A proper requiem must fit the subject, do it justice without overstatement, evoke the emotion of a passing in proportion to the loss without lapse into maudlin excess. Above all, it must have a fitting duration. Nothing spoils a funeral as quickly as mourners unable to contain themselves as they stagger to the rostrum to natter on in lachrymose blatherings.
I shall commit no such transgressions here. I hated Big Louie alive and rejoiced shamelessly in his demise fifteen years ago, as one celebrates the destruction of a nemesis. At least at first.

My initial encounter with Big Louie came as I surveyed the ruin, forty or so thriving willows chewed off to no apparent purposes, their trunks lying about in tortured poses like so many Union soldiers dead below the sunken road at Fredericksburg. The intake for the water delivery pipe lying roughly 20 feet away lay under a thicket of cuttings and mud, backing up the drainage that would normally proceed to one of my more prized “natural” ponds, an area that had held so much promise for the coming season as recently as the twilight before.

I had planted and nurtured every one of those trees to create the type of pond margin that mallards and woodies prefer. Their remnant trunks now stood decapitated, the ends chewed to crude points like the stakes the Huns once used to impale their captives. The beaver or beavers had packed the pipe with clay, an interesting phenomenon considering that there was no clay in the immediate vicinity. And as bad as the situation felt – compared with the beautiful luxuriant trees that had swayed to the evening wind the evening before – I knew it would only get worse. I would dig out the pipe, the critters would consider those efforts a challenge and joyously pack it more thoroughly on the ensuing night. Nothing but an assassin’s evening stakeout would solve this problem, and even that would not restore those lost trees or my hopes for that pond for the coming fall.

For reasons I can’t explain, I called him Big Louie when I had his leaking carcass hauled out on the ditch bank in the white halo cast by the flashlight, almost 60 pounds if he weighed an ounce, ugly and misshapen, defiled by death, his murderous looking teeth yellowed and black at the gum line. He must have reminded me of an unpleasant fellow who bore that name, a shroud of distant memory, buried in the subconscious. Double ought buckshot did him in after three nights of sporadic vigil.

I took a foot square hunk of his hide to use for fly tying and cut the rest of him up into rough, bloody chunks and left them in the other spots where his brethren wreaked nightly havoc, an effective form of psychological warfare I had been told. It worked. Apparently, the other beavers figured that anyone who could nail Big Louie would be too much for them. They left me alone for the rest of that season and well into the next.

* * *

Environmentalists pontificate in sonorous tones over the loss of the supposed four million acres of wetlands they claim we had in California before the advent of the Europeans – the hundred million migratory waterfowl that used the vast wetlands every winter, the twelve million or so regularly visiting what is now the Los Angeles Basin and other coastal estuaries where only a vestigial handful of feathered visitors can be seen today, risking the oil spills and other pollution outrages that defile their ancestral wintering grounds. We accept those numbers as a somber baseline, without wondering who counted and how they could have done so in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Whether a fair picture or not, the actual numbers don’t matter. There was more then – less now, of that there can be no debate. What we do know is that then as now, California experienced regular and recurrent cycles of drought, below normal precipitation often occurring in multiple dry years. There are people alive today, for example, who recall times when the Sacramento River actually went dry during high summer, a concept inconceivable in these days of the Central Valley Project and controlled water releases at 5000 cubic feet per second1 even in the worst drought conditions.

During those drought cycles, the birds presumably flew on in search of remnant wetlands. Some of them survived, from a population so large as to readily absorb attrition that might exceed the entire flight in this day and time. But wetland dependent mammals could not fly on in search of congenial ground. And thus it was that wetland dependent mammal populations remained in check, confined to those isolated and localized areas that stayed wet when all else went dry, with the populations on the margin brutally culled by inadequate rainfall.

All that has changed. We probably have almost no truly natural wetland left in the entire state. The lands we call “wetland,” are largely managed, particularly in the Central Valley. Irrigation works deliver water that those lands would never have received during dry years under primitive conditions. We grade those lands to improve drainage and enhance irrigation flows. We establish artificial flooding regimes to enhance “wild” seed production. We plant thousands of willow trees to replicate a utopian vision of what existed before the turn of the 20th century, when drought must have held those willow groves in check as surely as it decimated populations of wetland dependent mammals. And we have created thousands of miles of irrigation canals to deliver water to cropland, including crops such as rice that grow in poor soil but must stand in water all summer long, an environment in which local waterfowl can flourish as would not have been possible during dry cycles in primitive times.

Make no mistake. Those managed wetlands provide prime habitat for waterfowl and other wetland dependent species. Every year, it seems that we learn more and get better at the management, even as we put more land under easement in an effort to stem the tide of development. Highly educated men and women work hard at the project and do a commendable job.

