A River Never Sleeps

Under the cool tickle of back eddies, perfectly camouflaged by shadows that curl along the green banks, you may sometimes spot the dappled shoulders of a fanning trout. In the heat of the day they lie still as iron in the slow current, but the spring-fed waters remain icy even in the glare of solar noon. Everywhere, the careful watcher will see the stealthy surface dimples over rising fish.

These dark-backed beauties are my excuse for coming here, but in reality it is the stream itself which draws me. It is a living thing, always present yet infinitely changeable, a universe to the small creatures that dwell upon and within it, yet itself a tiny, fragile part of a changing and vulnerable landscape.

I have always had this affinity for moving water. I draw sustenance from the sound and sight of it, from the thundering rivers like the Nahanni, plunging in boiling columns down Virginia Falls, to the black glass of the Skeena at first light, slipping seaward under veils of mist. The steel-blue sweep of the Thompson under arid table land; the chrome-flecked slash of the Coppermine rushing to Bloody Falls. The olive drab of the lazy North Saskatchewan. The glistening, patterned boulders in the green ribbon of the Similkameen, twining like a diamond-back past sage-brush and cactus, through deserts of smashed rock and alkali pans. The muscular immensity of the St. Lawrence and its brawny match, the mile-wide Mackenzie -- not one of them fails to rivet my attention.

There is something about water moving on the face of rock, carving its endless patterns into tundra and prairie, oxbow and coulee, chute and canyon, something that defines the spiritual shape of the country in which we live. These sculpted images recur again and again in the paintings of A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer and Lawren Harris, and in the writings of Roderick Haig-Brown, Bruce Hutchison, Howard O'Hagan and Hubert Evans. And yet, for all the awe inspired by rivers, it is small streams that course the landscape of my affections. I call them all by the same name -- Zipper Creek. They flow out of the dreams of my past to wind through the turmoil of the present, subterranean currents of solitude and peace. Like any parent with many children, I have my favourites, and yet I could not imagine the world without one of them.

There is the island stream where I caught my first trout, a hand's length of cutthroat hammering out of a foaming chute to near straighten the hook on my little silver spinner. I'd scour the frost-covered logjams down that whole stretch of water, stocking my tacklebox with the snagged tee- spoons and spinning gear of other more grown up fishermen who came after steelhead and the yellow-bellied sea-run browns.

At the mountain stream where I laid out my first fly, I stood on a huge metamorphic boulder above the hidden creek that rushes through volcanic canyons, pool cascading into mossy pool, with only a luminous strip of sky above. At night, I'd roll my blankets under the overhanging cliffs, still warm with the late sun, and fall into the blackness of a deep, dreamless sleep that was somehow filled with the sound of rushing water.

There is the enduring mystery of the vanishing stream with its vanishing fish. It dries to a trickle in summer and there are no fish at all in the brackish puddles, yet it returns with the October rains, foams under the fallen trees and fills with the slab-sided coho salmon that whiz through the shallows of the estuary like silver comets. And there's the Zipper Creek of my high Alberta summers, tumbling down from the highlands to wander through meadows beneath the big bonnet of the Rocky Mountain sky.

Roderick Haig-Brown, our national philosopher of moving water, observed that a river never sleeps and that for all the splendour of water in its other states -- the pristine cornices of snow- capped peaks or the slow majesty of glacial ice -- it is the motion of water that seems most beautiful and profound. Perhaps this is because the great river systems and their tributaries defined our national consciousness. Analogy fashions the rivers as a nervous system, the portages as synapses, the traffic of canoes and York boats as the impulses that organized into thought and consciousness. And from that network of early commerce we shape our sense of national self. We are a people of continental fringes stitched together by those great uncharted rivers running into an unknown interior. They are the channels to that powerful, restless Canadian unconscious which has always absorbed its energy from the archetypes of our elemental landscape.

Someone, I think it was Izaak Walton, said of the gentler chalk streams of his native England, that every hour spent fishing can be added to the end of one's life. So, as with Roderick Haig-Brown, I claim the trout as my excuse. Here at Zipper Creek, in the baby toe of Alberta's foothills, one finds some of the best trout fishing in the world. Brown trout, brookies, cutthroat, rainbow and Dolly Varden, not to mention Rocky Mountain white fish and sail-finned grayling -- you can pick your stream, your species and your fishing style. You may fish still waters in the shade of cottonwoods, or you may test your skills on a rising freshet; you may try the riffles at the tail of a clear pool or challenge murky eddies over muddy bottoms. But each fisherman must bring intelligence and patience along with tackle, tricks and technical skill.

