I RESCUED BAMBI

It’s not often you get to rescue Bambi, but that’s just what I did yesterday.

The lost black-tailed fawn was stranded on a ledge along the river. Behind it, sheer rock banks were slicked dark with moss and rain. In front, deep, frigid water. It must have slipped in upstream during the night and clambered onto this false refuge. Now trapped, the fawn was wet, shivering, and, I’m sure, lonelier than it ever had been in its life.

What to do? Mama deer was nowhere to be seen, with no way to find or help its wayward fawn. Should I let nature take its course, however cruel that sometimes can seem, or should I help this pathetic little deer?

I had discovered it frozen against the rocks during my early-morning fishing. The cliffs stretched downward, exposing an ancient earth-rending fault that created a deep channel where salmon pooled on their mysterious voyages to redds of their birth. They spawn, then die, a hideous wasting process, slowly melting them with white fungus. Near the end, they cruise as ghosts, dead fish swimming. It’s nature’s way.

I had a friend, a wildlife biologist, who foreswore any intervention with nature’s way. You don’t try to save orphaned raccoons. You don’t feed the birds. You don’t need wildlife rehabilitation centers. And, you sure as hell don’t rescue Bambi.

I thought about that approach, of letting the fawn suffer its fate to maybe survive, maybe not. What difference would it make, one deer, more or less, in the world?

While I fished, I checked on Bambi regularly, hoping it would take matters into its own little hooves. But each time I drifted by in my boat, it would just get agitated and look hopeless.

After about an hour of this, I concluded it was up to me to do something. Sometimes life puts you in situations where you just have to do something you didn’t plan on. When standing by, when pretending it’s not your problem, isn’t an option. I was alone on the river, bad weather was coming (“Get set for wet and cold,” the online weather alert had warned.), water levels were rising, and I didn’t want to see Bambi’s helpless eyes in my sleep.

I used my big landing net to nudge Bambi into the 46-degree water, then shepherded it swimming toward the end of the cliffs about a hundred yards downstream. But the fawn quickly spotted an apparent escape route, and scrabbled its way onto another dead-end ledge, then up slippery rocks into a tiny, dripping cave. It curled up in the soggy grotto and stared at me. I decided to let it rest a bit, and went back to my fishing.

I wouldn’t even have been on the river, a second day straight, except for one of the local fishing old-boys. In fact, the day before I had been fishing the same way he had taught me, and always had found it wildly successful. Except for that very morning, when I’d caught nothing. He launched his old blue boat, and I had watched him from a distance, slowly trolling along the cliffs. Soon, our boats crossed water paths, and we swapped recent fishing stories. He shared with me his current technique, which I immediately adopted and almost immediately started catching big coho salmon. By the time I left, I had hooked seven, although two had shredded my too-thin leader and swum away with six-dollar lures.

Even though the old guy had been giving me fishing advice for two years, we still didn’t know each other’s names. I did feel like I knew him, however; we had often fished with our boats within hailing distance. He’s hard of hearing so always talks really loud into his cell phone when calling home to “the wife”; forced to eavesdrop, I’d learned way more about his medical conditions than I cared.

“So, what’s your name?” he asked.

“Wayne.”

“I’m Ken Moore. Think of Sears,” he offered.

Ken Moore. Sears? I thought a moment. Oh, I get it! For some reason, I felt the need to reciprocate with a name-saving tip. “With me, think of John Wayne,” I shouted as our boats drifted apart.

I have no idea why John Wayne was the first association that came to mind. I don’t even like the guy. I suppose it was better than my second thought, which was Wayne Newton.

Before Ken Moore quit for the day, he told me to make sure I got home in time to replace my lost lures and get some stronger leader line. I told him that with the predicted heavy rain due that night, I wouldn’t be back the next day.

 “Don’t listen to those weather idiots,” he said.

By the time I left for home, I’d had a fabulous time, so decided to come back the next morning and fish in the rain. I remembered from years earlier in Michigan that the salmon fishing could be exceptional as the first fall storms roared over the Great Lakes.

So I had returned this second day, brimming with hope and expecting exceptional salmon fishing. I had the right technique, new lures, the river all to myself, and the weather idiots had, in fact, been wrong, and no serious rain had yet arrived.

