On all the maps, the gravel-bottomed, tannin-tinted stream had a name, but Vincent and Sean—Master Maine Fishing Guide Sean Rideout—never spoke it, even to each other. They did have words for each of the stream’s discrete and singular features—its pools, its runs, its riffles—but these were names that had never been put to paper, which they themselves had conjured through a blend of long familiarity and imagination, and which therefore comprised a litany, an incantation, that only served to deepen rather than unmask the mystery of the stream.
They loved this stream because there were brook trout in it, there had always been brook trout, and there had never been anything but brook trout. The trout were not large; any specimen that reached a length in double digits they considered a good one; most were smaller. But these were fish that unquestionably belonged here, the ones whose ancestors had remained behind in the barren wake of retreating glaciers and had gone on to swim and spawn through the millennia as feathery lichens took hold on the surrounding ice-scoured bedrock, only to be overtaken by emerald mosses—which themselves were succeeded by an eruption of grasses that carpeted a broad and welcoming path for the forests that rose and fell and changed and rose again … all amid thousands of years of flooding and droughts and hard, snow-blasted freezes that sometimes lasted for almost a year, and the jaws of myriad, still-evolving predators and the ravenous claws and beaks of birds and the apocalyptic feet of mammoths and the sharp hooves of migrating caribou and solitary, plodding moose and the woven fish traps and stone spearpoints of the First peoples, who passed through from the North and the West in wave after wave, and finally, the depredations and degradations of the Final people: the clear-cutters and the road builders. And the anglers.
While in many other waters populations of brook trout had faded and been replaced, in this fortunate flowage the cycle of unending challenges seemed only to have made each generation of spotted fish a little stronger and a bit better suited to survival in this specific place—where they fit so well and belonged so completely that each individual was a living manifestation of the stream itself—of its amber flow and the sound of its water in the riffles and drops, and the wind bending the alders along its winding banks, and the shadows in its depths and the transient fingers of sunlight that reached down to its bed of dark and shifting gravel, and its swamps and its unseen icy springs and the whispering forest all around.
Each season Vincent and Sean fished the stream throughout a single day—fished it hard and thoroughly, and then they rested it for the remainder of the year. Rather than each of them carrying a rod and leap-frogging one another from pool to upstream pool the way two dry-fly anglers would do on almost any other small river or creek, on this one they fished side by side and took turns casting with a single seven-and-a-half foot, four-weight F.E. Thomas split-cane fly rod that Sean had inherited from his father. Though they knew that other people occasionally visited the place—they sometimes found tangles of discarded monofilament spinning line and Styrofoam worm containers and other trash near the pool by the bridge—the stream had no trails along its banks and it was a difficult wade, and in all their years of coming here, they had never encountered another angler.
They parked near the wooden bridge and they tugged on their waders and their wading boots, and then Vincent walked out onto the bridge to watch the hypnotic spurl of the water passing below while Sean rigged their rod. To the end of the tippet, Sean tied a tan caddisfly, a pattern that, with its flaring wing of elk-hair bristles, invariably put Vincent in mind of an old-fashioned shaving brush. Sean knotted another light length of monofilament to the bend of the hook, and to its end he attached a dropper fly. The dropper was a dull-colored nymph with a wing case and tail crafted using fibers from a pheasant’s feather—a fly tied to represent the larva of an aquatic insect—and just below its hook eye it bore a tiny brass bead to give it weight that would pull it below the surface of the water.
Once the rigging was accomplished, the two anglers put on their hats, slipped on their worn fishing vests, and clambered down the sloping bank below the bridge. Their boots in two feet of water, with branch-tips of dense alder trees brushing their shoulders as they moved, they skirted the edge of the First Pool and worked their way up to the Road Riffle. Sean made the first cast and no sooner did the flies touch the water than a nine-inch brook trout lifted from the bottom to hammer the dry fly. They whooped and, after a brief fight, Vincent netted and released the fish. Then it was his turn, and he hooked another, slightly smaller, trout that came swirling after the nymph. Sean caught one more trout in the Road Riffle, then they moved upstream, catching trout as they went.
They found four trout in the Boulder Pool—two for each of them, with Sean’s eleven-incher, caught on the caddisfly, the largest. In this way they worked toward the uppermost pool, the Meeting Pool, the rod changing hands each time a fish was caught. Within the leafy, tangled tube of the Alder Tunnel, a conventional cast of any kind was impossible—not an overhead, nor a sidearm, nor even a roll cast could go forth without wrapping in branches. But there had always been a good fish or two in that mysterious, shadowy spot, and so rather than skipping it and continuing up to the relative openness and easiness of the Short Riffle, they took turns twanging out a bow-and-arrow cast: they would carefully draw back the leader like a bowstring to arc the tip of the rod and then release it so that, in springing straight again, the rod rocketed the flies upstream, the leader and several feet of fly line unrolling behind them. In this way, they each took a decent brook trout in the Alder Tunnel.
