Catch & Release Read Online Free Page B

needle without my mommy’s help. Now I’m going to get a nearly invisible nylon line through the eye of a hook.
    My fly book is so pretty, so well organized, so full of things that are too tiny—hello, sweet little Flashback Pheasant Tail Nymph—or too fuzzy-headed to give me a fighting chance of getting the line threaded. Grasshoppers have been helicoptering up under my feet since I got out of the car, so a hopper is good, I got to figure. So I pick a Joe’s Hopper from the fly book.
    I take my good-luck fishing scissors out of my pocket and give myself a nice, clean-cut line to work with. I steady myself and I hold my breath and it actually works. I’ve got a fly on. I can fish. It’s probably more luck than skill, but I’m adding it to my imaginary list of coping skills anyway: able to thread a fly and tie a hook knot.
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    Trout have good vision and a hard-earned sense of self-preservation. I can’t say I’ve got research to back it up, but I bet most fish of any size have been jerked out of this water a couple of times. Part of growing up a trout, I guess. That sort of experience makes an impression on their raisin-sized brains, so the fish in this river are cagey fish. They are wily fish. They want to eat, but they know it isn’t that simple. They know better than to trust the world. They know happiness sometimes has strings attached. They have to be tricked. The first trick is invisibility. All that takes is a nine-foot rod and a careful approach to the water. The second trick is to bring the dead to life. The fly at the end of the line is not just deadly but dead. I have to make it look like life, I have to make it look like food. I can do that. I’m a practiced liar.
    Fishing is all about lies, and not the ones people tell about the monsters that got away. Fishing is about the lies we tell to the fish and the lies they choose to believe.
    I stand up and haul out some line. The reel ticks like I’m winding up a clock; the only other sound is the water talking over rocks. There is a moment—there— that likely-looking place where the current brings the food, that is the moment where I want to the hopper to drop. My first cast falls short. Nothing is where or when it appears to be. Even the rocks are a lie. Light bends when it moves through the water, and the result is deceptive. Things are dislocated. So even the river tells lies, I guess. I just have to adapt. I give myself more line, enough to pull its own weight, enough to build some distance and carry me, or at least to carry my bad intentions. Then I reach out again into the world. I put this moment, I put this moment, I put this moment—here— and the fish consents to believe. BAM! ZING! All that time wound up in the reel unwinds. Let’s dance, you fishie, let’s dance.
    In a moment I will have this fish in my wet hand. I will remove the hook. I will lean forward and place it back in the water, and, after a second, it will dart away. I’ll feel the water on my own hands, taking away the traces of slime. That slime and glow of colors on my memory are all that the trout leaves with me. After the release, I will move downstream a little bit more and cast again.
    That’s the way it’s supposed to go, but it doesn’t.
    It is a little tiny fish, and the hook isn’t in its lip. It’s through its eye. Through good and hard, since when I set the hook with the smart tug it pulled the barbless wire point right into the bone. Weirdly, the eye with the hook in it looks as bright and marginally intelligent as the other, perfect eye.
    It’s blushing: it’s a little cutthroat. It’s beautiful and it would have been more beautiful tomorrow. Stupid damn fish.
    I smack it hard on a rock to stop everything that’s gone wrong. Then I take out my pocketknife and slit through the tender belly. I push out the guts with my thumb. I don’t check to see what he has been