But the moment had passed. While Bambi shivered in its cave, I caught the second of just two cohos. I wouldn’t realize until four futile fishing hours later that it would be the last salmon I would catch this year. Those perfect moments that you chase, no one ever tells you when they’ve passed. You can just hope you spot them, and savor them, as they go by. No one ever lets you know that this will be the last fish you will catch today, or this year, or ever. It’s a downside of mortality. You just never know.

I released my salmon and boated back to Bambi, edging up to the cliff and stepping out onto the wet black mudstone. With the boat’s anchor rope in one hand and a paddle in the other, I tried to extract Bambi from its perch.

“Back to the water. Let’s go, little buddy. It won’t be any warmer later. Time to swim some more,” I told it, and rattled my paddle on the rocks. Bambi lost its footing and slid toward me. I didn’t want a deer sharing my boat, nor did I want to share its swim.

The fawn splashed into the river and headed straight for the opposite shore, two hundred feet away. No cliffs, just soft grassy banks, and beyond, pastures and vineyards of the Umpqua Valley wineries. No problem, it swam strong. I know that Bambi may never be reunited with its mother. Maybe it won’t survive the coming winter. But at least it has a chance. And, I’ll sleep way better.

As I watched Bambi emerge from its river adventure, shake like a dog, and trot off, I waved: “You’re welcome.”

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FISH JINX

Talk about an ignominious retreat! I fled the river today, salmon season over, my tail between my legs like the whipped dog I was. The fish beat me good this year.

I’ve been jinxed, I swear. A dozen or so days on the water this fall, probably 60-plus hours, chasing chinook salmon. My results? Three salmon “jacks” (immature fish less than two feet long), and one lost big fish. Pathetic.

Last year was just the opposite. On just one day in September, I boated 100 pounds of salmon. I was fishing the same place and the same way I fished all my fishless days this fall. If not a fish jinx, then what?

Rains have started here in western Oregon, meaning the rivers are rising and will be unfishable for a couple of weeks. By then, all the chinook will be gone – doing their last rites in the headwaters of the watershed and then dying. So today was probably the final day this year that I’ll chase chinooks.

It rained all night, poured through my hour-long, pre-dawn drive to the river, and didn’t let up until late morning. One theory has it that you have to suffer to catch big fish. You couldn’t prove it by me.

Like pigs in a trough, big salmon slopped around my boat all morning, sometimes jumping clear out of the water and so close they nearly splashed me. One of them should have eventually run into my hooks, even by accident. You would think.

I tried everything that I’ve ever used to catch salmon previously and got not so much as a bite. Salmon eggs dressed up sixteen different ways with corkies, spin-and-glows, and yarn, and dabbed with several varieties of (allegedly) salmon-attracting Smelly Jelly. Spinners. Plugs. Fished deep, fished shallow. Fished slow, fished even slower.

I’d like to blame it on the weather. Water temperatures. Short summer. La Niña, for Christ’s sake. Anything except the obvious answer, that for some reason, I’m jinxed. It’s hard not to take it personal.

One of the few fishing guides out in the rain motored past me around noon, heading back with his clients, an older couple bedecked in soggy rain gear. I went in soon after, and they were still at the boat ramp. I saw the guide flip some fish guts into the river.

Oh, great, I thought. Like I need another dose of fishing humility. I know, he gets paid to catch fish, he does it every day, and he had floated down through lots of water I couldn’t get to in my boat. But still…

As I beached my boat, the old man made small talk with me about the rain and then asked, more a statement, really, than a question, “Get some fish, did you?”

I confessed that, no, I had not. “How about you?” I was forced to reply in-kind.

“Got six. Largest, 28 [pounds]. Two of ‘em real bright, unusual for this late in the season.”

He pointed to the drift boat’s fish box, overflowing with big, fat salmon that looked identical to the leaping fish that had been taunting me all day.

“Good for you,” I said, and then repeated it, trying to keep the tone of gritted teeth out of my voice. What else could I say? I suppose I should have asked him about their special chinook-catching secret, but at that point, frankly, I just didn’t give a damn. I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough. A perfect end to my perfectly shitty fishing year.

