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Gone now the old fart. Hayman Creek was named for Charles Hayman, a sort of half-assed pioneer in a country that not many wanted to live in because it was poor and ugly and horrible. He built a shack, this was in 1876, on a little creek that drained a worthless hill. After a while the creek was called Hayman Creek.
Mr. Hayman did not know how to read or write and considered himself better for it. Mr. Hayman did odd jobs for years and years and years and years.
Your mule's broke?
Get Mr. Hayman to fix it.
Your fences are on fire?
Get Mr. Hayman to put them out.
Mr. Hayman lived on a diet of stone-ground wheat and kale. He bought the wheat by the hundred-pound sack and ground it himself with a mortar and pestle. He grew the kale in front of his shack and tended the kale as if it were prize-winning orchids.
During all the time that was his life, Mr. Hayman never had a cup of coffee, a smoke, a drink or a woman and thought he'd be a fool if he did.
In the winter a few trout would go up Hayman Creek, but by early summer the creek was almost dry and there were no fish in it.
Mr. Hayman used to catch a trout or two and eat raw trout with his stone-ground wheat and his kale, and then one day he was so old that he did not feel like working any more, and he looked so old that the children thought he must be evil to live by himself, and they were afraid to go up the creek near his shack.
It didn't bother Mr. Hayman. The last thing in the world he had any use for were children. Reading and writing and children were all the same, Mr. Hayman thought, and ground his wheat and tended his kale and caught a trout or two when they were in the creek.
He looked ninety years old for thirty years and then he got the notion that he would die, and did so. The year he died the trout didn't come up Hayman Creek, and never went up the creek again. With the old man dead, the trout figured it was better to stay where they were.
The mortar and pestle fell off the shelf and broke.
The shack rotted away.
And the weeds grew into the kale.
Twenty years after Mr. Hayman's death, some fish and game people were planting trout in the streams around there. "Might as well put some here," one of the men said.
"Sure, " the other one said.
They dumped a can full of trout in the creek and no sooner had the trout touched the water, than they turned their white bellies up and floated dead down the creek.
Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America
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