Rare Bird Open Season

By Robert F. Jones

At 62, William Humphrey is to minimalists of the Raymond Carver school what an old silk-wrapped, split-cane fly rod is to a shiny new graphite lunker stick. The proof lies in these 13 glowing tales gathered for the first time in one volume.

My Moby Dick finds Humphrey in the Berkshire Hills of lower Massachusetts, resolved to take a 30-pounder in a sporting manner befitting its own dark nobility. In the fading light of the trout season's last day, with the strains of Beethoven's Ode to Joy still echoing down from the Tanglewood concert shed above, he finally hooks the great fish. But then . . .

The Spawning Run, though ostensibly about salmon fishing, is actually an essay on the ancient sport of cuckoldry. Vacationing in Britain, the narrator and his wife put up at a fusty old angling hotel in Wales. Every morning a Wodehouse-load of stuffed shirts set off to the salmon water, tackle in hand. Among them goes "poor Holloway," a somewhat seedy chap of dubious breeding who has yet to catch a salmon in 20 years of trying. Meanwhile, the "salmon widows" wait restlessly back at the hotel -- for Holloway to sneak away from the river to yet another noonday tryst. Just as the juvenile parr of the salmon tribe dart in among their unaware elders to fertilize the females' eggs, so does "poor Holloway" put horns on his betters.

But there is far more than humor in this collection. The Fishermen of the Seine evokes, in a style as spare as Maupassant or Simenon, the ponts and iles of Paris at dawn, when rough-clad men hunker in the fog to hook Gallic mysteries like goujon, breme and chevaine. Two hunting pieces extracted from Humphrey's poignant 1977 memoir Farther Off from Heaven call back the hot dust and snaky swamps of his Depression-era boyhood in east Texas, along with the ghost of his hard-drinking, bar-fighting, trick-shot artist of a father.

The loveliest, most self-revealing story appears near the end. Birds of a Feather is an ode to the woodcock, that plucky, reclusive little game bird of the uplands. Preparatory to a hunt in upstate New York, Humphrey reads up on the bird. "He gets curiouser and curiouser. His brain is upside down. His ears are in front of his nose . . . Like the woodcock, I too am an odd bird; I know I am, and I would change if I could, because being odd is uncomfortable, but, no more than the woodcock can, I can't, not anymore -- it's too late even to try. My brain, I often think, must surely be upside down, so out of step with the world am I."

No, not out of step. Merely another rare bird: the best damned boot-in-the- mud nature essayist -- piscine, avian or human -- in the business.