RobG
Well-known member
Every year I visit my father up near Swan Lake, Montana and I pick up this red, smoothed mudstone that is on his desk. And every year my father asks “Do you remember where that rock came from?” And every year I answer “Yea, it came out of that bull trout I caught at Big Salmon Lake in the Bob.” He’s 85 so he remembers things I did 35 years ago much better than what I said one year ago.
I don’t know how many times Dad brought me into the Bob Marshall Wilderness on his horses. Sometimes I brought a friend and sometimes he brought a friend too. But if we couldn’t find friends we just rode together, leaning off our saddle to pick huckleberries, stopping to shoot any grouse that attacked us. The route was often different, but we always wound up at the same place, that little triangular island that split the river flowing into Big Salmon Lake.
I would stand on that triangular island all day long casting flies and lures at cutthroat and bull trout. And I mean all day. The left fork was better for bull trout, the right fork was better for cutthroat, at least until the bull trout came over looking for a meal; then the fishing would shut off. Sometimes a bull trout would sneak over and attack a cutthroat that I was reeling in. I once saw a bull attack a stick that floated into the lake. Bulls aren’t terribly smart but they are large and fun to catch. Their red meat and migratory habits must have made the early people think they were salmon, hence the name of the lake, but they sure don’t taste or fight like salmon so we usually threw them back and kept the cutthroat.
My Dad didn’t fish much so he would try to make his case to go elsewhere. “There are big fish at Salmon Forks, how about we ride down there? The White River is really good too.” Or “Let’s go see the Chinese Wall.” My answer was always the same. “No thanks, I like it here.” So he would go feed the horses and clean the grouse and trout off the frying pans. I guess he decided that if I was happy then it was worth it because we sure went there a lot. Variety for him would have to be going into Big Salmon Lake from Spotted Bear or Smith Creek instead of Holland Lake.
When I caught the bull trout that ate the rock I killed it just to see what the lump was. I’ve seen bull trout eat fish heads, sticks, and my poorly tied flies, but I never thought one would be so dumb that it would eat a rock, especially one so much bigger than its asshole. We still laugh about that.
I found this picture while looking for “Montana in one picture.” I took it years ago because I wanted to tell my family about this great rock. I even tell them it is a one of those Belt formation rocks from “the basement of time” that Norman Maclean wrote about, except the raindrops have been smoothed by the stomach contents of the world’s dumbest trout. It is probably my “Montana in one picture,” but I can tell even my own son doesn’t see it as anything more than a plain old rock.
Some day the plain old rock will stop sitting on Dad’s desk and start sitting on mine. And then some day it will stop sitting on anybody’s desk. Before that happens I hope my son can find his own rock and I can keep it and ask him if he remembers where it came from, as if I don’t remember asking him the year before, just so I know that he still remembers.
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