Earthkeeping: Love Notes for Tough Times by Gary Saunders

Author:Gary Saunders
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781773102702
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2022-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

Part Surgeon, Part Seamstress: A Fly-Tying Memoir

One March some years ago, I took in the Atlantic Sports and RV Show, and there, behind the muscular speedboats and knobby-tired ATVs and gleaming trailers, lay a little artificial fly-casting pool. The winter had been long. I hankered for the sight of open fresh water, any open fresh water. I stood for some time and stared at this pool, fascinated by its ripples and reflections. They conjured up the kiss of a well-placed line across a curling riffle, the quicksilver flash of a salmon’s rise, the swirl and suck of tail and fin as it struck, the cicada song of the reel as it bolted. And it brought to mind one long-ago winter in Toronto when I tied two hundred moose-hair flies.

The flies weren’t all for me. As an art student with a wife and infant son, I couldn’t afford even a fishing licence that year. No, the flies were for my father and his brother Don to sell at Saunders’s Camps on the Gander River in northeast Newfoundland. When my father launched the business in 1948, he’d fully intended to make and sell his own salmon lures. He did buy the wherewithal — only to discover that the dexterity and patience required to fasten slippery feathers onto little hooks were not in him. So at age fifteen I inherited a fly-tying kit and a hobby.

In pre-Confederation Newfoundland most angling supplies came by mail from Hardy’s of Great Britain or from a St. John’s agent. And though that venerable house in Great Britain stocked just about anything an angler might need, to my knowledge they stocked no moose-hair flies. Back then maybe no one else did.

The credit for introducing the moose fly to the Gander usually goes to Sandy Parsons, a local guide and outfitter. My older brother Calvin, himself an outfitter later, recalls seeing it fished near O’Leary’s cabin on First Pond Bar around 1945. Of course the fly was said to be deadly — what new fly isn’t? — but in fact it was very effective under the right conditions of water and weather.

Parsons, it seems, never marketed his pattern. Over the years, various local guides played variations on it, yet no standard local design evolved. British or American clientele who’d heard of the fly couldn’t buy one locally. Fifteen years later, this was still true. My father, frustrated by this, asked me to design one. “Something respectable, something an angler would buy. I’ll pay you two dollars apiece for all you can turn out — and I’ll supply the moose hair.” (Dad and Uncle Don also ran hunting camps.)

It was a deal, and for me a welcome one — though Dad couldn’t have made much on it. You could buy fancier flies for less in most tackle shops. It was, I see now, his discreet way of putting some bread on my table.

For here was his younger son, a recent University of New Brunswick forestry graduate, newly married, with a better-paying job than he himself had ever had, chucking it to become…an artist.

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