Fishing Fantasy
The Fellowship of the Fly
The following piece first appeared on the now reposed website, Floodplains Magazine, in 2018. It is shared now on AFIELD Notes with limited edits. The accompanying art was drawn by David Wilson. You can find more of David’s work on his website.
My learning curve for fly fishing in New Zealand was as steep as the slopes of Mt. Doom. I spent months swearing fish had echolocation and casting through air that would sooner catch me a Nazgûl than a fish beneath the surface of the water. Based on my introductory stocked trout streams in Virginia during the Second Age, I thought I could fly fish. As my graduate degree on the Fellowship of the Fly would teach me, I first had to survive Middle Earth to become an angler.
Nobody took the time to tell me that trout fishing in the southern hemisphere is more like hunting than fishing. As if my fishing skills from the Shire were not rudimentary enough, my Ranger hunting skills were nonexistent. Had I for some reason been stranded in the Misty Mountains my best survival tactic would have been to scavenge Smeagol’s scraps.
When the Rohan high country trout season opened, I iset about spooking every trout within a three hours’ drive. I spooked fish with my height. I spooked fish with my shadow, my rod, my presentation, my shirt, and at one point I spooked a fish with the shadow of my shadow. Fortunately for me, The Fellowship of the Fly allowed me to walk into a fly shop on the other side of the Great Sea and talk about stimulators, nymphs and stripping all while retaining a semblance of dignity. And a very serious, rugged expression.
The shop was local, but it sold everything from hunting boots to tents to fishing gear, and not necessarily the fly kind. There were gear fishermen afoot; and worse. I was skeptical. Often, the best bits of local knowledge come from fly-only shops where the societally misunderstood fly tier is in the back wearing a flannel shirt in the middle of summer, puffing on pipe-weed and using his sweat as UV glue. I ambled up to the shop’s fly pyramid of Isengard. The tower showed off colors and feathers stacked high and mystical under a swinging dim light. A grizzled shop employee threw a fish rag over a glowing blue palantir and made awkward eye contact with me.
It was well known in Middle Earth that all the men, women, wizards, hobbits and elves of the land in which I was a temporary visitor kept any angling secrets away from foreigners. To break this local oath of silence would mean consequences from the all-seeing Angling Eye that lorded over the land. I had yet to make an impression on anyone well enough for them to risk the consequences of spot burning betrayal.
On this occasion though, the old weathered face that stood across the fly section was as welcome as any I had seen in Gondor. It was one of those faces that knew something, some kind of Gandalf when he was still Grey, a bit under-cover. I was hoping whatever he knew was fishing and that by some chance, he was willing to take a risk by sharing his knowledge with me.
“What are ya after?” he asked me in his kiwi Istari accent.
“Trout,” I said, “Trout covered in gold and silver.” He looked out of the corners of his face like someone was after him, like the other employees would turn him in or the Rodwraiths would pop out from the ceiling and carry him away.
He raised a bushy eyebrow, “Keep yer voice down, mate. The ‘wraiths are near.”
The old gentleman walked around to the checkout counter and brought back an oversized, used topo map book and flipped through torn, ragged pages. He pointed his finger to a spot on the map somewhere near a town called Edoras and tapped it with his weathered finger.
“Come back when you find what you’re after,” he said.
I picked up my finger to tap the map to be sure, but he whacked it away with an old gnarled wading stick. He looked around one more time, confident no one had seen, and leaned on his staff.
“Don’t looked so damned human when you go, ok?” he said.
I nodded, paid for my flies, and headed out to my 4WD steed for the journey ahead. Behind me, all but the one swinging light about the fly tower was extinguished. The consequences for foreign fishing interference had arrived. So had the Rodwraiths. The flickering light cast the long shadow of a grey figure against an old wooden staff. The darkness overtook him. I ran to my car and drove to the mountains.
I awoke in darkness and to a frozen windshield. The cold breath of a Rodwraith was not far away. I pulled out of my parking location with no lights on for fear of being followed. If I were caught by the Rodwraiths, I didn’t know how long I could hold out. Sharing prime trout water is a crime seen by the Eye to be reason for an overnight stay in the dungeons of the Dark Tower. I had heard the stories, the warnings.
The Angling Eye of Middle Earth is known to poke holes in tourists’ waders and forces his victims to do cold plunges wearing cotton. He chains anglers into water that is too warm to freeze but solidifies enough to be slush; a thick soupy substance that allows no drifts, no swings, and no presentations. In the dungeons of the Tower, fish float by bleeding, bottoms-up, with no life left to chase a fly or leap from beneath the shivering substance that grabs hold of legs, wooly buggers and wading belts. The only hats allowed in the entire kingdom of Mordor say ‘Treble Hook Trouble’. There is no escape; there is only the river of slush, forever infiltrating every waterproof/breathable membrane mankind can fathom. I checked my shirt tag to be sure it did not read Fruit of the Doom.
I dropped the car in gear, turned on the defrost, and sped away using every one of my four cylinders. I didn’t dare look in my rearview mirror. A man had given his life for my chance at a fish. There was no going back now.
When I made it to Rohan, I felt small. The sky was big and the mountains formed a giant fertile valley of fantasy that was more scrub and brush than trees and snow. The site of Edoras rose above me, barren and empty. Something had happened here, something dark and cold. I ignored the omens and high-stepped through rough grasses as I made my way to the stream the old wizard had shown me. I kept my eyes trained on eddies, bends, pools, and dark shadows.
