I’ve always admired a beautifully tied fly, doubly so because I don’t tie them myself. Try as I might, I can’t get my fingers to follow orders. I can’t handle the fine work, and I lack the patience to stick with it. That’s why I’m a sucker for any gorgeous feathery creation I come across. In my early days with a fly rod, I fell hard for the Royal Coachman. It was lovely to look at it, and the name had a literary ring I associated with the great chalk streams of England, although it was first tied by the New Yorker John Haily in 1878. Surely the trout would be impressed, I figured, so I picked up a dozen in various sizes.
I put my Royal Coachman to the test on the Merced. I was a typical rookie, overly prepared. I’d bought every piece of equipment I’d read about in books, including a wicker creel. (A girlfriend later turned it into a planter for ivy.) There was a good hatch going on, and I made cast after cast to rising fish, who turned up their noses at the Coachman. I felt slightly indignant. Did those trout have no aesthetic sense? Hadn’t they read the poetry of Lord Byron? Deeply offended, I switched to a humble Elk Hair Caddis and soon hooked two fat rainbows.
That taught me a lesson, one I should have learned from my reading. With feeding trout, your job is to match the hatch. The Royal Coachman never got another chance. It died an ignoble death in a dark corner of my fly box, and I still feel a little guilty. When I want an attractor pattern now, I go with an old reliable such as the Humpy. The only gaudy flies I carry are those I use for steelhead — the Skykomish Sunrise, for instance, with its iridescent hackles of crimson and yellow. (It supposedly imitates a sunrise over the Cascades.) Steelhead and salmon don’t eat while they’re spawning, so you need something flashy to catch their eye. The experts believe they strike to protect the redds where the hens will deposit their eggs.
The most spectacular fly I ever owned I stumbled on by chance. That was in Burney, at a garage sale. It was early June, and I’d lucked into a good hatch of Tricos in the wild-trout section of Hat Creek. On my way home, I passed a house with some beat-up furniture on the lawn, as well as sundry toys and tools, a crib, a cement mixer, and several cardboard cartons. I was put in mind of a Raymond Carver story. Always a bargain hunter, I can’t resist these sales, so I stopped and while browsing unearthed a metal box full of flies. The guy in charge thought they might’ve belonged to his late uncle. I paid five bucks for the lot.
The flies, primarily dries and nymphs, proved all but worthless. They were damaged or poorly tied — dimestore stuff — except for one, a wet fly, that was in good shape. I’d never seen anything so colorful — blues and yellows, grays and silvers, shades of black, the feathers in pristine condition. An Antiques Roadshow fantasy washed over me. Had I found something valuable, a vintage fly, a treasure? I took it to a friend, a master fly tyer, and he looked it over closely while checking the color plates in a book. “Just as I thought,” he said, tapping a plate. “It’s a Jock Scott.” I borrowed the book. The Jock Scott,
it seems, was a famous salmon fly during the Victorian era, the work of a Scottish gillie. Gaudy flies were all the rage in the nineteenth century. Exotic feathers were widely available due to the craze among women for decorative hats. Tying flies was truly an art form, and George Kelson codified the recipes in The Salmon Fly (1895). His version of the Jock Scott called for feathers of an Indian crow, toucan, black turkey, golden pheasant, bustard, peacock, swan, red and blue macaws, and a chatterer. Needless to say, my fly was a replica. A skillful tyer had substituted dyed or synthetic materials for Kelson’s. But there are other tyers who still strive to re-create the original Victorian designs at considerable expense, seeking out sellers of exotic feathers online and at auction. (Ten Indian crow feathers might cost $100, and they’re no bigger than a fingernail.) These salmon f lies aren’t meant to be fished. They’re for collectors who display them in shadow boxes. Some years ago, the New York Times ran a piece on Marvin Nolte, a renowned tyer who works out of his basement in Bar Nunn, Wyoming. His flies in 2009 cost $175 apiece.
