Jack’s airgun.
Suddenly the water under the fly erupts and there is a live weight pulling on the line. The fly rod is suppler and more sensitive than the spinning rod; the connection to the animal feels less mediated, more direct. Heart pounding, he brings the fish up beside the boat. The man scoops it and hands Tommy the net with the thrashing trout.
“I want to keep it.”
“Then hit it on the head with the net handle. Right between the eyes.”
Tommy glances at his uncle, who is regarding him with an interested, carefully neutral expression. He reaches down into the net to untangle the struggling creature. When he grasps it in his hand the trout goes still, as if bracing itself. Gingerly, he brings it up to his lips as he’s seen his uncle do. Then he holds it down on the aluminum seat with one hand and uses the other to strike it with the net handle.
“Harder, Tommy.”
Tommy hits it again, but the fish is still alive. He hits it a third time, feeling sick because one of the eyes is bulging out and the blood is dripping from its gills into the muddy rivulet in the rowboat’s hull. He wishes he had let this one go, too.
“Once more, Tommy. Hard.”
He bludgeons it as hard as he can, and this time he feels a vibration down the length of the fish’s body, an electric shiver like that of the released trout but more pronounced. More final.
The man leans forward, holding open a canvas creel, watching the boy closely. There is something in his eyes: empathy perhaps, a glimmer of buried pain. Tommy feels a wave of guilty relief as he deposits the trout in the wide, rubberized mouth of the creel, and the lifeless creature slides away into the green darkness.
from A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing by Tim Weed (Green Writers Press)
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