Little Dan
Little Danila Podolski stood beside me on the bow of his boat and looked downstream. He held the anchor rope between his hands and dropped us down the seam piecemeal, paying out a foot or two at the end of each cast. Dan was a handsome and confident kid, widely considered one of the finest guides in all of western Russia; pushing 30, he remained boyish somehow, and he gave the impression that he knew how to goof off and get away with it. Brown hair curled at his collar and framed features more Slavic than Russian. His dark eyes sparkled and he tapped his foot as he watched the fly swing its arc across the current.
I stepped down off the foredeck and, without speaking, handed Little Dan the rod I’d been casting, a 14-foot 9 wt. with which I’d flailed through the morning hours. We’d been swinging little tube flies through the Ponoi’s copper water, picking up the odd fish, mostly grilse freshly fattened on the bounty of the White Sea. Some had travelled up from the frigid salt so rapidly that sea lice still clung to them, wriggling and translucent dark against the brilliant silver of their scales. The sweetness of the river water would soon drive them off, and send them tumbling back whence they came. This was new country for me, new quarry as well, and an angling style both difficult and lovely. Over a lifetime of fly angling I’d spent the bulk of my days pursuing tiny trout in the freestone streams of my native New England. I’d grown used to delicate presentations made with short, delicate rods, and I’d grown accustomed to catching delicate fish. Salmo salar proved another beast entirely. That said, one of the rewards of fishing a remote and abundant river is the empathy with which the fish respond to mediocre presentations, striking flies out of pity for the angler’s very fallibility. New to Spey casting, and beset by an ego that could not handle the reality of a fly-cast that did not fall in a crisp, long loop, I handed the rod over to Little Dan and sat down to lick my wounds, and, incidentally, to watch a master of the angler’s art.
Dan grew up in Umba, an outpost settlement on the Barents Sea. Among the hardscrabble inhabitants of Umba some number found a place guiding the rivers of the Kola, and the best of them work the Ponoi. The Ponoi is arguably the world’s finest and most remote Atlantic salmon river, and it is fished by anglers who expect the best. They get the best in Little Dan, who, like the rivers, the fish, and the Kola itself, is both elegant and tough. His arms are corded with muscle that showed as he stripped a hundred feet of running line from the reel, laying it in loose coils at his feet. Facing downstream, quartering river right, he flipped the shooting head and let it hang below him in the current. He looked like a heron up there, bent just a bit with the tip of the long rod nearly touching the water as it quivered in parallel with the current. In a flat, flicking motion, he painted a shallow c with his rod tip that opened downstream, laying the line up above him and slightly behind. He swept back again, charging the line in a loop that left just the tiny fly and a foot of leader on the surface of the departing river, and his body cocked like a corkscrew spring over his right shoulder. There was a pause there as the line loaded, and all motion stopped. The river rushed, and the clouds moved with glacial sloth over a cerulean sky, while Danilla and his cast became frozen moments. Then he uncorked it, powering forward with a flick and a release that, carrying over, dropped the rod tip nearly back to the water, driving his shoulder down in the manner of a baseball pitcher. In an instant, line in hand, he was perched like a heron again, smiling faintly as the tiny fly swept a tight arc across the current, nearly 160 feet from where we stood.
He seemed pleased with the cast, pleased to be fishing, and with the rod in his hands a certain electricity of expectation hummed about him. His expression didn’t change, and his eyes never left the water, but they no doubt sparkled some more.
Little Danilla Podolski came to the Ponoi to guide sports into the great leaping salmon of the North Atlantic, working out of the Ponoi River Company’s Ryabaga Camp. I never did learn what it meant to him, whether it was pride in his work or a love for the fish or the river itself that sustained him. But little Dan must have understood that any fish able to survive a childhood in the North Atlantic, that could navigate the seals and poacher’s nets to climb the tumbling waters of Ponoi, that could pulse, unfed, through the frozen arctic winters to return to the sea once more, was one tough customer. He must have known… he too was a product of the frigid Kola waters and the barren elbow of western Russian tundra long ago raked bare and left for dead. He was as much a part of the Kola as the salmon, and equally as tough, and with a rod in his hand he became part of that rough-hewn landscape.
We motored upstream for lunch, up to the head of the beat, where the banks were shallow and a worn slab of bedrock made a suitable table. I wandered up into the dwarf birch to look for wild cranberry and Boletus edulus mushrooms, while Dan poured soup from a thermos and sliced bread. I returned from my foray to see that he’d filleted a sea trout we’d caught in the morning, and had started a small fire up the bank a bit. The smoke from the fire kept the no-see-ums at bay, and we both wore shirtsleeves. Dan offered me a beer and reached into the cooler for another for himself, while I started in on my soup.
