The Three Fishermen <1>

There were three of them. There were four of us, and April lay on the campsite and on the river, a mixture of dawn at a damp extreme and the sun in the leaves at cajole. This was Deer Lodge¹ on the Pine River in Ossipee, New Hampshire, though the lodge was naught² but a foundation remnant in the earth. Brother Bentley's father, Oren, had found this place sometime after the First World War, a foreign affair that had seriously done him no good but he found solitude³ abounding⁴ here. Now we were here, post World War II, post Korean War, Vietnam War on the brink⁵. So much learned, so much yet to learn.

 

Peace then was everywhere about us, in the riot of young leaves, in the spree of bird confusion and chatter⁶, in the struggle of pre-dawn animals for the start of a new day, a Cooper Hawk⁷ that had smashed down through trees for a squealing⁸ rabbit, yap of a fox at a youngster, a skunk⁹ at rooting.

 

We had pitched camp in the near darkness, Ed LeBlanc, Brother Bentley, Walter Ruszkowski, myself. A dozen or more years we had been here, and seen no one. Now, into our campsite deep in the forest, so deep that at times we had to rebuild sections of narrow road (more a logger's path) flushed out by earlier rains, deep enough where we thought we'd again have no traffic, came a growling¹⁰ engine, an old solid body van, a Chevy, the kind I had driven for Frankie Pike and the Lobster¹¹ Pound in Lynn delivering lobsters¹² throughout the Merrimack Valley. It had pre-WW II high fenders, a faded black paint on a body you'd swear had been hammered out of corrugated¹³ steel, and an engine that made sounds too angry and too early for the start of day. Two elderly men, we supposed in their seventies, sat the front seat; felt hats at the slouch and decorated with an assortment¹⁴ of tied flies like a miniature bandoleer of ammunition¹⁵ on the band. They could have been conscripts for Emilano Zappata, so loaded their hats and their vests as they climbed out of the truck.

 

"Mornin', been yet?" one of them said as he pulled his boots up from the folds at his knees, the tops of them as wide as a big mouth bass¹⁶ coming up from the bottom for a frog sitting on a lily pad. His hands were large, the fingers long and I could picture them in a shop barn working a primal¹⁷ plane across the face of a maple¹⁸ board. Custom-made, old elegance¹⁹, those hands said.

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