It wasn’t just my fall chinook fishing that had sucked. Spring chinook – score zero. Shad – ditto. Spring trout – diddly-squat. Summer steelhead – zippo (whereas, last year had been great). Largemouth bass – zilch. Smallmouth bass – not too bad, although way worse than prior years.

Now, there’s still to come this year coho salmon fishing in late fall and steelhead fishing in early winter. But I seldom catch winter steelhead, and the coho are not nearly as exciting as chinooks. By the time they get upriver where I fish, the coho are maturing, blushing a lovely pink, and have lost much of the fight they had out in the Pacific Ocean a hundred miles away. When you catch them – and they are pretty easy to hook on a fluorescent red Kwikfish – they spin and wrap up in your fishing line like I’ve see alligators do on TV when they are hooked on a baited rope. You can’t keep any wild (non-hatchery) coho or steelhead because their populations are still at risk of dying out. So it’s probably over for my fish killing this year, with no big filets for our freezer.

                                                                              
Fishing isn’t just about catching fish, of course. (Thank goodness for that, or one might think I’ve wasted a whole lot of time.) It’s also about connecting with nature, enjoying the scenery, blah, blah, blah. Trouble is, after a while, after a couple thousand casts with no results, it does get a bit old. Fishing is supposed to at least include catching fish.

Driving home from the river today, I pulled off at the nearby country store to get a leaf out from under my windshield wiper. As I stood there in the rain, the guide from the river pulled into the empty parking lot in front of me with his shiny white pickup, drift boat and trailer, and his goddamned special chinook-catching secret. He made a big circle in front of me, then drove away.

What the fuck? I wondered. A victory lap?

No, he just had noticed the store was closed. It was all in my head. Like my fish jinx, I suppose.

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HAWG MAN

The Hawg Man introduced himself to me in the predawn darkness at the river’s edge. At first, I didn’t know he was a TV star. But it didn’t take long.

“Don’t you know who I am?” he asked. A trace of smirk was illumed by his boat and trailer lights.

We had just exchanged stories from our fishing two days prior, when he had beaten me to the boat ramp, and I had worried he was headed for my favorite spot up-river. As they had pushed into the river, he told his fishing guests, “On this boat, we never get skunked.” Turned out, he roared right past my spot, fishing farther upstream than I had ever ventured due to formidable rapids and rocks.

                                                        

Now, two days later, this time my boat already launched, I could take my time. I looked at him more closely. Handsome face. Trim. Really good teeth. Salt-and-pepper goatee and mustache, with same colored hair under a black cap featuring a red, white, and blue salmon.

“No, I don’t know who you are,” I smiled.

“I’m Glenn Hall. Got a TV fishing show: Hawg Quest.” (“Hawgs” are huge chinook salmon.)

Sure enough, his boat said “Hawg Quest” on its sides, along with paintings of fish in a panorama reminiscent of air-brushed nature scenes that you see on the back of RVs going down the freeway. Big white letters proclaimed the boat’s brand, “Wooldridge,” which I learned was one of his TV show’s sponsors. He proudly described his custom boat’s luxuries: a fancy electrical system for his stereo, lines of blue LEDs lighting a floor area that seemed twice as big as my boat, four downriggers on chrome rails, built-in hoses to flush away fish slime, boat headlights – all driven by a 150 horsepower white Evinrude outboard with a jet drive for skimming over shallow water. The supreme Northwest rivers salmon fishing rig.

“Most all the guys who fish here much know who I am,” he said, not-so-subtly implying that I must not fish here much. I didn’t tell him that I had been fishing this stretch of river twice a week for six years and, no, I really had no idea who the fuck he was. Instead, I asked him about his TV show and whether he had filmed his prior fishing day. I learned he already had 174 shows finished so didn’t need any more footage. He told me the cable channel of his show, “the same one that airs the Mariners’ games.” I was pretty certain that is a baseball team, but I wasn’t positive so didn’t reply. I’ll be sure to search for his show and DVR it, though.

Okay, he didn’t call himself Hawg Man. But, really? Glenn? It was hard to picture this larger-than-life macho self-promoter as a Glenn. I think Hawg Man is a much better fit.

