THE GUIDE KNOWS EVERYTHING
By N. Vernon-Wood
THREE-FOUR YEARS AGO, the Trail Riders of the Canadian Rockies had a picture in their bulletin that shure give us local dude wranglers a kick. It’s a photo of old Bill Slaney conversin’ with a bevy of sweet young she-Pilgrims. The old side-hill gouger is looking plumb intelligent (for him), an’ it’s titled “The Guide Knows Everything.”
Which same is ondoubtedly what some Pilgrims seem to expect. A man’s got to know the country, an’ how to make a comfortable camp. He has to be able to shoe a cayuse, patch a tent, swing an ax, an’ build a decent meal; an’ when he can do them he’s only just started. He mighty soon discovers that he also has to be a naturalist, geologist, an’ botanist, besides a jack-knife surgeon, a recontoor, a ballistics expert, an’ a pretty fair judge of human nature an’ how much exposure to give a fillum on a dull day.
An’ every once in a while some bird will pull something like this: “Look at that view, Tex; don’t you think Corot would have loved to paint it, or do you think Browning would have caught the atmosphere better—or do you?”
When they start that sort of thing, it’s a good plan to grab your field glasses plumb excited an’ say, “Holy old doodle, they’s a bear on that slide—no, b’gosh, it’s a burned stump. Don’t it beat hell how them shadders fool you sometimes?”
ALL THIS HERE PREAMBLE is by way of explainin’ why it is a feller’s apt to get him what the experts call a Complex. He gets so he begins to think he just about does know it all, an’ just then somethin’ sneaks up an’ busts his little pink balloon all to hell.
Take trout fishin, f’rinstance. I’m what you might call a fair-to-middlin’ journeyman angler, but most of my stream whippin’ has been done for strictly utilitarian purposes, fish in the pan bein’ the prime motive, an’ I’ve never branched out into the finer an’ more artistic aspects of the sport. But that don’t prevent me recognizin’ an’ appreciatin’ a top hand when I see one. An’ Father Moriarty was one of ’em. He’s the priest in charge of the Bankhead Mission, an’ shepherd to the wildest flock of woolies that ever cracked a prayer-book.
I’m comin’ down Johnson Canyon, onetime, an’ down at the bottom of a cliff, in a scrub spruce, I find a hummin’-bird’s nest—one of them delicate bits of ornithological construction that makes a man feel clumsy as an ox, just to look at. I meet up with this Padre, who has a camera an’ fishin’ rod along with him, so I ask does he want to make a picture of the nest, with a cute ruby-throat settin’ on a couple of pea-sized eggs. Right away he got human, an’ we scrambled back together.
From bird’s-nesting with a camera we naturally got on to fishin’, an’ I took the old feller to the pool at the foot of the falls. That hole was one of the major blights in my comparatively carefree existence. It’s full of rainbow trout as big as pack horses, almost, an’ are they snooty? I’ve tried ’em with Royal Coachmen, Brown Hackles, an’ Black Gnats accordin’ to season an’ weather conditions. I’ve used Bucktails, Colorado Spinners, Rubber Grasshoppers, an’ God help me, worms. The mornin’ sun has risen on my shiverin’ form, up to my pants pockets in the icy water, tryin’ to inviggle them blasted ‘bows to strike, an’ it’s gone down behind Sawback Peak throwin’ its last crimson beam on a disgruntled waddy still feebly castin’ along the edge of the riffles. An’ all I ever took out of there was half a dozen tiddlers that was too immature to know better.
I led his Reverence to that hole with malice aforethought. I’d got the notion that if I couldn’t catch them trout, no one could—same bein’ a typical example of Guide Philosophy.
His eyes kind of lit up when we looked down into the drink, an’ he says, “What do you suggest we use?”
“Well,” I tell him. “I think I’ll try a Wickham’s Fancy as a dropper, an’ a Gnat for point. What flies you got?”
“I think I’ll just sit and watch a while. I’m not as young as I was, and a rest seems to be indicated.”
So I unwound a leader from my hat, an’ unlimbered my rod. I’ve got to let on that I really believe them pediculous pink-bellies are takeable, but it’s just a gesture as far’s I’m concerned. The Father sat him on a rock, an’ seemed about as interested as a river hog at a ladies’ quiltin’ bee. After I’d made forty-’leven fruitless casts, he pulled a mess of feathers, yarn, horsehair, an’ old socks out of his pocket, an’ opened a tin that had originally contained half a pound of Dublin Shag. Out come a few hooks, a pair of scissors, an’ he went to work.
