Trout Soldiers

Okay, I thought to myself, now this is a New Zealand moment. I was sitting at the table in a sheepherder’s hut, way hell and gone back in the tussock grass country of the South Island, drinking whisky and shooting the bull with Keith Mitchell, video celebrity of Trophy Trout, Volumes 1,2 and 3, when Bruce Masson, producer of that classic video series, walks through the door holding a live and pissed-off twenty pound possum by the tail. It was snapping and growling and trying to bite Keith on the leg - the wrong approach, since Keith has made the extermination of the island’s 70,000,000 non-indigenous possums his personal jihad. Bruce just wanted to see how its pelt looked in the light, you know, for fly tying material. No one even asked how he managed to catch a wild possum by the tail in the dark. I reckoned in a situation like this you just go with the flow.

After the possum firing squad had been convened (one down - 69,999,999 to go, as far as Keith was concerned), Bruce demonstrated by the light of Keith’s headlamp how a possum should be plucked while the critter is still warm. I suggested to Margaret, who was by this time in a state of acute cognitive dissonance, that, really, not many people would be aware of that fact. This could come in handy someday. Watch and learn.

While not exactly Richard Attenborough types, and while they might be hard on possums, you’d be wrong to assume that that these boys were insensitive. Far from it, Keith and Bruce are philosophers to the core, albeit of a rather sinewy variety. They love their island with a deep and burning passion, live and breath trout fishing, and go at it with the fervour of the knight errant. Keith’s pupils dilate when he gets to talking about the degradation of the native tussock grass country. Bruce worries about just how many more fishing trips they can squeeze in before the season ends, before his knees finally give out. Both of these guys are not in the full flush of youth – Bruce is the same age as I am, 57; Keith is a few years younger. Both are country boys, 24-7; Keith is a sheep farmer, Bruce is a water supply supervisor for the farming district. That’s what they do in their time off from fishing, at any rate.

Trout soldiers, I call them – a quite different thing from the typical, contemporary trout-bum. This is what you become if you are serious about your fly-fishing. How serious? Well, it’s all about dedicating way too much time, money and effort to intangibles and the aesthetic life, getting back into the most remote, difficult, wild situations possible, where the country is unspoiled, trout are scarce, big, and spooky, the water is as clear as air and has preferably not been fished that season - combination that is getting hard to find these days, even in New Zealand. Catch and release is simply presumed. When Margaret suggested that we catch a trout to eat for dinner they just looked at her as if to say, what are you talking about? If you’re hungry we’ve got, like, steaks. This is about the hunt. Pure aesthetics.

There’s a lot more to tell about my recent experiences in New Zealand, but I’ll leave it there for now. What I came away with is a growing anxiety regarding the materiality of time, and the that wish I’d discovered the South Island thirty years ago, but that there’s still time to get my licks in. Just got to get serious about it.

Bob Wyatt is a regular contributor to Flyfishing and Flytying magazine