My Split Tail

 

I was up at Bennett Spring near Lebanon, Mo. a couple days back and saw the ugliest trout I have ever seen in my life. In fact, until then, I had never seen an ugly trout anytime, anywhere.

Commonly, trout are beautiful fish caught in beautiful places. I would suggest it is the most important reason they are fished for. You will never catch a trout that matches crappie or catfish for flavor. Per pound they do fight harder than either of the last two mentioned, but so?

So, held in the hand and taken from the places they commonly live, they are an experience that transcends the ordinary. I love my bass, crappie and sand bass, but I will go out of my way to fish for trout almost every time the opportunity presents itself and collect the memories of such like I might lose twenty-dollar bills found blowing by a gas pump.

I was fishing the Niangua River where it boils up out of the ground at Bennett, standing waist deep in water cold enough to freeze cream when the ugly trout swam by me the first day of a four-day trip. He was potbellied, hook jawed, possessed of a dramatically split tail, and nearly as long as my forearm. He looked to go a good three, maybe three-and-a-half, pounds.

His body was all over dented, scratched, and otherwise mauled, perhaps by a mink or otter. In trout years he was likely as old as me, seventy, and possessing a similar body, right down to the dents, scratches, and pot belly. He swam alone, too ugly, I guessed, to be accepted by the crowd.

I felt some compassion for him, some, almost immediately, for no apparent reason. It was then I decided I wanted to catch him, kill him, and eat him. Baked, with lemon slices, basil in the belly, and rubbed in olive oil.

It took me three days to do it. Fishing in that section of the river allotted to flies only, I could not find the fly to drift in front of him that interested him in the least. Several times I bumped his nose with flies that smaller fish were gobbling, almost at every opportunity, but not him. He would see the flies coming, tumbling towards him in that gin clear water, and pointedly turn away, and swim to another part of the river where I could not see what he was doing.

Three days in a row. Time and time again. I began calling him “old split tail”, but not out loud, afraid someone would hear me, see him, and try to catch him out from under me.

At the end of the third day, shadows on the water, muskrats out for the first meal of their day, he took the ugliest, plain white piece of fuzz I had in my fly box and went three feet straight up into the air. When he came down, he headed straight across the river, nearly forty yards, as quick as I can write it, and jumped again.

Down the river he went another thirty-five yards in the opposite direction and jumped again. His third run was a pig wallowing affair towards my quarter-left, and then he stopped, sulked deep, shook his head, trying to throw the hook, all the way to the net. A scoop, and “Got ‘im!”

In the hand, he was as ugly as I thought he was. Carmen Basilio had a handsomer face, Ma Kettle a better figure. I wouldn’t have sold him just then for a fistful of twenty-dollar bills.

At home two nights ago, looking at him browning on the grill, my grandson, Lane, came out and looked at me and the trout there together. First from one, and then to the other. I don’t know why.

“Papa,” he said.

“What.”

“Are you going to eat him by yourself?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Because I earned him.”

“Who’s going to eat the other two?”

“You, if I let you.”

And I did.

Copyright © 2015 Conrad M. Vollertsen