Lazy May Day Trout Fishing

May Day Trout

  On a bright May day a few trout are visible from the high bank- wisps of movement against a dark green background, more angular and better camouflaged than the undulating filaments of aquatic weed that wash downstream. But to some fishers a fish is truly visible only when it rises and feeds. Sometimes trout shoulder the river aside, and sometimes they barely crease it, taking a cluster of midges sliding past on the waters tension, as light as thought. Most of the time the fish adhere to the stream bottom, waiting, feeding in the surface drift.
  Until the fish rise I wait too. In slack current, rafts of goslings test the water, their parents, like tugboats, nudging them this way and that. Everywhere there is the racket of red-winged  and yellow-headed blackbirds and a few blue-jays announcing my presence, the high-ceilinged squawk of pheasants, the wet slap of some mallards wings on takeoff. Some green hills climb in the distance, level off, and then become small towns.

Then the time of the morning comes when the wind has died and clouds have hidden the sun at last. The thing that will make those trout appear from nowhere is about to happen.
  The nymphs of a species of Mayfly- will rise through the water column and hatch on its surface, and the trout will certainly rise with them. In mid-afternoon the Mayflies are no longer there, no matter how hard I look, and then a minute later they are back. The Mayflies are the same color as the river's dull surface, their wings pointing upstream over slender bodies. They drift into view no matter where I look, and coming into view though my polarized sunglass's among them are the heads of brook tout and some stocked brown trout, suddenly visible at last.