This is guaranteed to be a 100% genuine lie, concentrated and pure to the bone based on truths, half-truths and bald-faced lies.

Someone asked me to post this story I wrote years ago. This is a charming, almost completely true story that took place in Hamilton,Montana, in the Bitterroot Valley. I hope you enjoy it.

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A TROUBLED MORNING: (and on Duckling Advice)

INT. Camera Fades Onto Group in Longhorn Saloon - Early Morning.

FADE IN: to conversation:

So, there we all were, gathered around for our early morning eye opener, and sitting there is "John" who lives out south of Hamilton going towards Darby, Montana. He has this neat little spread with a pond that is fed by the Bitterroot River and the pond had ducks on it. One queenly Mallard had little, fluffy yellow, new baby ducklings. "They’re cute," he said.

At least he mentioned that fact one fine day over a late morning picker-upper where we all gathered before reporting to our respective places of employment after lunch. The Longhorn saloon is famous for it's beef dinners and famous, generous libations.

"Yep," he continued . . . nodding his head in disbelief. "I took the grain out to feed the ducks yesterday evening to scatter it around as I always do, and from across the pond comes my Mallard fresh off her nest with all these cute, little and new ducklings trailing and swimming after her. She was quacking in great pride and excitement because she was a mama!"

"So?" Asks one of our fellow fly fishermen.

"Well, she got a third of the way across the pond as I was scattering the grain. All the other ducks were already quacking and pecking around my feet when suddenly there was this big swirl of water and splash and damned to hell if this big brown didn’t take and eat the last trailing duckling. I couldn’t believe my eyes!" He exclaimed. "It not only happened last night but he did the same thing this morning!" He emphasizes with a rap of his knuckles on the table. (Glasses of Grouse flutter and rattle.)

"You’re kidding," chided Dave Hardy who works to this very day at the Ravalli County Bank.

"NO, I’m not kidding," returns John, a bit miffed. "Yesterday I had nine new mallard ducklings and now, this morning, I only have seven left," he drifts off staring at his sweating glass.

"I don’t know what I’m going to do."

"How big is this brown," someone asks. "You saw it once, right?

"I saw it both times! That is the biggest brown I’ve seen in twenty years and the bastard is in MY POND eating MY ducklings and I’m pissed."

"Hell, catch him," I smile Tie up a big, duckling fly and fish for him," I cop the plea.

"Is this another one of your crazy ideas," asks another fly fisherman of the round table.

If "Matching the Hatch," works for Ernie Schwiebert and us, why not "Matching the Duck?" I reasoned.

"Hey! He might have crazy ideas but I've never seen one of his that didn't work," chides Dave Hardy. I've loaned him money on his crazy ideas, remember?"

Everyone nods thoughtfully. Another mumbles, "might work."

John brightens up and thinks about it. John is a good fly tier, so I continue and everyone starts to listen.

"Look John, go to Maggie’s store. She happens to have some feather dusters for sale and one of them happens to be yellow. Just use as many Yellow duster feathers that you need to tie a realistic duckling fly.  Then, this evening when you go to grain your ducks at the pond, and as she comes swimming across to you again . . . simply cast that duckling killer fly behind the last swimming duckling . . . need I say more?!"

Another member of the round table harks, "You know. It’s such a crazy idea, that it might work!

The bartender shouts from behind the bar, "Way over here I've never heard such bull-shit! Are you boys drinking or not?"

"Yep, bring us four more of those Famous Forest Chickens and make 'em doubles Bubba"

"That's four-fingers-deep on those chubby fingers of yours," adds another.

Four Famous Ruffed Grouse are flushed out and land on our table. We raise our glasses in ice-tingling unison and bump glasses. The sound is like four shotguns pulling hammers back. We get back down to business.

Everyone starts thinking about it, as I explain it in detail, especially John. The more they think about it, the more they think about it. I was contagious.

"Okay, okay! I just might try it," John ponders, staring into that amber glass of Famous Grouse about to enter his very unfamous body.

