Editor’s note: Years ago, we ran this piece as part of a longer Meander. Seth has asked us to print it once more. Aside from being a fine piece of writing that many of California Fly Fisher’s readers will not have seen, the reason for its repetition will become clear at the end of the story.
The rod’s an 11-weight I loved casting the one time I had a chance — for sailfish, roosters, and dorados — way down in the Sea of Cortez. The reel is old, but gleams with provenance, owned before me by Kate and Bill Howe, architects of the ALF pattern. True, my floating line was extruded for tarpon a long time ago, but it is smooth and clean, if a tad bit stiff on a day when frost gilds ferns shadowed by firs and spruce. At least the leader’s fresh, tied as prescribed in Andy Mill’s $100 tome, A Passion for Tarpon. As for the Bimini, knotting it around my knee proved painfully difficult until I realized that when author Mill suggests “twist both legs tightly around each other,” he actually means the ends of the lines. Too late, this time, but after alternating layers of Bengay and Neosporin, I tie on a big brown Cockroach, adapted to a hookless tube style. If I can’t guess what local baitfish this might represent, no matter. It looks good as a mole or vole, sparrow or robin, and will cast just slightly better than any of those, hurled dead or alive.
“So check this out,” I said to my panting partner, preening the feathers of the hookless Roach and letting him sniff. “But remember, this is a professional test: no gnawing, and for God’s sake, don’t swallow the thing. Also, in case I forget, I’m not casting to you, but ‘intercepting your path.’ ”
Rascal smiles as he sweeps his tail through a three-foot arc. If not technically a game fish, he’s certainly game. He’s also enormous, the British strain of golden retriever — voracious, smart enough to vote in the primaries of both major political parties, and the only dog I’ve owned that can actually tell a joke with superior timing, although that is a story for another day.
“So you’re going to go long,” I explain. “Past the fire pit, staying clear of the post box. You got that? You ready?”
Rascal won’t go anywhere — his attention’s stuck to the Roach. Or it is until I throw out a fir cone teaser — reluctantly, because I’m sure some purist will complain this is “chumming.”
It does the job, though. Rascal sprints after it. And in the ten seconds this ruse provides — to the end of my back cast as the line loads for a haul — it occurs to me how special this moment is. Ridiculous, maybe. Lunatic, if you insist. But nobly intended, a reader must admit, which is enough for me. And then, about the time I accelerate the forward stroke — as the Roach whistles safely past a maple — something else occurs to me . . .
I am casting a fly to a prey so eager I don’t need no stinking hook . . . a beast willing to fight me for nothing more than his own share of ferocious pleasure.
Makes you think — or laugh. Either way, know this: On a “Bad Dog!” day, Rascal can run down the Kinkaids’ Volvo before it slows for the speed bump down the street, oh yes. And if I can throw him the Roach, avoiding the choking that afflicts the casting of so many tyro tarpon fishers, he will dig. It helps to recall Mill’s assertion, so accidentally relevant now: “Most anglers are decent casters on golf courses and in backyards.”
How true. Even as a breeze blows down from the ridge, I lay out a full fifty feet before expertly shooting my fly “to end up between the [dog’s] eyes, slightly high, and in front of [him] one inch to six feet, depending on a few variables such as [air] clarity.”
Not a perfect cast. But I got a pretty fair bounce.
Rascal sees. Does he ever. Even as flakes of crushed cone fall from his mouth, his body tenses from nose to tail. No bow has been strung so tight. And then, because his manners are excellent, Rascal’s stare turns to me. Can I? I nod. I strip. He holds fast. No, really, Can I?
I nod again. He cocks his head slightly left, because this is clearly too good to be true. I nod again, strip twice, and finally shout the same command I’ve given a hundred thousand fish. “For God’s sake, just take it!”
And unlike so damn many of those fish . . .
I’ve seen Rascal chase bluegill spawn in the shallows, birds in the spring, rabbits all summer, also an in-law’s rat terrier he’s careful not to catch. This time is different. He knows that, somehow. His attack is everything an angler could hope for.
It takes my breath away to see the muscles in his shoulder bunch, then his paws churn out chunks of turf, his tail spread for takeoff.
Tarpon people can talk all they want about the sight of a “bucket mouth,” but listen up: The canines in Rascal’s jaw are real dog teeth, honed and polished by a stupid habit of gnawing on alder — weapons, I mean, that have shredded every year’s Yellow Pages since 2006 and can rip open a fifty-pound bag of Annie’s Organic Lamb and Rice Chow the way I tear off a paper towel. We’re talking a maw that can seize.
And does. No hesitation: My set is superfluous. Rascal’s on, and here’s a fact, boys —
— this ain’t no oversize herring.
Nobody forgets a golden’s first run. The speed. The leaps. The roars — that slam-slam of its head when it feels the tension of the line. Knowing the fly is faux, Rascal cares not, his disbelief suspended so completely that his snarls frighten deer from my house to the main road.
