A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

by Norman Maclean

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others.

But he never asked us more than the first question in the catechism, “What is the chief end of man?” And we answered together so one of us could carry on if the other forgot, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.”

Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word “beautiful.”

Always it was to be called a rod. If someone called it a pole, my father looked at him as a sergeant in the United States Marines would look at a recruit who had just called a rifle a gun.

Power comes not from power everywhere, but from knowing where to put it on. “Remember,” as my father kept saying, “it is an art that is performed on a four-count

Perhaps we always wondered which of us was tougher, but, if boyhood questions aren’t answered before a certain point in time, they can’t ever be raised again.

In some ways, I liked him even less than Paul did, and it’s no pleasure to see your wife’s face on somebody you don’t like.

We regarded it as a family river, as a part of us, and I surrender it now only with great reluctance to dude ranches, the unselected inhabitants of Great Falls, and the Moorish invaders from California.

Of course, he never mentioned that, although he did not drink when he fished, he always started drinking when he finished.

It was a beautiful stretch of water, either to a fisherman or a photographer, although each would have focused his equipment on a different point.

One great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing.

Still, I could never be talked into believing that all a fish knows is hunger and fear. I have tried to feel nothing but hunger and fear and don’t see how a fish could ever grow to six inches if that were all he ever felt. In fact, I go so far sometimes as to imagine that a fish thinks pretty thoughts.

When her hair glistened, though, she was worth it. She was one of the most beautiful dancers I have ever seen. She made her partner feel as if he were about to be left behind, or already had been.

Her hair did not glisten and I had never seen her legs when they were just things lying on a floor.

Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn’t think so. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.

Although the Scots invented whiskey, they try not to acknowledge the existence of hangovers, especially within the family circle.

Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.

Fishing is a world created apart from all others, and inside it are special worlds of their own—one is fishing for big fish in small water where there is not enough world and water to accommodate a fish and a fisherman, and the willows on the side of the creek are all against the fisherman.

had no choice now but to cast into the willows if I wanted to know why fish were jumping in the water all around me except in this hole, and I still wanted to know, because it is not fly fishing if you are not looking for answers to questions.

One of life’s quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.

But, with a big fish, one moment the world is nuclear and the next it has disappeared. That’s all. It has gone. The fish has gone and you are extinct, except for four and a half ounces of stick to which is tied some line and a semitransparent thread of catgut to which is tied a little curved piece of Swedish steel to which is tied a part of a feather from a chicken’s neck.

Poets talk about “spots of time,” but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. I shall remember that son of a bitch forever.

He acted as if his father had offered to help him to a bowl of oatmeal. He bowed his head in silence until he was sure I wouldn’t say anything more. Then he said, “It’s going to rain.”

“Do you think you should help him?” “Yes,” he said, “I thought we were going to.” “How?” I asked. “By taking him fishing with us.” “I’ve just told you,” I said, “he doesn’t like to fish.” “Maybe so,” my brother replied. “But maybe what he likes is somebody trying to help him.”

He tried to put his arm around my shoulders but his fish basket with big tails sticking out of it came between us and made it difficult. We both looked clumsy—I in trying to offer him help, and he in trying to thank me for it.

In Montana, we don’t care whether the whiskey is much good if we can get strawberry pop for a chaser.

If you think what I am about to tell you next is a contradiction to this, then you will have to realize that in Montana drinking beer does not count as drinking.

What a beautiful world it was once. At least a river of it was. And it was almost mine and my family’s and just a few others’ who wouldn’t steal beer. You could leave beer to cool in the river, and it would be so cold when you got back it wouldn’t foam much. It would be a beer made in the next town if the town were ten thousand or over. So it was either Kessler Beer made in Helena or Highlander Beer made in Missoula that we left to cool in the Blackfoot River. What a wonderful world it was once when all the beer was not made in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or St. Louis.

I don’t like to pray and not have my prayers come true, so I walked a long way on the bank looking for this last prayerful hole. When I saw it, actually I wasn’t looking hard because it was an ordinary piece of water, but when I took a sudden second look I could see that fish were jumping all over it.