A few minutes later, he stepped up alongside an’ laid seventy foot of line across that pool in a manner that was a joy to see. He’s usin’ only one fly, an’ it lit like thistle-down on the lee side of a big rock that stuck out where the water boiled after plunging over the falls.
Just as he recovered, I thought I seen a shadowy shape, rise, an’ on the next cast I knew it. It come up from behind that rock, an’ struck like the trip-hammers of hell. An’ I stood an’ watched a paunchy little priest handle six an’ one-half pounds of wet dynamite an’ lightnin’ with a four-ounce rod in a manner that got me thinkin’ of D’Artagnan, an’ the swordsman’s wrist. What’s more, I found out later he uses a leader like cobweb.
That little man could sit on the bank of a stream, study the water, weather, an’ the insect life, an’ then take somethin’ from his fly-book that would look to those trout the way fresh-broiled deer liver looks to a hungry Pilgrim. I got so I invented jobs over to Bankhead on the off chance of runnin’ into Father Moriarty an’ persuadin’ him to play hookey. I’ve seen him catch trout where there wasn’t any, an’ I never seen him lift more’n two out of the water in any one day. He’d bring ’em to the shallows, slip his fingers down the line an’ takin’ care his hand was wet, slip out his hook gentle as a woman. “There you are,” he’d say. “Back to your pet eddy, an’ meditate on the sin of gluttony, an’ next time, don’t mistake the shadow for the substance.”
They buried the Father last fall. From the cemetery here, you can hear the Bow falls roarin’ loud an’ deep in the spring, an’ sort of musical the rest of the time, so his body is right handy to good trout water, an’ I’ll bet you four fits that his spirit is havin’ one whale of a time with them other sportsmen, the Galilee fishermen, Ike Walton, an’ Grey of Falloden.
LAST FALL, HAVIN’ NOTHIN’ much to do, an’ a month to do it in, I says to the youngest of my quiverful, “Want to skip school an’ come along with me while I see can we get the odd elk for eatin’ purposes, son?”
Which is Unnecessary Question No. 59. So we pack a couple of cayusesan’ hit south. Three days’ travel puts us at the foot of a pass that divides Alberta from British Columbia, an’ is the watershed between the Saskatchewan an’ Columbia river systems. The B.C. side is crummy with elk, an’ there’s bear on both slopes. We fixed up camp for a week’s stay, an’ next mornin’ headed up the pass afoot. Before we’d gone three miles, we’d spotted nine bulls, mostly young stuff, an’ all easy pickin’s.
The kid wanted we should bust the first one we seen, but I thought this was as good a time as any to inculcate a little hunter’s patience into his system.
“No hurry, son; never grab the first thing you see, when you might get just what you want later.”
Couple of hours after, we spotted a twelve-pointer ‘way up on a slide, so we made a stalk, an’ laid him out. I grallocked him, an’ takin’ only the liver for immediate consumption, hung my old sweater on his antlers to flag off the prowlin’ coyote, an’ we backtracked for camp.
While we’re fryin’ up some liver next mornin’, the youngster want to know was there any trout in the crick that wandered by camp.
“Search me, son,” I says, “but I doubt it. It’s a right pifflin’ watercourse, an’ I never took the trouble to wet a line in it. Still an’ all, trout, like God, are where you find ’em. Want to take a whirl at it?”
He opined he might, so I tell him to get the tackle an’ go to it, while I salvage the meat. I figger it’s a good way to keep him occupied while I tend to the serious business of life. What with this an’ that, I don’t get back till mid-afternoon. There’s no sign of his Nibs in camp, so after hanging the plunder over a smudge to discourage the flies, I wander downstream to see has a grizzly spooked him into a tree, or is he asleep on the bank.
Half a mile below camp, I meet him ploddin’ along. Ploddin’ is right! He’s wet, cold an’ hungry, but is he downhearted? The peaks echo “no!” The little sonofagun has a mess of cutthroat, runnin’ from four to six pounds apiece, that any man would be proud of.
After we’d fed our faces, an’ admired them trout some, he says, “Dad, did you know there was trout like that in this crick?”
“Son, I didn’t know they was anything more than frogs, an’ that’s a fact.”
He gives me one of them, long, cold looks that kids can turn on so good. “Heck,” he says, “I thought you guides knowed everythin’.”
National Sportsman, June 1936, 14–15