They caught fish in every one of their named places, and they lifted none from the water, but always removed the hook while cradling the trout in the cold flow of its element. One of them would gently hold the fish in his fingers while the other slipped the barbless hook from its jaw, then the two of them would quietly celebrate the trout, honoring its vitality and its beauty, until finally and suddenly it realized it was free and, with a frenzied thrash of its tail, shot down into the depths. So perfectly matched were these trout to the colors and the shifting patterns of gravel and light at the bottom of the stream that, rather than escaping back into the stream, they seemed to dissolve in it.
It was a near-perfect day until they reached the High Bank. It was there that, shortly after Sean had finished unwinding the two-fly rig from an alder branch that Vincent had snagged on his back cast, they heard movement and they turned their eyes to the top of the bank. There on the High Bank stood not the first, but the first three other anglers they had ever encountered on this stream: three much younger fishermen … three fishing Bros, each Bro with a backpack rather than a fishing vest, each wearing a longish Bro beard. There was Black Beard Bro, Brown Beard Man-Bun Bro, and Little Runty Red Beard Bro. Black Beard Bro and Brown Beard Man-Bun Bro had their cell phones out—these people videoed everything—and they were recording Sean and Vincent. As for Red Beard Bro … a set of large white ear buds bloomed beneath his hat, and he was jerking his head and twitching his shoulders to a tune that only he could hear. At the feet of Brown Beard Man-Bun Bro sat a blue fabric beer cooler that bulged like a tick. These people drank while they fly-fished.
Most worrisome: their fly rods were not rigged; instead, each Bro clenched a fistful of multi-piece graphite fly-rod sections, suggesting that, rather than fishing the entire stream as they followed it toward its sources, they were likely beelining to one particular spot on the stream—the stream’s last fishable place before it divided out into the swamps, and the best place on the entire stream in terms of size and number of fish. The Meeting Pool.
Vincent heard Sean swear under his breath. He felt a vague tug against his right wading boot, and when he looked down he saw that, following his most recent cast, as he’d shifted his attention to the Bros on the bank, the flies and the fly line had drifted back down to him, the line somehow wrapping his lower shin as it passed between his legs. Line and leader now hung from him, tandem V-wakes coming off the flies as they dragged in the current 20 feet downstream—and this awkwardness was what the Bros were recording with their cell phones.
Abruptly, Red Beard Bro pirouetted away from the river and crashed off into the brush. Though they could no longer see him, they continued to hear him and to see the tops of the streamside alders swaying as he thrashed his way down from the high bank and continued upstream. The other two Bros lowered their phones.
“Hail fellows well met,” called Black Beard Bro, a bright grin slicing his face. Sean and Vincent continued to stare. After a moment, Black Beard added, “Say, is this a bamboo fly rod which I see before me?”
Vincent glanced down at the elegant rod. Sean said, “Thomas split cane. Might be worth more than your car.”
Brown Beard Man-Bun said, “Well, he’s got a Tesla, so …”
“Well maybe two of his cars, then.” The two Bros laughed. Sean did not.
Black Beard said, “Seriously though, I’ve always wanted to cast one. Never had the pleasure.”
“Is that so?” said Sean. There was an uneasy silence.
Black Beard said, “We read about this brook on the forum. Decided to give it a try.”
Sean, after the shock had worn off: “On a forum, did you?”
Vincent noticed that the water around their feet had grown cloudy. He turned his eyes upstream to the bottom of the Bend, and there stood Red Beard Bro, in the middle of the stream, dancing. His shuffling feet kicked up a ribbon of silt that wound its way down to them.
“Hey!” yelled Vincent.
Sean saw what was happening, and he, too, yelled. “Hey, jackass!”
Vincent felt the loop of fly line tighten against his shin, and when he looked downstream he saw that a small brook trout had hooked itself on the nymph, and was now doing a dance of its own as it struggled.
Back upstream, Red Beard Bro laughed and waved, obviously unable to hear them over the sound of his music. Only after Sean raised his hands above his head and scissored them maniacally did he unplug an earbud and cup a hand to his ear.
“Quit that crap!”
Black Beard Bro had his phone in hand again, and he was videoing as Vincent hunched down over the water, rod tucked beneath his arm, and began awkwardly drawing in the little trout, hand over hand.
“Bro,” Brown Beard Man-Bun Bro said to Sean. “Tucker’s only trying to help. He’s only booting a few bugs off the bottom in order to get the fish turned on for you.”
Sean said, “We don’t want Tucker’s help. We don’t need Tucker to turn the fish on for us.”
“And it seems to me like he’s done you a good turn. I’d wager that’s the first fish you two fossils have caught all day long.”
“That’s not the way we fish. That’s not the way anybody fishes. You guys need to get lost.”
“I believe the two words you’re actually struggling so hard to find right now might be thank you.”
