Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing

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Authors: Patrick F. McManus
hunt, though, and I was even more glad that I had lied about the sign next to the grouse woods. What it actually said was, “Future Site of the New Grouse Haven Golf Course and Condos!”

Dream Fish
    The great fish came to me in a dream.
    I was ten years old and fishing was practically my whole life, all else mostly filler. At the moment, I was trapped, perhaps terminally, in fourth grade. The only thing that could save my sanity was Opening Day of Trout Season, and it lay far off in the future, somewhere beyond eternity. And then came the dream. It went like this:
    It is spring, Opening Day of Trout Season, and I’m down on the creek in the eerie light just before dawn. I see the fishing hole as clearly as if I’m actually there, it’s all so real. The weather has been cold, must have been cold, because the melt-off in the mountains hasn’t come yet. Otherwise, the creek would be running high on Opening Day of Trout Season—up near the top of the banks, the waterthe color of a chocolate shake, and about as thick. But in the dream, the creek flows low and clear.
    I am familiar with this particular hole, have fished it often in real time. The creek divides around a little willow-clad island at this spot, a narrow stream going down one side of the island and the main stream down the other. The main stream ripples across a gravel bed, then deepens into the hole, a dark placid pool beneath an overhanging stump at the end of the island.
    A log crosses the small stream, a convenience supplied by the dream to keep me from getting my feet wet in the icy water as I cross over to the island. The dense willows on the island prevent me from approaching closer to the hole, just as it does in ordinary life, but a tiny protruding gravel beach provides me a place to stand for a straight shot at the hole, a drift of about fifty feet. I prefer fishing a much shorter line, and although I don’t think so at the time, it seems to me now that the dream, which had been rather accommodating so far, would have provided me with a little closer access.
    I remove the sinkers from my leader so as to get the necessary drift without hanging up, and then send the worm on its mission. This is no ordinary worm, but one chosen for its strength, courage, and intelligence, the Sir Lancelot of Worms. I feed the line bit by bit from my level-wind reel, which no longer level-winds, because in an earlier and frightening part of the dream, I have taken the reel apart and cleaned it. Not likely! But this, of course, is only a dream, and one does foolish things in dreams, like cleaning a reel the week before Opening Day of Trout Season.
    Through my dream’s omniscient vision, I see the great fish lurking in dark depths beneath the stump, surrounded by bare, hook-hungry roots, the roots apparently supplied by the dream for the purpose of suspense. Peeking over the Cabinet Mountains, the sun suddenly rolls a shower of diamondsflashing across the creek, and at that very moment the great fish glides out from among the roots and sucks in the worm. The rod twitches ever so slightly. I heave back, arms straight and quivering above my head. Beads of water fly sparkling from the line as it snaps taut in the air, and I feel for the first time in my life the surging power of a truly big fish, a fish that will not surrender to the indignity of being flipped ignominiously back over my head and plopped on the bank, my standard method of landing fish.
    The straining leader cuts a slow arc in the surface of the pool, the fish not giving an inch, taking its time, contemplating its next move. The submerged roots are dangerously close. I haul back hard on the line, but I can’t hold the fish away from those gnarled and grasping tentacles an evil tree had sent down into the earth a century ago for the sole purpose of depriving me of the great fish.
    And then, as if the beckoning roots aren’t bad enough, the worst possible thing happens. Mrs.

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