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Aiming for the bright light above, the little guy — we’ll call him “Dan” — struggled through the pile of gravel where his mother had buried him several weeks before.
As he reached the top of the stones, Dan poked his tiny little head into the light, and without warning, he was rudely greeted by a swift current.
Biscuit Eater could sense something big was about to happen.??There was a nervous electricity in the water and all the others of his kind seemed to be jittery. A low,
metallic sound was emanating from the far end of the concrete lane he’d called home for his entire life. The sound was soft at first but it was getting louder by the second. Something unfamiliar…
He got the idea from a Zane Grey novel he had read a year prior. It was just a passing phrase in which Grey, who spent a good chunk of his time in a cabin on the Rogue River in Oregon, mentioned something about killing a steelhead for Thanksgiving dinner. The old man didn’t think much about it at first, but then the thought of a steelhead instead of a turkey began to intrigue him.
Early Monday morning we were trolling Ice House Reservoir’s main body, heading toward the east side of the lake. The wind was blowing at a gentle clip which made the lake’s surface a little choppy and us a bit chilly — overall, a nice morning typical of the high country in autumn.
As we trolled on, I noticed what looked like smoke from a campfire rising from the eastern shoreline. We were looking right into the blinding light of the rising sun as it reflected off the water, so it was difficult to tell exactly what we were looking at. My buddy Rob thought it was morning mist coming off the lake.??We were both dead wrong.
The guy I had in the right front seat of my driftboat didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that he’d snagged and lost — through a total disregard of the simple instructions I’d given that morning — six of my best steelhead plugs throughout the day. ??It was late in the afternoon as I went to tie on the seventh and, scanning my now much-depleted plug box, I decided I couldn’t take the chance of him losing yet another. Busy yakking with his buddy all day and not noticing his plugs were getting fouled in the rocks, he obviously didn’t care anyway. ??So, I pulled out an expendable lure — one that had been given to me as a sample by the manufacturer. It was a Wiggle Wart, just like the ones the guy had been losing all day, but this one had such a ridiculous paint job I dubbed it the “Mardi-Gras Peacock.”?? The hideous, clown-like plug had a baby-blue back, an orange belly, gold flanks, bright yellow eyes – and for good measure, black and red tiger stripes running down its sides. Maybe a walleye would have low enough self-esteem to eat such a thing, but not a noble steelhead!?? Well, you know what happened next, right?