I smelled him before I saw him — that cheap cigar of his, that all too familiar stogie that Leroy Van Slate clenched between his teeth and was constantly trying to keep lit to ward off the mosquitoes and no-see-ums while he fished.
I knew he had to be somewhere upstream, just around the bend by the big pool. The sound of his hobnails crunching on the shoreline gravel confirmed his arrival.
I hadn’t seen Van Slate in a couple of years, maybe longer. His presence on the river tonight was totally unexpected. From where I stood, in the water, in the gathering shadows, I could hear his every move.
My friends and I called him “that old cigar-chomping SOB.” He was a short, bullnecked, middle-aged man who in his prime stalked the river like a Great Blue Heron and carried a wicker creel big enough to hold a small child. He was a fish killer of the highest order, my friends and I agreed. A wooden priest — a 12-inch replica of a Louisville Slugger — hung from his wader belt.
Van Slate had a modest cabin on the Namekagon River in northwestern Wisconsin, outside the tiny sawmill town of Seeley. He and his wife stayed there occasionally, and especially during the trout season. He had a home n Superior, Wis., a few blocks from the coal docks on The Big Lake and within walking distance of the shoe manufacturing plant where he worked.
On Friday afternoons, his wife would pick him up outside the shoe plant gates, the car gassed and loaded. He’d get behind the wheel — a sandwich in hand and a thermos of coffee resting beside him — and then like a man possessed he would drive straight to the river.
When he got there, he would get out near his favorite stretch of water. His wife would drive the car a mile or so down the road, and with her books and a flashlight, she’d wait for him there. Close to midnight he’d leave the river muddied, winded, wet with sweat, and more often than not carrying a heavy creel.
“A patient woman,” Van Slate would say fondly. Those who knew them respectfully agreed.
I felt bad for him when I heard that his wife had died. They’d been inseparable. During her long illness he’d boarded up the cabin and stayed away from the river. I’d gotten used to him not being around. Maybe it was just my imagination, but there seemed to be more fish in the river.
Now here he was, back with his gawdawful cigar, and I had forgotten how bad it smelled. To make things worse he had taken my spot on my favorite stretch of river, a spot where just the night before I had been surprised and thrilled at the sight of a cloud of brown drake spinners above the trees.
I watched the swallows and cedar waxwings dive into the mating swarm and I knew that the big flies would be on the water shortly. There was a better than average chance that a big trout would be rising to feed.
I didn’t have to wait long before the mayflies completed their mating ritual and began to lay their eggs. It was when the spinner fall was at its heaviest that I saw the largest brown trout I’d ever seen in this river.
I watched spellbound as a huge wake came from beneath a dead white pine lodged at the head of the pool. Waves lapped against my waders as the wake moved past me and stopped just out from a clump of blue iris below where I was standing. Smaller trout, which had been feeding on the spinners, suddenly stopped, and for a time nothing moved in the pool.
Then the big fish rose.
My hands shook as I‘d checked my leader for wind knots. I did it out of force of habit because I had yet to make a cast. I hadn’t ever been this unnerved, but then I’d never expected to see a fish this big.
I crept along the shoreline toward the tail of the pool to get below the trout and waited, hoping he’d rise again. He did. Then I made my cast. The fly landed a couple of feet in front of him. Its silhouette looked like so many of the naturals that I was confident he would take my fly without hesitation.
I waited what seemed like an eternity for it to float over the fish. then heard a deep, sucking sound that big fish make as their mouths close over a fly. I knew I’d caught him, but when I set the hook, there was nothing there! I hadn’t felt even the slightest tick of barb touching flesh. To add insult to injury, my fly came sailing back, slapping me in the face like a wet dog’s tail.
I was dumbfounded and couldn’t believe what had gone wrong. The fish had disappeared and a steady raft of spinners drifted past me. I waited until well after dark to see if the big brown came back to feed. It didn’t.
The first thing I thought of this morning was the fish I lost and I plotted all day for strategy that would make him mine. I was determined to catch him. I wanted to see the water move as he rose to my fly and took it, to feel the surge of power when he became aware of the hook, to hear the sound of my reel as the trout took line out.
I had promised myself and anyone else who was listening that after taking a moment or two to admire him, I’d release that trout back to the river. I’d hoped with no little embarrassment that the gesture would improve my chances.
But now my plans had been emptied and I was downstream of the big fish. It was that interloper Van Slate at the pool where the trout lived, not me; and if that wasn’t difficult enough to swallow, there was the ever-more-aggravating stench of Van Slate’s cigar.
Why hasn’t he moved? I wondered. Has he seen the big fish?
Van Slate may have gotten there first, but I saw that fish first. I knew deep down that if that old cigar-chomping SOB catches it, that brown trout would end up like every other fish he’s caught — on his grill.
