The New River runs north through southwest Virginia, which is the first thing you learn about it and the thing everyone will tell you anyway, and it is older than the mountains it cuts through, which is the second. It is also the best muskie river in the South, a fish the state stocked decades ago and which the river has since decided on its own to grow big. October is when the muskie fishing turns on, when the water temperature falls through the sixties and the fish that spent the summer sulking in deep holes start moving onto the ledges and the weed edges to eat, and when the ridges above the river go orange and red so hard you forget to cast.
I floated the stretch above Pembroke in a raft with a guide named Ray who had a rule that nobody talked about muskie in the boat, because talking about them is bad luck and anyway there was nothing to say. A muskie is the fish of ten thousand casts, the saying goes. Ray said the saying was optimistic. We threw big bucktails and nine-inch glide baits on rods that felt like pool cues, and at the end of every retrieve we did the figure eight at the boat, because a muskie follows a lure like a dog follows a mailman and makes up its mind at the last second.
For three hours we had two follows, one of them a fish so big that when it turned away under the raft Ray said a word he had told me he did not say on the river. Then at the tail of a long pool below a railroad trestle I was halfway through a figure eight, not paying attention, thinking about lunch, and the water next to the raft opened up and closed on my bucktail like a door. Ray netted it in a net the size of a hammock. Forty-one inches, spotted and barred like a tiger that had taken up swimming, with a mouth full of teeth I did not need to count.
We photographed it in the water, and Ray held it in the current until it kicked out of his hands on its own, which took a while, muskie being a fish that recovers at its own pace. Then we ate lunch on a gravel bar with leaves coming down on the sandwiches and did not catch another thing all afternoon, which Ray said was normal and which I had already been warned about by the saying.
At the takeout he told me the New River gives up about one muskie per good day, and that today had been a good day, so I should not come back expecting two. I said I would come back expecting one. He said that was still optimistic.
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