But in the process, we have fundamentally changed the ecological balance. Specifically, we have created an environment in which wetland dependent mammals thrive as never before. We could point to a number of species – but I am talking about the accursed beaver, energetic plugger of pipes, dammer of drop boxes, obstructer of water delivery systems, ruthless destroyer of laboriously planted trees, the outlaw vandal of the muddy margin. The population has exploded – and with it the frustration and stomach acid production of those who must contend with them and their works, with the impatience and competitive urges typical of human interaction in modern times.

* * *

The McCloud River runs gin clear and swift over a boulder strewn bed below Pine Flat, a small bench of level ground at the bottom of the rugged canyon, named for the conifers that grow there among the hardwoods. Rising full blown from an enormous spring on the slopes of Mt. Shasta, the McCloud flows south to become the largest of the four major tributaries of Shasta Lake and hence the Sacramento River. It richly deserves its fame as a fabled trout fishery, the stream from which rainbows were taken to be introduced around the world. The construction of the dam that created the huge reservoir of Shasta Lake, as the heart of the Central Valley Project, has actually improved the fishery in many respects while facilitating water deliveries for agriculture and development while providing essential flood control. Now, runs of huge brown trout and smallmouth bass that grow large in the lake run the River to spawn and populate the slower reaches between the whitewater stretches.

The McCloud presents challenge and reward to the fly fisherman. Aquatic insect life of all kinds proliferates in its waters. Terrestrials – ants, hoppers, lady bugs – blow in off the forested slopes of the canyon walls, sometimes in massive numbers associated with migrations that seem to darken the sky. But caddis provide the predominant trout food and caddis pupae nymphs the fly of choice when no hatch breaks the surface or terrestrials fall from above.

It has been my privilege to fish the McCloud often over the years, sometimes as often as thirty days in a summer. A caddis pupa nymph tied with dubbing from the hide of Big Louie, with wing covert and legs fashioned from the bronze flank feathers of greenheads killed over that fateful pond, is my fly of choice. Fished upstream on a long line with 12 feet of leader and a tiny indicator, it takes more and bigger fish than anything else, and challenges the limits of skill. Each cast must be placed just so in order to get the proper drift. The stretch below Pine Flat has always held a monster or two to reward the careful cast and stealthy approach, particularly when the big brownies run in the springtime.

Solitary fly fishing on a remote, brawling river in a serene wild setting provides ample scope for reflection. My mind runs away with me in those moments as I work the fly derived from the skin of an animal I killed because he insisted upon modifying my habitat to suit his fancy – habitat that I was attempting to modify to suit mine. As a species, we are the most aggressive and voracious habitat modifiers the planet has ever seen (barring inanimate forces such as glaciers, hurricanes and the like). We consider it our right to do as we please and destroy all that gets in our way, not least those other habitat re-arrangers whose goals happen to conflict with ours. Except for scale, what difference exists between what Big Louie sought to do to my mallard pond and what we have done to the Sacramento River with Shasta Dam? And without our massive rearrangement of the Valley, he would never have existed in the first place to mess with my plans before I terminally messed with his.

* * *
 
I have tied flies with that hunk of beaver pelt for nearly fifteen years and probably have enough to last well beyond the point where my remains will reside on the wrong side of the grass. Every time I clip a portion to dub a body, I reflect on its origins and the thoughts thus reawakened.

In nature, all is connected – no part can be altered without affecting other parts, with consequences direct and indirect, foreseen and unforeseeable, immediate and remote. While the aggressive, competitive and impatient elements of our nature may equip us for athletic competition, the rigors of business and the fast pace of government at the highest levels, stewardship of natural things requires the opposite – patience, reflection, restraint. These rise to a level of even greater importance when we create artificial conditions to enhance consumptive activities such as hunting, where the aggressive and competitive elements of human nature can be most destructive, particularly when enhanced by the products of modern technology. Nothing new in these thoughts, as John Muir and Aldo Leopold espoused and advocated decades ago in timeless writings.

The willows that line the pond where Big Louie offended my sense of proprietorship flourish today, despite several onslaughts of beaverine vandalism. I do not now counter those periodic assaults with lethal means. And although I cherish the hunk of hide that has yielded so much quiet pleasure over the years, I regret having sent Big Louie to the great beaver pond in the sky in a fit of pique and for no long term gain.

It is a valuable thing, no doubt, to attempt to atone for our past depredations by seeking to restore replicas of “natural” conditions, so long as we recognize the broader role that they serve beyond providing us a setting for the greater “harvest’ of game.

1 5000 cfs roughly equals 10,000 acre feet per day – or enough water to cover 10,000 acres to a depth of one foot, or enough water in a day to provide the annual needs of 15,000 residences.