John goes to Maggie’s Store and goes home gets to work. He proceeds to tie up a duckling fly and since he never did one real fluffy before, he spends a couple hours designing it.  I swear, it looked so real I thought the damned thing would quack and waddle off the table. It was a work of art!

So John does the fly and comes on over to my company and asks for a bottle of Gink which I was happy to donate to this cause. He invites me over for the test and I arrived well enough ahead of time to make sure I didn’t miss this rare opportunity of his sheer genius and inventiveness. We get his rod strung up and out to the pond we go, just as the sun starts to set behind the Bitterroot Mountain Range.

(Shadows lengthen) John is ready with the fly rod and I have the bucket of grain. I start to cast it around. Suddenly, here comes the Mallard with her seven remaining ducklings - quacking in excitement.

John starts casting and none too soon! His marvelous duckling fly lands a little long (which was good in this case) and he strips in quickly.

The ducklings follow mother, adroitly as the fly catches up. John manages to keep the Fluffy Duckling Fly a little behind the last, trailing duckling. Dang it to hell, if there isn't this awesome, HUGE SWIRL of water! It’s the biggest I’ve seen in years! I'd swear a gallon of water was sucked down into that big, pink, gaping hole in the water.

John was tied into a huge monster! I mean, HUGE!  John fought the fight of a lifetime. His whooping and hollering testified to that fact. He was all around that pond as was that hungry, meat eating fish! It was nip and tuck for at least a half hour, and then the time extended into forty minutes and then fifty-five minutes.

I thought, "Surely he would never get this fish," but by golly, he slid that monster up on the slippery, muddy pond bank and jumped on it. It flopped so hard that it seemed to pick John up off his chest a couple times. All I could to was gape. I stood there with my mouth open in disbelief. This has to be a new world record!

I took its picture and we measured and weighted it.  The fish was 45 inches long and weighted three pounds!

Everyone stares at each other in dismay and slowly, one by one they start leaning back in their chairs slowly shaking their heads?

"Forty Five Inches long and weighing just three pounds? How can that be?" They grumble sarcastically.

I lift my whiskey and toast them.  "The rest of him was feathers."

All my friends stare a blank stare at each other. They (to the man) then noisily slid their chairs back, get up and leave as a group without saying another word. They leave me sitting there.  They leave the bar tab on the table!

I sigh and savor my remaining tumbler of F.G.Whiskey, pay the tab, and leave - as saloon double doors swing, squeaking in protest.

Bye, Bye, Blackbird

by Trent Roberson

trent@rxffish.com

One of my cherished and long remembered fishing companions was named Farrell Voyles. He has been gone many years but, every now and then, I reflect on the many times he and I used to go off into the wilderness of southern Indiana’s more remote areas. Moderately populated and close to lots of urbanization, there were not many places one could manage a day’s fishing and still have things all to ourselves.

One time when still very young and into use of live bait, my father and I were seining one of the streams near home before heading out to do some lake fishing for crappie. As large and as impressive the outdoors was at that time in my adolescence, one never had to look far to see signs of a civilization already encroaching on the more rural areas. It was on this quiet stream that I first learned who, and what, Farrell Voyles was.

Having seined long enough to get an ample supply of minnows for the afternoon’s fishing, I was surprised to find a couple of fellows seining the same stretch near where we had parked the car. Even more noticeable was their rowdy carrying on; laughing and slapping each other in hospitable fashion. One of them was heard to be saying "that will fix Ole’ Farrell. He will sure be surprised when he comes to check his traps and finds this."

Farrell, as I was about to learn, was not only a good fisherman and outdoorsman but, prone every now and then as we all have been, to reverting to the use of live bait. What I learned was that Farrell used glass minnow traps throughout the river we had just been seining. Once a week, he would work all of his traps scattered along the stretches.

His next visit to run his traps was going to be a real revelation. His ‘friends’ had put a medium sized bass in one of the traps as a practical joke. In another one I learned that they had put a can of sardines. And so on…the stories about pranks all his friends had come to play on him started to unfold that afternoon as the two fellows started recalling the many times they made him victim of their tricks…in friendly retaliation, so they said.

