Ghost Fish (Part 3 of a Story for My Son)

Carl & Emma, in their 90s,
four decades after I met them
on my first trip to NY as a kid

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

The day after I released the fish, we went to see my mother’s brother, Carl, and his wife, Emma.
    “So you’re the kid from down South who is using a Rebel lure to teach us how to fish, eh?”
    That was the introduction from my Uncle Carl, and I was swept away. He was a legend of an outdoorsman and a famed regional stone mason, yet he and my Aunt Emma were also well read and interested in just about everything. From the beginning I was in awe of them, of their combination of blue-collar livelihood and professorial intellects, and the constant humor.
    I wouldn’t see them again for 10 years, but after that I would visit more than 100 times, even though I lived more than 600 miles away most of my adult life. They had no children of their own, so my visits apparently meant much to them; I lived at an uncomfortable distance from my own parents, so the visits felt like homecoming to me.
    “Why don’t you tell Carl about the fish you let go?” my mom said. “He might know what it was.”
    I was dumbstruck; how did she know?
    “A little birdie told me,” she said.
    “You let it go?” Carl asked. “Why?”
    “It…it just seemed special,” I stammered, thinking how stupid it sounded even as I said it.
    Instead of laughing, Carl asked: “Why was it special?”
    “It jumped, and jumped, and jumped, way out of the water, like nothing I’ve ever seen, not even on TV.” I went on to explain how it compared to the 15-inch rainbow trout.
    Instead of chiding me, Carl was suddenly serious. “Would you know it if you saw a picture?”

Carl’s record book stone sheep,
mounted on a wall in a corner
of his trophy room

    With that, he ushered me into the grand trophy room he had built, with its huge deer and moose and elk heads on the walls, and a record book stone sheep like few people had ever seen. Skins from beaver he had trapped were draped over chairs, and photos of trophy fish were everywhere.
    He pulled out a book, flipped to a section with illustrations of various trout: “It should be in here somewhere.”
    Studying the photos, thinking how the fish looked by flashlight, I shook my head. “No, the brown trout is the closest shape, but it’s the wrong color. The steelhead is close to the right color, but it’s not quite the right shape.”
    “So maybe you caught a fat steelhead, or a skinny brown?” Carl asked, with a laugh.
    “I should have kept it, so we would know. I’m stupid.”
    “Well, having a great mystery is okay too. Want a tour of the trophy room?”
    “Sure.”
    With that, Carl walked me along a wall, showing photos of huge white-tail bucks shot at his “camp” on the Tug Hill Plateau, a cabin that had been in the family for half a century.
    He paused at a photo of a group of bearded men in front of a log wall: “That one there, second from the left, was your grandfather. My dad. He built the camp and started me hunting there. This is the last photo taken before he died.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “He was shot by another hunter. For a while I wondered if I would ever hunt again.”
    Even today I remember how he paused, gently patted the photo, then moved on. There were more photos: beaver pelts from the winter trapping season, huge native brook trout from the spring fishing season, northern pike with mouths so large they looked like small alligators.
    On the next wall, set amidst heads of mule deer and elk, were photos from hunting trips out west. Then came a wall devoted to fishing in Canada.
    “There it is, there’s my fish!” I said, pointing at a photo of a man standing in a river with a glistening silver fish filling a huge net.
    “What?” Carl said. “Can’t be. Are you kidding?”
    “Kidding? That’s my fish. It’s silver, and the shape is perfect. And its mouth, it’s different than a trout. What is it?”
    Carl hesitated: “Wait a minute. Did your mom put you up to this? She always had a devilish sense of humor.”
    Now I was off stride: “My mom has a sense of humor? Are you kidding me?”
    I studied the photo: “Seriously, that looks like my fish. What is it?”

An Iceland waterfall, the kind that even
an amazing athlete like the Atlantic salmon
can’t quite jump, but they try

    “That’s an Atlantic Salmon I caught and released in Nova Scotia,” Carl said. “Greatest sport fish there is. Latin name means the leaper. They call it ‘the fish of a thousand casts’ and I probably made at least that many to catch this one. The Salmon River used to be full of them, but they were killed off before your grandfather was born. There have been rumors, but there hasn’t been a documented catch in close to a hundred years.”
    I stared blankly at the photo. “You’re kidding, right?”
    “Nope. You may have caught the proof, and let it go.”
    Now it seemed a really stupid idea. I said so, fully expecting him to agree, and probably fuss at me for being an idiot.
    “Well, would you really want to be known as the guy who killed the last Atlantic in the lake? They really are special; I could have kept mine, but I let it go, just like you. Makes a much better story. Maybe you will catch it again someday.”
    “Do you really think I caught the first one here in a hundred years?”

Fly fishing for Atlantic salmon in Iceland.
Cold-weather fly fishing for salmon is
tough anywhere; in Iceland it can be
brutal. Or it can be warm and sunny,
you take what the day gives you and
have no choice but to be happy with it.
It is a day on a river trying to land
a salmon on a fly: How bad can it be?

    Carl chuckled. “Who knows? Odds say no. Experts would say no. But how many people were out on the river fishing a hex hatch last night?”
    “Hex hatch?”
    “Hexagenia limbata. It’s a giant white mayfly, they used to come off the water in huge numbers just before dusk. Fish would go crazy for them and wouldn’t eat anything else. If there are any Atlantic salmon still around, that’s what they would have been after last night. But nobody would be fishing for them because they were trolling heavy lures behind a boat hoping to hook something else. Maybe people don’t catch them because they don’t even try to catch them.”
    With that, a 40-year friendship was cemented, and a 50-year quest began, even though I didn’t know it at the time.

Copyright © 2020 by Paul Clark