If you are starting to be a fly fisherman you better be careful not to confuse yourself with the fish and buy “counter flies”—flies that in a drugstore counter look to you like the insect they are named after. George had a glass tank in his backyard which he filled with water. Then he would lie under it and study the insect he was going to imitate floating on top where it doesn’t look like an insect anywhere else.

I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.

Paul reached and grabbed the arm that belonged to the armpit, and pulled him up. The arm turned white, even when it was sunburned. “You’re almost home,” Paul said. “There’s no other place you can go.” There were no more murmurs. Paul kept holding the arm.

The bastard who had ruined most of our summer fishing. The bait-fishing bastard. The bait-fishing bastard who had violated everything that our father had taught us about fishing by bringing a whore and a coffee can of worms but not a rod. The bait-fishing bastard who had screwed his whore in the middle of our family river. And after drinking our beer. The bastard right in the back of the car who was untouchable because of three Scotch women.

But I didn’t really know. I still didn’t know what Scottish women look like when they struggle to keep their pride and haven’t much reason left to keep it. In case you have any doubts, they keep it.

A man is at a disadvantage talking to a woman as tall as he is, and I had tried long and hard to overcome this handicap. “You don’t like him, do you?” she asked. “Woman,” I asked, “can’t I love you without liking him?”

Somewhere along the line she had forgotten that it was I who liked chokecherry jelly, a gentle confusion that none of her men minded.

“Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.

Usually, I get up early to observe the commandment observed by only some of us—to arise early to see as much of the Lord’s daylight as is given to us. I several times heard my brother open my door, study my covers, and then close my door. I began waking up by remembering that my brother, no matter what, was never late for work or fishing. One step closer to waking and I remembered that this was the trip when my brother was taking care of me. Now it began to seep into me that he was making my breakfast, and, when this became a matter of knowledge, I got up and dressed. All three were sitting at the table, drinking tea and waiting.

After she got us in the car, she checked each car door to see that none of her men would fall out.

However I may have violated grammar, I was feeling more perfect with every Rainbow.

After I caught these two, I quit. They made ten, and the last three were the finest fish I ever caught. They weren’t the biggest or most spectacular fish I ever caught, but they were three fish I caught because my brother waded across the river to give me the fly that would catch them and because they were the last fish I ever caught fishing with him.

He was about the only man I ever knew who used the word “beautiful” as a natural form of speech, and I guess I picked up the habit from hanging around him when I was little.

Just as he was making the first cast, Father threw the rock. He was old enough so that he threw awkwardly and afterward had to rub his shoulder, but the rock landed in the river about where Paul’s fly landed and at about the same time, so you can see where my brother learned to throw rocks into his partner’s fishing water when he couldn’t bear to see his partner catch any more fish.

From there he waded into the water and began to cast again, but now he was far enough away so we couldn’t see his line or loops. He was a man with a wand in a river, and whatever happened we had to guess from what the man and the wand and the river did.

Then the universe stepped on its third rail. The wand jumped convulsively as it made contact with the magic current of the world. The wand tried to jump out of the man’s right hand. His left hand seemed to be frantically waving goodbye to a fish, but actually was trying to throw enough line into the rod to reduce the voltage and ease the shock of what had struck.

“He is beautiful,” my father said, although my brother had just finished catching his limit in the hole my father had already fished.

This was the last fish we were ever to see Paul catch. My father and I talked about this moment several times later, and whatever our other feelings, we always felt it fitting that, when we saw him catch his last fish, we never saw the fish but only the artistry of the fisherman.

From time to time Paul’s right hand had to be reaffirmed; then my father would shuffle away again. He could not shuffle in a straight line from trying to lift his feet. Like many Scottish ministers before him, he had to derive what comfort he could from the faith that his son had died fighting.

“Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?” he asked. I said, “Everything.” “It’s not much, is it?” “No,” I replied, “but you can love completely without complete understanding.” “That I have known and preached,” my father said.

Then he asked, “After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it?