Sometime one fall, not that many years ago, our family became the proud owners of a horse…a pony really. It was my daughter’s idea, something she’d wanted for a very long time. When she was five, she began saving birthday money, quarters we’d given her for doing odd jobs around the house, and other little gifts of cash she’d received from aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Eventually, when she was nine or ten, she did a little babysitting and she even got paid for feeding a couple of horses that boarded at a barn just down the road from where we live. After five or six years, one summer afternoon, she announced that she’d saved enough for a horse and to our astonishment, my wife and I discovered that she wasn’t too far from being right. So, we chipped in and our household was all the richer to the tune of one pony.

All of this reminded me of when I was her age. In the summer of 1969, my parents, my younger brother and I flew to Montana where we spent a couple of weeks at what was laughingly referred to then as a “dude ranch”. We were all assigned horses and long rides were organized to keep the visitors out of the kitchen and boarding room staff’s hair during the day so they could get some work done. I was given a gold colored gelding named Dillon who was as dumb as bag of hammers and about as energetic as one too. To say that this horse didn’t move too quickly would be an understatement – he flat out refused to move. Kick him, prod him, coax him, and yell at him – it all went unnoticed.

I loved that horse. I loved him so much I never rode him. I spent the entire time we were in Montana learning how to fly fish for trout on the banks of the fabled Gallatin River instead. I’d take off right after breakfast and that would be the last anyone would see of me until supper. I caught native rainbow and cutthroat trout on dry flies. I also fought the less desirable, but (I thought) equally exotic whitefish. I found trout in small ponds and in the tributaries. I was close to assuming that trout might even appear in the sidewalk puddles that collected after a brief mountain shower in the nearby town of West Yellowstone. I was in a place where trout were as common as fleas. I was twelve years old and I had found heaven.

For his part, Dillon wiled the days away in the paddock, munching on wild grass and sunning himself. I’d walk by him every once in a while and he’d look up to acknowledge the pleasant out-of-towner who had so generously given him a mid-summer vacation. There was only one day I disturbed him from his rest.

Early one morning, Dillon and four other horses were trailered to the place on the Gallatin where Fan Creek enters into it. My father, two new friends that we’d met at the ranch, a guide and I drove up in another car, lashed our fly rods to our steeds and mounted up, ready to ride upstream. For about an hour, we rode in the cold mountain dawn air, until we reached a spot where the creek ran narrow and deep. We quickly spread out on the stream and enjoyed what to this day I swear was the best day of trout fishing I’ve ever experienced. By lunchtime, I’d caught and released a dozen rainbows and being very full of myself, boasted of this to the adults, challenging them to declare the size of their catches. To their credit, none of them shot back that they’d each caught close to forty! The afternoon was more of the same and I ended up keeping one nice foot-long fish for my breakfast the next morning.

So, there were times that my daughter’s pony made me wonder what it would be like to head off into the mountains again on horseback, in search of uncharted trout waters in the Green Mountains. I might have found a beaver pond no one had ever fished, filled with native brook trout that would have been all mine for a day of blissful dry fly angling. Of course, the horse might have quaked under my middle age girth. It might have rebelled against my unsteady reign. It could also have just decided, to hell with it – I’m going to dump this chump.

Perhaps I really was very wise to have just strapped the canoe to the roof of the car and taken my dowager beagle for a peaceful little trout-fishing trip out on Nelson Pond instead.

Copyright 2008 by Peter Cammann

 

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