Jason is working furiously,  faithfully, and fruitfully  to complete the art and final design layout for the first book in our Fly Fishing series. Entitled, “Fishing the Film,” it’s an in-depth look at the skills necessary to successfully take fish with dead-drifted flies and those fished with action, in the upper foot or so of lake, stream, or ocean.The book is illustrated both with Jason’s great art, and stories that enhance the reader’s understanding of the process of fishing the film. Here’s a story from Chapter 1 about fishing a fly with action in the film–a mouse fly, to be more precise.

Down and Dirty Mouse

Mice by the Mouthful

And then, there are the big brookies of the tundra. Ontario’s Sutton River headwaters in Sutton Lake and flows directly north through Polar Bear Provincial Park, dumping into Hudson Bay, a hundred and some miles from its source. There are both resident ands ea-run fish present in the stream all the very short summer long. And they eat any and everything they can get their lips on—including our old friend, the ever-present mouse. A mouse in the water does not float daintily on top. It is most certainly a creature above, in, and under the film. Only the rodent’s head and perhaps a bit of the back sticks above the surface as it swims hard for the other side. I doubt they know that danger lurks below, but nature has long-since weeded out any slow swimmers. As a result, our preferred mouse patterns are dressed of deer hair, but they’re not packed as tightly as most. On the Sutton, our technique was to cast the semi-floating imitation right on the gravel of the far bank, and then just let line drag pull it off and swim it rapidly back to our side. Those brookies would almost turn themselves inside out in pursuit of the motoring fly. Many times they jumped in order to take the fly on the way down, or they would slash and grab at it on the swing, until they finally hooked themselves in their eagerness. Their zest for the mouse made for some great sequences in our video, “Trout of the Tundra.”

Every Alaskan angler carries mice imitations—some four inches long—to lure the big rainbows of summer into such savagery as has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. I even had a huge king salmon rise to a mouse one time on the Kanektok, waking along after it and bumping it out of the water several times with its nose. It never took the fly, but I remember that fish more than all the others put together on that trip.

Atlantic salmon like mice, too, as a substitute for blocks of wood. Yes, wood. One year, fishing Russia’s Umba River in June for Atlantics, I was plying the home pool in the late afternoon hours and spotted a block of wood headed down current toward me. It was a chunk of a 2 x 4 that had found its way into the river. Only a couple of inches long, it made a suitable mouse (2 x 2 x 4). As the block neared my position, it drifted right down the seam I had been working.

To my utter amazement, a nice salmon rose and took the block off the top. The block popped back to the surface a few seconds later. I was stunned, but only momentarily. The next thing I recall is a fly box in my lashed it on as fast as humanly possible. I heaved the big imitation up and across onto the seam and added a Puddle Mend to eliminate any drag. On the very first drift, the fish came up just as it had before, and slurped in the dead-drifting mouse. I waited the mandatory pause (“God Save the Queen,” as they say in England) before striking. When the line tightened, sure enough, there was the salmon on the other end.

God save the Queen, indeed. God save all those big mouse eating fish, whatever and wherever they may be.