Sometimes a tyer goes overboard. The temptation to score the feathers of a blue chatterer, say, becomes too strong to resist, and the black market may beckon with protected species for sale. But no one has ever gone to such lengths to secure the vintage materials he wanted as Edwin Rist, the subject of a fascinating new book, The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk Wallace Johnson.
Rist grew up in Claverack, New York, and was schooled at home by his parents, both Ivy League grads and freelance writers. Young Edwin was a prodigy of sorts. In the first grade, he began playing the flute and went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The same gifts applied to his fly tying. His father, while researching a piece on the physics of fly fishing, watched an Orvis video, and Edwin was so captivated by it he began tying flies with anything he could find — pipe cleaners, down feathers from a pillow, any old hook.
Ever supportive, his father set him up with a vise, a bobbin, and some thread, all the gear he needed. At the age of fourteen, Rist was already a master tyer capable of duplicating Kelson’s extremely complicated patterns, his work featured in Fly Tyer magazine. At fly-tying shows, he won many prizes. Yet when he headed off to college, he left behind all his tying gear and feathers, hoping to concentrate on his studies. But that didn’t work out. He soon accepted an invitation to demonstrate his skills for a club, and that got him started again. He had to rebuild his collection of feathers, though, which led him to investigate the Natural History Museum at Tring, north of London.
The museum is a treasure trove for ornithologists. It holds the skins of seven hundred thousand birds, fifteen thousand bird skeletons, and seventeen thousand specimens in spirits — whole birds pickled in jars, that is. Under the guise of taking photos for a friend’s doctoral dissertation, Rist gained access and cased the joint. Only one sleepy guard was on duty. Edwin was beside himself at the bounty he discovered in the drawers and cabinets: virtually every type of feather Kelson had called for back in 1895. He’d never have to spend another penny for materials. Later, he devised a plan to break in and plunder the museum, filling a suitcase with, among other things, forty-seven Indian crow skins and thirty-seven skins from king birds of paradise. He escaped by train without incident.
In all, Rist stole 299 skins from different species and subspecies. The value of the haul was beyond calculation. Rist began plucking the feathers with tweezers, storing them in Ziploc bags, and selling them to wealthy collectors and tyers of classic flies via online forums and eBay and at shows across the United States. Nobody asked questions. The buyers were satisfying an addiction, and the transactions involved the secrecy of a drug deal. At times, Rist volunteered information, saying he was helping settle someone’s estate or had come across a particular skin at a taxidermy shop.
For nearly two years, Rist’s business went undetected, and he amassed a fortune. It all came to an end in 2010, when a police operative connected the dots and realized the feather seller who went by the online moniker of Fluteplayer 1988 was Edwin Rist. The constabulary soon arrived at his apartment and took him into custody. Rist’s trial was a tabloid sensation. Caught red-handed with the skins, he looked destined for some serious prison time, but a court-appointed psychologist diagnosed him with Asperger’s Syndrome. The judge, citing a precedent, was forced to let Rist go, his 12-month sentence suspended.
As Wallace’s book ends, Rist is playing in orchestras across Germany. He seems untroubled by the fact that the police did not retrieve all the missing bird skins and claims not to know where they might be. And the kicker? He appears never to have cast a fly.
But what happened to my Jock Scott? Well may you ask. After establishing that it wouldn’t make me rich in Antiques Roadshow style, I contrived to fish it for steelhead on the Russian River. Steelies are creatures of habit, and I’d come to know their favorite lies in the stretch below my trailer. I knew, too, that it made no sense to try for them when the river was rising. They made good use of the current and often covered 20 miles in a day. The best fishing to be had was when the river dropped and began to clear while still retaining some silt.
I chose such a day for the Jock Scott: late February and warm, with the mustard in the vineyards starting to grow and an osprey on duty overhead. I walked to a spot where the river slowed and formed a quiet pocket. A steelhead often rested in the pocket after being on the move, gathering its energy again. There was no need to wade. I could reach the spot with a short cast from shore. I put the Jock Scott where I wanted it and let it sit for a moment before I retrieved. The third cast was the charm. A big steelie hit the fly and ran with it, and I felt my leader snap. My Jock Scott vanished as magically as it had appeared.
