Reading the Water by Mark Hume

Author:Mark Hume [Hume, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771645706
Publisher: GreyStone
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Casting Instructions

EVERY SUMMER MAGGIE AND I took our daughters camping. We pitched our tent on lakeshores and beside streams and rivers. Before I taught Emma and Claire how to cast I showed them how to lie on a dock and peer through the cracks to see trout finning below. I helped them turn over rocks on the lakeshore to find caddis larvae, wandering aquatic insects that carry on their backs intricate homes made of tiny sticks or stones. I taught the girls that adult caddis look like small moths and that when they skitter over the surface to lay their eggs, trout chase them, striking with abandon. This changed the way they looked at lakes. I showed them dragonfly nymphs clambering up the stems of bulrushes to shed their shells.

“When you see dragonflies zooming about over the lake, you know there will be nymphs underwater nearby,” I said. “Trout love to feed on them.” I took a newly emerged dragonfly off a bulrush and brought it into the canoe.

“They look fierce, but won’t bite if you don’t hold them roughly,” I said as Claire watched the insect resting on the gunwale, testing its new wings. Tentatively she laid her hand down and waited while it clambered onto her fingers. With its tendril wings gingerly unfolding, its ferocious mandible gasping harmlessly, it gently clasped her skin with tiny, clinging feet. She held it in front of her face, turning it in the light, and Emma found one too and it sparkled blue.

The girls learned to differentiate dragonflies from damselflies by the way the insects held their transparent wings (a dragonfly’s wings extend from either side; a damselfly folds its wings like a tent over its back), and they marveled at how the sunlight glowed through the glossy filaments. They blew on the unfolding wings to dry them, then laughed as the insects lifted up and soared away like sparks on the wind. Later, they chose dragonfly nymphs from my fly box and we fished slowly over weed beds, the girls alert for a strike because they knew the fish and the insects were interwoven in the water.

They saw nature and felt it. We drifted under soporific skies. Heard the calls of ravens, a sonorous glop, glop echoing in the forest, and the ripping sound of air through pinion feathers as ducks tilted in to land on the water near us. Emma collected hawk feathers, consulted with her mother to identify them correctly, and tucked them under the band on my fishing hat. “Red-tail,” she said. “Wing feathers.”

Claire brought me a mountain bluebird, found dead by a roadside, its ruffled warm body painted the color of van Gogh’s The Starry Night. She held it gently, but not sadly. She had grown to understand that life is fleeting and nature had its own rules.

“How do you think it died?” she asked. We inspected it. There were no cuts, but its neck was limp.

“Maybe it hit a car. Maybe that peregrine we saw fly over earlier struck it,” I said.

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