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Copyright ©2017 Keith McCafferty. All Rights Reserved.
Preface
I first heard about Ernest Hemingway’s steamer trunk of fishing tackle, the lost treasure chest at the heart of this novel, from his oldest son, Jack. Jack and I were contributing editors for Field & Stream some thirty-odd years ago, and though not close friends, we shared a river from time to time. It was a blustery November day, easy to recall be- cause all November days on British Columbia’s Thompson River are blustery, and we were the only fishermen along a stretch of the river known as the Graveyard, just down the hill from the old white crosses where all the graves face north. On toward dark, Jack hooked a steel- head of fifteen or sixteen pounds, which I landed for him in the tailout after a long fight. We admired this great seafaring trout for a few seconds before releasing it, and celebrated with a thermos cup of hot chocolate into which I laced peppermint schnapps, in honor of my father.
After toasting the fish, I asked Jack if he thought his own father would have liked this kind of fishing—that is, wading on slippery boulders in a river haunted by the dead, casting hour after hour in miserable weather, and considering yourself lucky to hook up once every few days and manage not to drown. He said that Ernest would have enjoyed the challenge, but that he’d lost the heart to fly fish after a steamer trunk containing all his valuable gear was stolen or lost from Railway Express in 1940, en route to Ketchum, Idaho, where he was a guest at the Sun Valley Lodge. In fact, Jack could only remember his father fly fishing once after the loss, in the Big Wood River.
This was an interesting insight into the famous author’s psyche, but at the time I was more interested in casting my own fly rod than the fate of another man’s tackle or the sentiments it evoked.
Years passed, and I had no reason to recall the story until my wife, Gail, persuaded me to set a novel in northwestern Wyoming, where Hemingway stayed at the L Bar T Guest Ranch during five summers and falls in the 1930s, hunting, fishing, and writing. By then Jack had died and I sought to verify the details of his story with Patrick Heming- way, Ernest’s sole surviving son, who lives in my hometown. I spoke with him at a local screening of the PBS American Masters series film Ernest Hemingway: Rivers to the Sea. Patrick was kind enough to indulge my questions and said he recalled the lost trunk, adding that it probably contained best-quality bamboo fly rods and reels ordered from the House of Hardy catalog. Hardy was the premier London maker, and Patrick remembered helping his father convert the prices from pounds sterling to American dollars.
Today, only one piece of Ernest Hemingway’s fly fishing tackle survives in good condition, a Hardy rod in a model called the Fairy that he had with him when he first went to Idaho. It is displayed at the American Museum of Fly Fishing in Manchester, Vermont, along with a letter to Field & Stream that Jack wrote about the missing tackle.
As concerns the possibility that the trunk contained Hemingway treasures unrelated to piscatorial pursuits, and perhaps of far greater value, there is one way to find out.
Pour a drink, light a fire, and turn the page. I have a story to tell.
