We scrubbed the dishes in the lake water, scouring them with sand to remove last night’s meal. Pops was just waking as we got back to camp. I made a fire and had the coffee water at a boil when he exited the tent, stretching.
“Kevin saw a white buck,” Buzzy blurted before I could. “He almost let him touch him. Says the sucker was huge—at least sixteen points.” Buzzy spread his arms wide for the dimension.
“The White Stag?” Pops asked, clearly surprised. “You saw him? How close did you get?”
I told him.
“Son, you have seen a rare sight indeed. I’ve been tramping in these woods all my life, and I’ve never seen the White Stag—heard tell, but have never seen him. And you got that close?”
I nodded and he regarded me proudly. “It’s all that vet training I’ve been giving you. Animals can sense that.” He winked and put the never-lit pipe to his lips.
“It was so cool, Pops. It was like he knew I wasn’t going to hurt him.”
Pops nodded. “That stag is the stuff of legend. Folks have been seeing him or his kin for years… but only in glimpses.”
I brought him coffee in an old dented aluminium cup. We sat around the fire while I recounted the White Stag for the third time and we swapped stories of momentous animal sightings while fatback fried in the skillet. Buzzy told of a black fox he had seen on Skull Mountain. Pops talked of two-headed lizards and Siamese sheep from his veterinary school days. We ate the fatback with hot oatmeal, then cleaned the dishes down by the lake.
Back at camp, Pops was relacing his hiking boot. “That was the last of our food, boys. This morning let’s get a game plan for victuals. We can’t live on fatback alone. Buzzy, did your grandfather ever teach you how to set snares?”
“He taught me how to set a rat trap.”
“Well, that’s a start. Do you understand the concept of bait and trigger?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Now, I’m partial to spring snares, so we’ll need to carve some triggers. Drag snares are easier to deploy but tend to lose game. A good spring snare will catch a rabbit almost every time.”
Pops chopped half a dozen three-foot-long staves from several straight branches around camp. He took one up. “First thing is to strip the bark, then carve one end into a point. That’s what we’ll drive into the ground.” When all the branches were debarked and sharpened, he chopped off the top eight inches of each stake. “These will be the triggers. We carve a notch into the stake and a matching notch into the trigger, and we’re halfway home.” He quickly cut the stake and the trigger and showed how they fit into each other. “The key to good trapping is to find the trails that the varmints use and set the snare right where they walk. You use a thin wire for the noose and prop it up with sticks about four inches off the ground.” He drew the mechanics of a spring snare in the dirt.
We carved the triggers and fashioned six nooses from a spool of thin wire Pops had in his pack. “There’s a field of underbrush on the other side of the cliff that’s full of rabbits.” He pointed to the rock face that jutted out into the water. “We’ll get them coming to drink at the lake.”
We followed Pops over the cliff hill and into a wide thicket of saplings and mountain laurel and briar. He showed us the tamped switch grass that marked the animal trail. “Here’s some fresh rabbit turd—always a good sign.” He chose a ten-foot sapling and stripped it of branches. He pulled the sapling down, set the trigger, and propped the wire noose up with two Y-shaped sticks. “Now we add some brush on either side of the trail to funnel them into the snare, and soon we’ll be eating rabbit stew.”
He handed me a snare fixing. “Now you two make one.”
Buzzy and I chose a trail that came out of a coppice of holly bushes. He stripped a sapling with Pops’ bowie knife while I pounded the stake into the ground. We set the snare and Pops nodded approval.
We set four more, then started our walk back to camp. “We’ll need to check the snares often, so anything we catch doesn’t suffer unnecessarily.” As we neared our tent Pops detoured to an old poplar tree and a faded green tarp held down by rocks. Underneath the tarp was a long handmade dugout canoe and two wooden paddles. “Made this on a Tramp in the midsixties—held up pretty well, I think. Help me with the back end, boys; she’s a heavy one.” Buzzy and I picked up the back and followed Pops to camp. “Now, who wants to learn how to fish?” he asked and pulled two collapsible fishing rods out of his pack.
“I already know how to fish,” Buzzy protested. “Since, like, age three!”
“I do too. Mom took me once.”
Pops dismissed us with a wave. “You may have been fishing, but that’s very different from knowing how to fish. To really know how to fish you need to understand how fish behave. Just throwing worms on a hook with a float may get you lucky, but it won’t get you good. I, on the other hand, will teach you boys to think like a fish.”
“Can you teach me to swim like a fish? That strikes me as more useful,” I said, hand on mouth to hide my grin. Buzzy wiped a smile.
“Dang ungrateful pilgrims. I’ve a mind to leave you up here for a few days and see how Buzzy’s rat-trapping experience feeds you.” He threw us each a rod.
I purposely held the wrong end and mocked a cast to Buzzy. “I got a big one Pops, what do I do?”
Buzzy dropped to the ground and began fish flopping.
Pops walked over and peered at my catch. “All you got is a holler fish… better throw that one back.” He took our rods and walked off, satisfied at having got the better of the exchange. He turned at the water’s edge. “You striplings coming?”
We laughed and ran after him. “Aren’t we taking the canoe?”