I was fascinated by all the lore surrounding this fellow. It wasn’t many days later that I visited his restaurant for the first time. He already knew my father very well. He and I immediately hit it off too. Eventually, we started fishing together, and continued for many years thereafter.

It was on my first of many visits to his restaurant, a hang-out for the locals, that I began to learn the reasons why so many liked him…and at the same time, discovered their need to always have a score of one kind or another to settle with him. His conversation that afternoon was about a stone quarry near home where he had caught many monster bass.

There had been many catches of very large bluegill and bass already taken from this quarry, a 12 acre abandoned stone quarry that had eventually become filled with water. I was fascinated by all of the stories associated with this place. I was even more impressed and honored that Farrell was filling me in on all of the secrets to his success for big bass that had been taken by him.

He told me that I would need to walk the high bluffs overlooking the shallow side of the quarry and scout the activity before fishing, particularly since it was to be my first time there. Made sense to me. While give me many hints about this place, he went on to describe the most incredible episode of his fishing that he had experienced there.

As he described it, at the far end of the quarry away from where I would launch the boat, there was a small neck or cove where the quarry narrowed to only about 20 or 30 feet across. It extended from the main body of water nearly 100 yards.

He told me about the afternoon he had scouted the shallow side of the quarry from above for signs of fish and what they were doing. It was in the narrow neck where he had seen the most activity. It was mid-summer and the afternoons were hot. Trees overhung both sides of the banks up and down both sides of the small cove. They provided lots of shade. According to him, the bass would come into the cove and hang out under the shade of the trees.

There were lots of Red-Winged Blackbirds throughout southern Indiana in the spring and summer months. Many of them had made claim to the trees all around the quarry. They were particularly heavily congregated in the trees along both sides of this small neck.

Farrell went on to describe the bazaar happenings he had observed that afternoon. When a bird would fly from one side of the bank to the other side of the bank, they would be rather close to the water. With the mid-day sun overhead, they were close enough to the water that they would cast shadows on the bottom of the quarry floor as they flew back and forth. On almost every passage of a bird from one side to the other, large splashes, obviously from big bass, could be heard beneath the shaded portions of the trees after the bird had disappeared inside them.

Farrell went on to say that he couldn’t actually see a fish take a Blackbird but, he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that was what was happening. Making a quick retreat to get his boat and to get up to the small cove to fish, he put on a large all-black top-water plug.

By now, totally fascinated with Farrell’s story of what was obviously the story of stories, I could hardly wait for his conclusion to the day’s events. He went on to say that he got the boat close enough to make a cast straight into the cove. After only a few casts, he caught a huge bass that fought him tooth and toenail for several minutes. Finally, he landed it.

So fascinated by the Blackbird theory, he followed with his confession that he had to know what the bass had been eating. He hauled out his pocket knife and gutted the fish right on the spot. Then he proceeded to split open the stomach to investigate the mystery of their diet.

Trent, he said…You won’t believe what I found when I opened the stomach!

"A Blackbird" I asked in fretful anticipation?

A long pause and then, his answer. "No, Trent. I didn’t find a Blackbird".

"What did you find, Farrell?"

"Shadows…lots of shadows"!

Then came a long and very quiet pause…and finally, he burst out laughing. The ‘master’ had conned me…on my very first serious talk to him about a cherished (so I thought) fishing secret.

Throughout the many years that followed, I was victimized many times in similar fashion…always the subject of some misdirected moment of great joy this man delighted in telling his buddies. It was one of those moments on the stream while seining that afternoon that I learned the rationale for the prank his friends were playing on him. They too, had been suckered into many of his artful stories only to find out that they themselves were really the ‘subjects’ of his story.

Which all goes to show you that fishing is not just for the sport but, for the often unique camaraderie that goes with it too. Perhaps that component is really the most important of reasons we often share ourselves to the devices of others…the need to have partnership in whatever joys and rewarding experiences we will find along the way.

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