The truth is I did admire Van Slate’s fishing prowess, although grudgingly. Maybe I was jealous. We could have been friends, I thought, if only he didn’t kill everything he caught. Before his wife died I’d talked to him on a couple of occasions about it over a few beers at the Wayside Inn.
“I just like the taste of trout,” he had said and grinned.
The sun had dropped below the tree line, and the brown drake spinners lifted from the bushes by the thousands and began their dance — rising upward, then dropping, rising upward again, then dropping, fluttering up and hovering briefly, and then dropping again.
Perhaps the flies will go back to the trees and bushes and not come down at all. It’s happened before, sometimes when the weather changes quickly, sometimes for no reason at all. In my heart I knew that the spinners would fall and that Van Slate would be there until the last dog is hung and the big trout caught.
More spinners joined the swarm and the birds grew frenzied as they swooped and dove into the cloud of mayflies.
A few spinners dropped to the water extruding their delicate egg clusters onto the river’s dark surface. A few small trout slashed at the spinners that were quivering they laid their eggs. I caught two of the feeding trout, each of them 14 to 15 inches long. It helped to take my mind off Van Slate upstream.
Once again I got a strong whiff of cigar smoke.
“What’s going on up there?” I whispered to myself. I would have heard the big fish if he rose.
Then I did hear the rise. There was no mistaking the sound — a loud splash like someone had tossed a chair into the water.
“Holy K-e-e-r-i-s-t!” Van Slate exclaimed. I heard his hobnails crunch against gravel and a crashing in the underbrush. I pictured him struggling to navigate the thick alders and spruce that crowded the shoreline between him and the fish.
The big fish rose again, deliberately, like he somehow knew that he was safe, that there would be plenty of flies and he’d have no need to rush.
Then I heard Van Slate’s reel screech for an instant. Must have snagged his fly in the bushes I thought. There was more profanity and the sound of branches being broken. I chuckled when I saw the glow of his flashlight and thought of him holding it in his mouth and fighting the brush to retrieve his fly.
The big fish rose again. Then again and again. He had established a rhythm feeding the drakes, which carpeted the water. Even in the afterlight I could see that it was one of the heaviest spinner falls ever. I was covered with mayflies.
I continued to hear brush snapping. Van Slate must be frantic.
Then I heard the crunch of hobnails on the gravel again. Quieter now. More purposeful.
The big fish rose again, and a second time. I heard Van Slate step into the river. The big fish rose again.
Van Slate peeled line from his reel. He was getting ready to make the cast, I thought with emotions that were mixed and intense. The big fish rose again and again.
I heard the fly line’s back-and-forth swish as the cast was lengthened.
“Yahoooo!” Van Slate shouted like a rodeo cowboy. My heart sank.
There was a loud thrashing that seemed to go on forever.
“Oh Kee-r-i-s-t,” I heard Van Slate plead: “Let me land it.”
The man has no pride I thought. Now he’s trying to make a deal with God. The big fish would take off line and Van Slate would bring it back. Back and forth, back and forth, an epic battle whose outcome was in doubt.
Finally it was over. I was certain that I heard the crack of Van Slate’s priest on the big fish’s skull. My shoulders slumped.
I heard the familiar crunch of hobnails on gravel. The sound grew louder as Van Slate made his way along the shoreline. He entered the river and waded toward me. I didn’t want to startle him, so I turned on my light and shined it in his direction.
“Mr. Van Slate,” I called out. “Lucca here.”
“I thought I heard someone below me,” he said cheerfully. “It’s been a few years since I’ve seen you.”
“Yes, it has. From the sounds of it you had on a pretty good fish.”
“You better believe it!”
He sounded excited. I couldn’t blame him.
“Mind waitin’ up?” he asked. “My flashlight went on the fritz.”
“Sure. We can walk out together.”
“That’d be great!” I wanted to see the fish but dreaded the moment. As Van Slate walked toward me his creel looked heavy and dead.
When he entered the circle of light cast by my flashlight, the shoemaker had a big grin on his wide, fleshy face and his porkpie hat was pushed back on his head. He smelled strongly of tobacco and sweat as we shook hands.
“Mind if I have a look?”
Van Slate set his rod against a tree and reached inside the creel. In stunned silence (mine) that old cigar-chomping SOB, his grin widening, pulled out a half-smoked cigar.
“I released that great fish!” he laughed and stuck the stogie in the corner of his mouth, fumbling in his shirt pocket for a match.
“Can you believe that? A fish of a lifetime -- and I let it go. Seemed like the thing to do. Goes to show you that life changes for all of us, even for a worn-out old SOB like me.”
David Lucca is a freelance writer, commercial fly tier and storyteller who lives on the Namekagon River near Hayward, Wis. This story appeared in the May issue of Midwest Fly Fishing magazine.