A window in the water revealed a rise and the unmistakable ripple of a fish. I paused to see if there was a hatch, some indicator of what fly I should use. There was a flash of gold but nothing escaped the surface tension of the water. I tried a few presentations along the seam and earned only a head nod here and tail flick there. I glanced over my shoulder before I chose a fly I had purchased from the outdoor store. It was a chunky terrestrial; an invasive bug pattern perfect for a non-native fish. Almost everything in Middle Earth was not supposed to be there, even me, especially me.
I dropped in the foam hopper and the fish struck the fly as my old wizard friend knew it would. The hook set had my line screaming and the fish on the reel. My fingers felt a breeze of cool air and a shadow above distracted me long enough for the fish to leap clear from the water and throw my hook. My hat fell over my eyes and as I flipped it back the shadow above me was gone. I had the dark cold feeling that a Rodwraith was near. But something else was close, something beautiful swam in the water.
The trout was precious to me.
I moved with care, glanced above and behind me every few minutes for signs of the Eye or his agents. I moved from shrub to shrub and hid my silhouette against the undergrowth. Despite my best efforts, I knew I was exposed; to the sun, to the weather and to the Eye.
With a torn shirt and muddied knees I poked my head above the edge of a cut bank and saw the olive green back of a rainbow trout. It held on the graveled inside of a bend in the river and grabbed morsels from the quicker current floating by its left. I froze and used elven eyes to see the trout. The only cover I could find was a small prickly bush the height of a hobbit, so I crawled like a half eaten orc along the uneven ground to kneel behind it. I raised my head and my rod to cast.
My view was better now and I saw the trout’s elongated head and kype. It was a meat eater looking for mice and terrestrials, a predator with a mouth to feed. Life was brutish beneath the Eye. This fish was a survivor.
I switched flies and on my second cast caught the edge of the bank opposite of where the fish held. I crawled through the grass to the edge of the river so as not to spook my quarry. I managed enough stealth to free the fly and make it back to my measly bush for another few casts. I tried a new approach, something foreign to Middle Earth; I fished subsurface. I tied on two nymphs and no indicator, and when the fish jerked its head to the left, I knew he had approved my presentation.
The fish was running and my reel was spinning but the pace of my clicking drag slowed. Then came the cold and shadow. My left hand jerked the reel until it was frozen solid and the guides along my rod cinched with ice onto my line. I did not need to look over my shoulder to see the blasphemous creature behind me. It was a wretched Rodwraith, the direct report to the Angling Eye and the first responder for any foreign fishing intervention. My quest was at an end. I turned through the now slushy water and tried to continue reeling in the fish. It made one last leap from the water and landed hard on the viscous slush below. I held the rod in my left hand and turned to face my tormentor.
The black hooded Rodwraith before me quivered with the knowledge that I knew the location of a trout stream. There was no hiding the truth from the gaping maw of hatred made whole in front of me. It lashed out at my line with a sword sharper than any Abel nippers. I swirled in the congealing water and felt the cold creep of leaky waders. My reel no longer turned so I took to stripping in the remainder of my line. I sacrificed my hat and threw it as a Frisbee toward my assailant. Within the Rodwraith’s dark hood a fire burned and my hat was incinerated. The thing burped an output of smoke and coughed up the several hooks that were wedged along the brim of my beloved cap.
The fish was close now and I saw it fighting desperately to remove the hook lodged in the beak of its mouth. But there was nothing I could do with a frozen reel and sinking boots. From my right side the Rodwraith rushed me and its momentum crashed into my unbalanced body. I fell beneath the River of the Dead and lost my grip on my line. I surfaced with slush in my waders and the frozen rod in my hand. My time in Middle Earth had come to an end, my life sacrificed for the tug of one trout in a mystical land I didn’t belong. The fish and I would die together then, a foreigner and an introduced specie in a land of fantasy.
I held up my rod and arms in defiance and the slack line dangled below the rod tip. I was not done, I would reel until the end. As my body went numb from the dunked waders I saw the glow of my last journey. But there was no heavenly gate before me, it was an old man dressed in white waders wielding a two handed rod of greatness that when swung before him broke the darkness and cold of the Rodwraith’s wintery spell. I saw the river thaw and felt the life of the trout attached to my line. I stripped my line tight and heard the clicking of my reel. I reached behind me to net the fish.
Why shouldn’t I keep it?
The man in white fired a perfect loop of line at such an angle that it lassoed the wretched Rodwraith long enough for me to behold the beautiful rainbow of flesh in my net. My assailant screamed an angry crescendo as I touched the trout. I gripped it in my hands and dreamt of a mounted trophy, of a filet grilled on the open fire. Then I remembered who I was, where I came from, what I was meant to be. I was part of The Fellowship of the Fly.
I released the fish from my fingers back to the pool. The tortured scream of the Rodwraith faded into the breeze. The white wizard with the bushy eyebrows was quiet now, he nodded to me and sent a wet fly swinging through the current. On the opposite bank, the Rodwraith removed its hood and revealed a calm kiwi face with a fishing hat that read ‘bait is for bogans’.
The holes welded shut in my waders and the river ran free again. Somewhere beyond us the Angling Eye turned its attention elsewhere.
“Just had to make sure you weren’t gonna keep the One Trout,” said the Rodwraith, “This here is catch and release only. Woulda been a shame to have to bite ya finga off.”