Per A Passion for Tarpon, chapter 11, I lean into the rod. And — yo! —when this does provoke a jump —
— I bow!
— another jump!
— I bow! He runs!
No . . . I mean he really runs! On all fours, though mostly two at a time!
And stops, dead! So suddenly and silently that — ho! — I, too, hear his electronic collar beep!
He feints right! He cuts left. He’s heading toward the Lisa person’s crummy camellias!
“Good Rascal!” I shout. “Wait — no!
Better . . . not!”
I see it happen; I know my dog. At the sound of my voice, Rascal thinks “Fetch? Oh is this fetch?” and instantly responds.
No way I can keep up with the orange blur streaking toward me. No way on Earth. With a multiplier reel, I couldn’t pick up line fast enough.
“Stop! Go! Back . . . back!”
Rascal does none of the above. Generations of new FedEx carriers have quailed before the charge I face; now I know how they feel. He’s twenty feet from my boots when I sense his intent. “Rascal! No jumping!”
Lord, the speed . . .
At the last possible second, Rascal turns. His tail whips my waist as his feet spray sod and fir needles. A quick reversal — another . . . now he’s racing back across the emerald-green flat, loops of hissing fly line straightening out behind him until, at last, I get him back on the reel . . .
Rascal rocks. His head shake sprains my wrist! And then —
— he falls to earth like a stone. Drops on his belly, chest heaving, the Roach clamped in his mouth like a —
— cigar —
and he lies there, staring at me . . . and laughs.
Anthropomorphize, my ass: He laughs.
“Rascal?”
He laughs some more. Nods. “What’s so damn funny?”
With his eyes fixed to mine, he drops the Roach between his forepaws.
“Hey. Don’t do that. You don’t let go.” Then he lowers his nose and . . . nudges it.
Once. Again. He tenses his body, stares harder. And suddenly I realize he’s just waiting for me to try to take it away.
“Rascal!” Just try.
Tarpon may sulk. But golden retrievers?
They play with you.
“That is not in the book!” I shout. “That is definitely, definitely not . . . in . . . the . . . book.”
Rascal’s not a reader. But I am, with a bigger cerebellum, as evidenced by a thought that went just like this, twice, unfortunately: The toy can toy too, you know, because two can toy, toyer, so . . .
What I say when I clear my mind is this. “Oh no. No, I’m not going to pull. I won’t, so you can wait as long as you want.”
Rascal waits. Five seconds, seven. At ten he gets it. And grins. You don’t think so?
Deliberately, so deliberately . . . he puts a paw on the shock tippet and pins it down. (Oh, yes, he does know.) And then, ever so slowly, he takes the fly in his mouth.
And chews.
“No! Bad Rascal. You son of a bitch, don’t you — Rascal! Dammit! You . . . stay! Stay! Don’t you move one inch . . .”
It could have ended there. “Stay” is an order Rascal almost always honors. And he would have this time, I’m sure, leaving me either a marginal success or a failure still vaguely instructive and duly diligent, I think. Except for that “almost” before “honors.”
Like rivers deep and oceans wide, Grand View Lane has moments nobody can predict — times when wild nature, or, in this case our neighbor, Judy, will rise up when least expected: entropy unfolding while holding a small spade. “You guys!” she shouts from her deck across the street. “You guys are crazy!”
For a moment, everything hangs suspended. That includes my lower jaw, as I perform the slo-mo “Oh-no!” Disney TV movie routine as Rascal stands stock still, staring at the lady he’s loved from puppyhood. The sound of her voice, the sight of Irish hair exactly the shade of his fur, the glorious odor of her gardening shoes —
On his best days, the invisible electric fence barely holds Rascal back, or doesn’t. But now, delighted by a new toy he must show Mistress Jude?
I’m into my backing before he’s crossed the road to leap her ditch. Halfway up her berm, I’m fighting him above the top of my rod. Incredibly, the tippet survives his lunge through a rose bed, then a leap over her low deck fence, a mad scramble over her fence and into a flower box . . .
“Rascal, no jumping!” I hear, this time in a burry alto.
And he’s still on! Judy laughs, and Rascal roars, and so do I, and so does the propane truck — oh God, not the propane truck — gunning its engine at the speed bump!
It’s over in seconds. Rascal is rearing and laughing and celebrating life. On my knees, I try to fit my thoughts into song, but “Don’t cry for me Golden Retriever,”
has potential, but doesn’t work out, scanwise.
That’s all right. I’m okay, even philosophical. That’s the kind of risk we face in the West, the way we roll out here, where our flats are bound by forests, real mountains, city streets, and suburban yards with quake-bent retaining walls — all kinds of Islamordas, really. And though we truly miss tarpon, there’s always this:
We’re golden.
Rascal Norman, 2002 to September, 2018
Rest in Peace, Friend