After lunch and another beer, we were tempted to laze around in the sun too long, but several bright fish had shown above the downstream rapid. It amazed me every time, these magnificent and wary fish porpoising with such bravado. Dan drove us above the place and swung the bow into the current to drop. He kept one hand on the motor’s tiller, the other fist punched into his hip, in the manner of a conquering pirate.
“Drop here” he said and I loosed the anchor from its cam and let out 15 feet of line. We hung there in the current. “You try snap t now,” and he pantomimed the flick of the sweep and the punch of the forward cast. I stripped out line and let the shooting head hang below us, while I stacked the running line at my feet. I closed my eyes and saw Little Dan Podolski painting that narrow c with his rod tip, painting invisible brush strokes through the arctic air. I followed the motions that I’d imagined, and loaded and snapped, and the line went out straight and true, quartering to the bankside and laying out long. It was the first good cast I’d made that day, and I looked to Dan for approval. He wasn’t looking. His eyes were somewhere else downstream, maybe lost in thought, or just in silence. I looked at him and considered a life here in this vast remote place, and lost track of myself for a moment. Which is, of course, when a salmon chose to chase.
“Reid! WHAT YOU DOING! Keep Stripping! Keep Stripping!”
I looked back at the path of my fly and could see the receding surge behind it. Dan was shaking his head at me, no mirth now, deeply disappointed.
“Stay on focus.” he said, and turned back downstream. “Try again there…” I swung my fly through the same lie a few more times, lengthening line a bit with each shot and varying the speed of the retrieve, but to no avail. Dan puffed out his cheeks and shook his head, exasperated with my nonchalance.
“You miss a good one there.” He grabbed the anchor rope and let out a few more feet. “We drop lower now.”
Finding the rhythm of the cast, I kept my motions compact and fluid, sweeping and snapping and at points handing Dan the rod so that I might watch the master at work.
At length he handed the rod back to me and turned the jet drive over, handing me the tiller as he flaked the 60 meters of anchor rope. In this way we spent the remains of the afternoon, dropping, swinging, and casting. There was a rhythm to the silence, and something deeper too. And somewhere among the silences there came a tapping on my line. The rod was tucked under my arm, and with my fingertips I instinctively stripped a bit faster, bringing tension to the system and lifting the rod tip to maintain it. I spun the spool frantically with my free hand, taking up slack and getting the fish on the reel as quickly as I could, but moving jerkily, awkward with the size of the equipment. Dan seemed unconcerned.
“Slow, now, slow… bright fish, bright fish… is good one, da?”
The fish came easily, gently to the side of the boat, and I could see the leader loop approaching the tip-top.
“Be ready now, he going to go fast…”
And Dan was right; as a thousand such fish had taught him, when the boat came into sight, all hell broke loose. The silver fish turned away and streaked across the current, tail-walking and cart-wheeling over the river and peeling the running line from the reel. I could only point and let her go, slowing her departure somewhat with my palm. But tension was good, and Dan was casual, and I inherited from him some calm.
“Reel slow and gentle now” he said “and guide her back”.
I tried to breathe, tried not to think about my tendency to lose good fish when the fight was long. I worked the fish up-current to where it lay even with us, but I couldn’t turn it. I coaxed it up finally and turned it back to the boat, where Dan waited with his net, which seemed ludicrously small. With every turn, however, the fish regained some power, shook her head and bore off at angles to the boat. Each time my heart skipped, while Dan sat down to whistle, tapping his foot and admiring the scenery. There was little at stake for him in this battle.
At length the fish tired and came broadside to us, and Dan, with a deft stab, had her netted. I lay the rod down and went to look. He had her in the net behind the boat, and he rode the tube up the leader and out of the way. The barbless double slipped easily from her lip, and she lay there heaving, awash in afternoon sunlight.
“She go 16, maybe 17. Strong, da, these hen fish. Better than the rest.”
I reached out and grasped her tail, and held her there in the eddying current below us. I could feel her strength return as I held her. She became something stronger than I could hold, something eager to leave me behind, so I released her. She flicked her tail once and darted down, where the water turned her silver back to gold, and then to shadow, and then to just a memory of something strong and beautiful. I flicked water from my fingertips and shook Dan’s hand.
On the long upstream drive back to camp, I cinched my hood and turned my back to the wind and the spray, and I watched Dan at the helm. Upstream to my back, there was dinner awaiting, and a vodka toast to a lovely day, and a banya to soothe my bones. For Dan there lay the same, but more too: a lifetime of days in this raw-boned place where he’d grown to become a fixture. And of course there were salmon to catch and to cherish, and casts to lay out with love, and the cycle of seasons that carried a wealth of silver high up the rivers of the eastern Kola.
First published in The Atlantic Salmon Journal