The Hawg Man was plenty full of himself, but here’s the thing. On our prior day’s fishing, just one more day when the salmon had skunked me and my boat, he and his buddies caught six chinooks. On this day, they would catch only two small ones, if I read correctly Hawg Man’s hand signals as he flew past me heading home for the day. He flashed his TV star smile and waved, happy as you can be piloting your jet boat full-speed down a deserted river in Oregon’s fall sunshine.

I was anchored for lunch in the shoreline shade, and had been thinking about my early-morning encounter with TV guy. He reminded me of another human bombast I knew years ago in Michigan, TV star outdoor show guy Fred Trost. Fred is dead now, but he and his big mouth cut a wide path in life.

Fred took over the then-iconic outdoor show, Michigan Outdoors, and turned himself (from hustling Bowling for Dollars on a Flint TV station) into a plaid-shirted, mustached caricature of a hunting-fishing guru for Michigan’s outdoorsmen.

I didn’t know Fred all that well, but well enough that he was always comfortable insulting me – usually about my balding. His jibes reflected his insecurities about his own thinning pate. Sometimes, we would cross paths in country-western bars with Fred and his latest paramour – a friend of mine had branded them “horse-faced dogs” for their predictably rough looks. Fred prided himself on being a good-ol-boy.

Shameless self-promotion is essential to be a successful TV outdoor guy. Fred tried everything to make his show successful – printing a magazine, hawking outdoor whatnots, opening a “Fred Trost Museum of Outdoor Collectibles,” even staging TV debates on outdoor sports or environmental controversies (which is where I had fit in to his show). What ruined his life was his attempt at investigative reporting.

His big scoop was deer pee. Fred charged on his TV show that a Michigan company was selling fake deer urine. When hunters bought their little bottles of expensive deer pee, they were promised it came from does in heat. Deer hunters sprinkle the juice around to mask their human odor and, presumably, attract horny bucks. Fred said it was all a bunch of hooey.

I found his pee-damning video online (http://www.forhuntersbyhunters.com/2011/08/truth-deer-urine-fallacy.html). Living forever in virtual reality, Fred seemed so comfortable, naïve really, when smiling into the camera and calling the deer-pee-peddlers liars and cheats.

But either Fred was wrong about the fake pee, or he just wasn’t able to prove his libelous claims in court. In any event, he lost everything when the Michigan company sued him and won a $4 million judgment. Ever the wronged, camo-clad knight in his own mind, Fred vowed revenge on the legal system. He went back to school and got a law degree from a little college in Lansing. To the best of my recollection, however, this had no impact on the deer pee lawsuit or on Fred’s life, in general. To me, he just seemed even more bitter and unhappy.

Then one day, years later, someone sent me an email with Fred’s obituary. It said he had died of a rare lung disease at 61. Fred’s friends called him “the first outdoor media star” and “a giant in the outdoors.”

My encounter with the Hawg Man, his TV-persona starlight glowing even in the morning darkness, reminded me of Fred. Though a flawed character, Fred really did love nature, hunting, and fishing. I wished he could experience just one more moment like mine on the river: Ravens talking their talk high in a dirty blue sky, hazy from wilderness fires off in the mountains. Does and fawns grazing the river’s banks defined by round clumps of sedges that bristle like soft, green porcupines.

Turkeys gobbling in the hills; wrentits trilling, reminding me of the sound made by a bouncing ping-pong ball accelerated, then stilled by a lowered paddle – but echoing through a piccolo. Overhead, “whoosh-a-whoosh-a-whoosh,” from wings of a vulture spooked from its dead fish luncheon. Flat greens and yellows dominating the landscape, wearing none of the riotous colors of Michigan’s forests in autumn, except riverside, among the scrubby trees and shrubs growing at the limits of winter’s raging floods, patches of poison oak flaming red.

In one of my former lives (as newspaper reporter), I wrote a profile of Fred. He told me then, “Here’s a way I can make a living, have an absolute ball, and get my message on TV about why hunting and fishing are honorable.” But that was before his great deer pee exposé. Maybe there’s a lesson in there.

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