August

I elected to sleep outside, mostly because I was delighted to have caught what seemed to be native, purebred Westslope cutthroats from a stream smaller than the width of the room from which I’m writing this. A third the width, really. It was neat. But I got rained on. C’est la vie.

I tied some flies, then packed up and headed west towards Hamilton. I had driven about two miles down a little gravel road to get here, and going back out towards the highway in the fog, I came across what appeared to be a paint horse foal laying in the road. I got right up to it, and instead it was a massive Saint Bernard, literally taking up half the road, and laying square in the middle, making it impossible to pass. So I pulled my car over, got out, and fed it the remainders of the rainbow I had for dinner the night before. I’m not entirely sure that sort of thing is kosher in Montana, but the dog sure seemed to enjoy it; I made a new friend out of the deal, and got him to leave the road.

I pulled over at a random campground and caught a half dozen browns from four to ten inches in length, then worked my way up the west fork of Rock Creek, catching small cutthroats and cuttbow hybrids, nothing bigger than ten inches, but a lot of fun. I really was interested in catching a small bull trout, but I doubt I was throwing the right flies to target those fish. It was a pretty stream, and I had it all to myself.

I did pull off near the saddle of the ridge at some lake, just for shits and giggles, and because I had yet to fish a lake. It was gorgeous, a dark gem set in the middle of a verdant green meadow. Or so I thought. I should’ve known by the moose tracks.

I walked out onto the thing, in sandals. I say onto because it turned out to be a quaking bog- ringed with a thick mat of sphagnum moss which trembled and sank when you walked upon it. Sometimes it only sank three inches, other times it sank a foot or more. In the back of my mind I was worried about the moment it gave through completely- thinking of arctic explorers and others who have been lost in ice which collapsed beneath them, and they couldn’t find the hole they fell through. I thought back to a National Geographic article I had read when I was younger, about mummified men the had found in peat bogs in Scotland, and wondered if this could perhaps be my fate…

But there were trout dimpling everywhere, so I stupidly carried on. And nothing awful happened- I just caught one dumb stocker west slope cutthroat after another. Foam ants, damselflies, caddis, it didn’t’ particularly matter- if it floated, eventually something would hit it. I made a game out of it, watching where fish rose and casting to where I expected them to rise next. It may have worked, I don’t know, but in an hour or so I must have caught at least twenty fish, none over ten inches. It was dumb fun.