All Fishermen Are Liars Read Online Free Page A

the inevitable signs of hard human use and nearly sixty brutal Arctic winters. This is more of a comfortably lived-in outpost than a resort: a place where serious fishermen come to fish. Beyond that, all they need or want is a warm, dry place to sleep, three meals a day, a good guide and good fishing, all of which they get. I felt supremely at home here, with no worries about using the wrong fork at dinner. I started fishing in the Midwest at about the time this camp was established, and it still startles me to think that any kind of fishing is considered upscale.
    I got my shot at grayling a few days later when I did a fly-out to the source of the Horton River with an Australian named Frank. It seems that Frank had gotten it into his head to try for a world record lake trout on two-pound tippet and this was a good place for the attempt. In the fall—and August is fall here—hundreds of grayling work upriver toward the outlet at Horton Lake to feed, while large lake trout prowl down into the gathering current to ambush them. It was understood that Frank and our guide, Mike, would make a serious try for a big lake trout on light tackle at the outlet while I’d have a seat on the float plane and an entire Arctic grayling river all to myself.
    The Horton is a typical tundra river: cold, clear, broad and shallow, with placid, but braided currents and a view to the horizon in every direction without a tree in sight. When five big bull caribou wandered over to the river to drink, I could see them coming for a thousand yards: just their antlers at first, which at that distance looked like bentwood rockers bobbing in the middle distance.
    The outlet itself was wide, smooth, dish-shaped and pewter-colored under a low, drizzly overcast. The current was nearly imperceptible, but now and then there’d be a large, violent boil followed instantaneously by twenty or thirty smaller boils as a good-sizedlake trout lunged into a pod of grayling. Before the day was out, a ten-pound lake trout would be landed with the tail of a two-pound grayling still sticking out of his mouth. When his face was pointed at the camera for a photo, he swallowed defiantly, as if to say “You got me, but you’re not gettin’ my lunch.” A philosophical discussion ensued over whether this was ten pounds of one fish and two pounds of another, or one twelve-pound lake trout, but Mike, using flawless guide logic, declared, “The fish weighs what the scale says it does.”
    I watched Frank for a few minutes, trying to figure out how he was getting a passably pretty cast out of a rod, line and leader far too light for the big fly he was using. Then I strolled down the river. There were no rises, so I tied on a size 14 soft hackle as a search pattern and got a two-and-a-half-pound grayling on my first swing. It jumped once, made a decent run—scattering the wakes of other fish—and then jumped again before it started to tire. The next three or four grayling were all around two pounds, and then I hooked a fat male with an outlandish dorsal fin that was closer to three. He ran farther and scattered more wakes. I hadn’t yet taken a step or made a cast longer than twenty feet.
    If I had to guess how many grayling I landed over the next few hours, I’d say it was in the neighborhood of fifty, with a combined weight of something like 125 pounds, and the phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” stuck in my mind like an annoying song. So I quit. I wasn’t bored, but there’s a point—different for everyone, I suppose—when you have simply caught too many fish too easily and are in danger of not only missing the point, but also of abusing the very thing you claim to love and came so far to see. I’ve been fishing long enough to have a few memories of big, easy hauls that are tinged with shame. I didn’t want this to be one of them.
    I found Mike a few hundred yards upstream squatting on the bank cleaning the regulation five-pound lake trout for lunch. “You want