He stood at the rock outcropping next to camp, a daypack slung over his shoulders. “Not today. I’m going to take you to the best honey hole in Kentucky, where we will hunt the smartest, most intuitive freshwater fish in this or any other lake: Micropterus salmoides.”
“Salmon?”
“Largemouth bass.”
The cliff jutted out thirty feet into the lake. A narrow shelf, just wide enough for a sideways foot, ran from the beach to the end of the rock. “A few years back I found a spot where the real lunkers like to parlay. It ain’t easy to get to but worth the effort.” We tightroped out to the end of the cliff, then climbed up ten feet to another ledge, then down again to an undercut alcove two feet off the water. The recess ran sixty feet across the face of the cliff.
Pops took off the daypack and removed a rectangular canvas folder. He unzipped it and spread it on the rocks. Inside were rows of colored worms, silver lures, gleaming hooks, furry flies, wooden grasshoppers, plastic crawfish, lead weights, extra line.
“Bass are curious fish by nature, so it’s easy to catch a yearling—they’ll strike on anything that moves. However, the smartest ones learn from their mistakes and become skittish and mistrusting… and big! Catching lunkers is an art, and knowing where they congregate is only half of it. They don’t like the light, so they tend to lurk in the deep or around structure: under ledges, around fallen trees, under piers, in weeds. Under this here ledge is where they lounge during the day.
“Every time I come up to Glaston with Chester and Lo, I outfish them ten to one—drives em nuts. And here’s why.” He pulled a dark purple rubber worm from one of the pockets in his canvas tackle holder and held it up to the sunlight. “A black grape worm on a Texas rig.” He turned the worm in his fingers to show us the delight of its workmanship, its exquisite coloring. “Don’t tell Chester or Lo, but I’m a weightless wormer. I let the worm drift down slowly right in front of the bass’s nose; then I read the line with my fingers.”
He tied the hook to the line and set the barb inside the worm. “We’ll each take a turn at it. We don’t want too many lures hitting the water at once. Watch and learn, pilgrims.” He plopped the worm into the water in front of the ledge and let it slowly sink. After a half a minute it had sunk out of sight. Pops let out the line by hand, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. His head twitched to the left as if he had heard a sound. Then he jerked the rod up and quickly reeled, jerked again and reeled some more. The rod bent on the weight of the fish. With a few more turns of the reel, a huge bass was flopping on the ledge. “Whoa, that’s big,” I said in a near whisper.
“At least a twelve pounder.” He removed the hook and laced a keeper cord through the bass’s gill and out its mouth and put the fish back in the water at the end of the undercut. “Let’s change worms and you try it.”
“Can’t I use the purple one?”
“You can, but the other lunkers down there have already seen it. I change worm color every cast just so the fish don’t get used to seeing the same lure.” He peered over his sunglasses at us. “That’s one of my fishing secrets I expect you boys to keep to yourselves.” We nodded.
He affixed the bright-yellow striped worm to the line and hid the barb inside it and gave me the rod. “Just plop the worm into the water; the fish will hear the sound and it will get their attention; then just let the goby sink down past them.”
I did and watched the yellow worm disappear in the clear water. I slowly unspooled the line just like Pops, until the line went slack. “I think I’m on the bottom,” I whispered.
“Okay, jiggle the rod to make the worm move just like a live worm. They may be looking at it right now.” I did as Pops said, then again. Nothing.
“Okay. Pull it to the end of the ledge there and slowly reel it up. We’ll let you try the Black Grape on your next cast.” He set a Lemon Zinger for Buzzy and coached him as he sent the worm into the depths. Same result.
We fished for an hour in the morning sunlight. Pops caught four more large fish, and Buzzy and I hooked some yearlings, only one of which was worth keeping.
“We’ve got lunch and dinner, so you boys ready for some cliff diving?”
I looked at Pops curiously.
Buzzy grinned. “Sure!”
“Follow me, then.”
We balance-beamed back across the ledge. Pops put the string of fish in the water by the beach and we climbed the hill above the secret fishing spot, coming out of the woods onto the sunny top of the face forty feet above the water’s surface. My stomach tingled as I approached the edge and looked down.
“We call this Jumping Rock—creative, don’t you think? I was about your age when I did my first dive. It was a way to show my brothers I had sand. But I was terrified—almost wet myself.”
“It’s a far way down,” I said.
“Long as you push off from the ledge, you’ll be fine. Just don’t dive close to the wall.” He took his shirt off and stood on the edge, toes curled under. He was ramrod straight; arms leveled out front. He brought them out to his sides, then parallel to his body. He crouched slightly and pushed hard up and out, arching his back, throwing arms out like angel wings into a perfect swan dive to the clear water below. Buzzy and I exchanged impressed eyebrows.
He peered over the edge. “You ready?”
“No, you go first.”
“Naw, I’ll follow you.”
“You’re older; you should go first.”
“You’re a guest in my state. Guests always go first.”
“You’re bigger.”
“You got brown hair.”
“What, are you scared?”
“Hell yeah!”
“But you dove into a raging creek to save my butt. This is nothing.”
“Then you go.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”