I'm a fly fisherman myself, although I'm not above dragging a worm off the end of a dock if that's what it takes to provide supper. When I cannot challenge the wild strength of a sea-run cutthroat, working the rising tide in a misty estuary, then I prefer the silent stealth of a brown trout in ambush.

Alberta browns are cautious and wary. They are spooked as easily by a heavy step on the bank or a sudden shadow against the sun as they are by wallowing in the stream like a hippopotamus or the splashing bird's nest of an ill-cast line. For me, the first sortie always involves a long, slow stroll by the stream, pausing frequently to watch for trout rising to take the insects that hatch in the warmth and pop through the surface film. Next comes the keen observation of insect life.

What are the fish eating? Is there a hatch of caddis-fly or stone-fly? Check the fly box. Do I have a pattern that resembles the hatching flies? If not, can I tie one?

Finally, the stalk. On come the chest waders -- I prefer supple waterproofed nylon to the drier, warmer but inevitably awkward rubber -- and out into the icy current. I approach the fish from downstream, trying to lay a long, gentle line into the current. The big browns like to lie below the bends of the stream, conserving energy by idling in the back eddy and sliding out to feed on what the current brings to them. They are wary, and the fly must drift unencumbered over the trout's station.

Watching a fish rise slowly through crystal water to take the tiny fly you have tied yourself is a moment of beauty and exhilaration. For myself, I hardly care whether I catch a fish any more. Those that I do are most often released. The long days and purple evenings on Zipper Creek are the real treasure.

On this day, not even the minnows are stirring. Overhead there's a red-legged hawk wheeling under skies gone ragged with fast-moving cloud. The lowing of distant cattle wafts in from farm land beyond the tree line. This stretch of current runs clear over brown pebbles and streaming weed, rippling in the green landscape. Here and there, leaves have begun to turn the tawny colours of autumn. It is the kind of scene that drew Izaak Walton again and again from the clamour of his Seventeenth Century ironmonger's shop to the contemplative pleasures of fishing. It was to the pastoral life of streams that he finally retreated and wrote for us his lovely little meditation, The Compleat Angler.

I've tried six pools now and nothing is stirring. I change flies. First, a backswimmer, iridescent filaments of peacock herl; then, my own spiky variant of a deerfly, made with clipped caribou hair; a glittery minnow imitation; a gaudy California coachman, yellow wool under polar bear fur; finally, in desperation, a garish black, silver and scarlet British pattern called The Butcher, sent by a far-removed relative on a forgotten birthday. The Butcher is a pig. It tracks in the current with all the grace of a sow's toe. I cast it several times more, wondering at the stupidity of the fish it is supposed to deceive. I surrender to the day.

Pushing through a thicket perfumed by wild roses, I head back upstream to a natural meadow. The underbrush is thick with canes of late-ripening raspberries, and I fill my fly box with the wild, red fruit and retire to sit by the stream, watching reflections of clouds sail by as I eat the sweet berries one by one. My meditations are interrupted by the prickling sensation that comes of being secretly watched. I search the underbrush. The stream bank. The feeling persists, almost electric in its creeping at the nape of my neck.

I try a trick taught by a bush-wise Dogrib trapper. Don't look for anything in particular, empty the mind and leave the blank screen sensitive to any tiny, ill-defined movement at the periphery of vision. One only experiences the feeling of being watched when the unconscious mind has noticed something almost imperceptible to the normal senses, something screened out by the conscious mind. The truly ambushed never suspect their fate.

Sure enough, there is a flutter at the edge of my field of vision, and then I see it. Only a rod's length away, a tree stump begins to move. It is a great horned owl, near perfect in his grey camouflage. It is most unusual to meet such a nocturnal bird of prey abroad in bright daylight, but his presence explains the absence of bird song and squirrel chatter. The huge, golden eyes watch me for a long moment, then blink slowly, and the bird rises and wings away in a silent sweep of wings, another shadow blending with the longer shadows of a growing dusk.