“Actually, the two words I’m finding for you right now …”
“Sean,” Vincent said. He was feeling sick to his stomach. So much wrong here, all at once. As he removed the hook from the little trout’s mouth, he was imagining things getting very ugly. “Let’s let it go. These guys are here; there’s no rolling that back. And they’re different. They have different ideas. He likely did think he was helping.”
Sean dropped his gaze from the men on the bank. “Clowns,” he muttered.
“Yeah.”
When the accidental fish had been freed and they returned their eyes to the bank, the two Bros and their cooler were gone. They looked upstream, and Red Beard Bro was gone as well. But the three of them were not really gone, they knew.
Dreading what lay ahead of them, they resumed moving upstream, bypassing the Bend, which had been ruined for them by Red Beard Bro and his shuffling dance. They caught a couple in the Blackfly Pool, three in the Top Run. Ten minutes after their final fish in the Top Run, Sean reeled up and said, “Maybe they went right past it and kept going.”
“They’d have to be blind,” Vincent responded. “And stupid.”
“Maybe they just kept on walking, and fell into a swamp and drowned.” Vincent drew in a ragged breath. His stomach was still queasy.
At that point, they would have been wise to go back to the bridge. But they couldn’t help themselves. The horror that awaited them ahead was irresistible; it drew them onward. As quietly as they could, because they now were the interlopers, they approached the Meeting Pool. They heard the Bros laughing from a long way off, and as they came within sight they stopped and knelt in the woods. Brown Beard and Red Beard were sitting on a bleached log that rested parallel to the stream. They waved cans of beer, both of them barking out wry comments as they observed Black Beard working the pool with an extremely long graphite rod. It was ten, maybe twelve, feet in length.
“That’s not a fly line he’s using,” Sean said after a moment.
“Nope. Monofilament.”
At the end of each downstream swing, Black Beard lifted his arm and swept the rod over his head to plop a team of weighted flies back above him. Then, keeping the rod high and the line taut, he followed the swinging flies with the rod tip. The visible part of his line consisted of three colored sections of mono—green, yellow, red, maybe six feet in all—knotted between a short, transparent leader at the terminal end and stouter, colorless mono that ran all the way back through the line guides and disappeared into the reel. In all he had no more than a dozen feet of line off the rod tip. After every couple of casts, Blackbeard shifted his position in the pool.
“That’s not even casting,” Sean said quietly.
“No.”
“He’s just dunking the damn flies.”
“He is.”
Sean clawed a pair of compact binoculars from his vest and lifted them to his eyes. After a minute he said, “Yup. As we might have guessed, we’ve got what appears to be a red Squirmy Wormy as the point fly, and a chartreuse thing that looks to be maybe a Mop Fly as the dropper.”
“In other words, a rubber tube and a piece of carpet fuzz.”
Sean said, “So, what an outstanding day this has been. Not only do we learn that our secret brook trout stream has been burned on a forum, and not only do we have to run into other anglers here for the first time in twenty years, but … those three anglers have to be a goddamn Three-Stooges team of goddamn bearded Euro-nymphers. They have to be using this ridiculous technique and this ridiculous gear that’s not even real fly-fishing. It’s an insult to the water.”
Vincent was about to say “It could hardly be worse” when Black Beard Bro jerked his fly rod skyward and yelped. The long rod bent deeply, the tip pulsing as he stripped in line, and after a minute the fish came thrashing to the surface.
When the fight was finished and the fish lay arcing helplessly against the bankside gravel, the three Bros yipped and chittered and gathered around it like hyenas at a kill. They drew out their cell phones and videoed each other holding the fish, and they interviewed one another about the experience of having caught it. About the intense emotions each of them was feeling. Their high-fives and fist bumps were recorded for posterity and online publication. It was the best thing, the best thing ever. It was indescribable. It was frigginawesomebro. Sean groaned when Red Beard Bro stood before the compound lenses of two cell phones and announced to the world the name of the stream.
To their credit, every minute or so between rounds of exaggerated, self-conscious celebration, the Bros placed the fish in a net and dunked it in the water. When they finally released their hostage, at the very least it was still alive.
And, really, Vincent found himself finding it hard to blame them. If he’d caught that trout, even though he no longer took trophy photos, he might have wanted a picture of it. It was a fine fish. From where Sean and Vincent sat, it had to be a good 16 inches—definitely larger than any brook trout either of them had taken in two decades of fishing this very stream.
Sean gave Vincent a nudge. He said, “It’s time for us to go.”
“Succession” is an excerpt from Paul Guernsey’s fourth novel, Rolling Back the River, which was recently published by Stackpole Books and is currently available for purchase online and via your local bookstore. Guernsey is the former editor of Fly Rod & Reel and the author of the nonfiction book, “Beyond Catch & Release: Exploring the Future of Fly Fishing.” His third novel, American Ghost, won the 2018 Maine Book Award in the speculative fiction category. He lives and fishes in Maine.
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