Neosho

The wild beings peculiar to a place transcend blood, bone, soil, and sap.

I remember the jarring contrast. A broiling sun bore down on my skinny shoulders as creek water that felt as if drained from a glacier caressed my tanned 8-year-old legs. While water and air felt like polarized opposites, a visual distinction was imperceptible. The pure little torrent running over ancient stones was so clear that were it not for the riffles, I couldn’t tell you where one elemental ended and the other began.

But most of my memory from that summer day clings tight to the images of a tiger-striped bass smacking my little balsa-wood topwater lure with a violence for which I was utterly unprepared. The largemouth from my grandparents’ pond battled with all the savagery of a soggy sock in comparison. Even with my thumb in its mouth the smallmouth never succumbed. Not waiting for my release, the bass took its freedom with a ferocious writhing, tearing away from my grip, and torpedoed under a slab of rock.

I stood trembling in the aftermath as the currents hurried past.

This, my first smallmouth bass, was probably not at all like your first smallmouth bass. And I’m not talking about any distinctions in the tactics or circumstances surrounding our encounters. It’s because the bass I caught was a relatively rare subspecies of smallmouth bass called Neosho.

The most recent science says that the Neosho strain of smallmouth is found in only four states — Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas — and nowhere else on Earth. Every creek or river that holds Neosho drains from the Ozarks into the Arkansas River, and that along with their range in my home state (the Boston Mountains region of the Ozarks, which also happens to be my usual range) probably has as much to do with my love for them as anything else. Neosho are the only strain of smallmouth bass in almost all of the creeks I grew up fishing, which are all the creeks I still regularly fish. And while I’ve caught hundreds of smallmouth bass in my life, only a few dozen weren’t Neosho — a claim that speaks to my homebody ways more than anything else I could tell you.

Neosho look a little different than other smallmouth, with a slightly jutting lower jaw and a sleeker, more trout-like shape. The more streamlined bodies offer a hint, as does their name, to their preferred habitat. “Neosho” is an Osage word that means “clear, cold water.” Like me, they don’t do so well in lakes and prefer cool streams of the interior highlands. Likely because of this preference for more strenuous environs they don’t grow as large as their Micropterus dolomieu cousins, and they grow slowly. I lean heavy toward Herman Melville’s thoughts on the absurdity of measuring a wild beast, but for the sake of understanding I’ve measured a few Neosho and the largest brought to my hand was just a tick more than 17 inches. In all probability, that fish was close to a decade old.

They’re also a little different when it comes to catching them. While I’ve hooked scads of Neosho on poppers and the aforementioned Rapala, they don’t attack topwater offerings as often as their cousins. This discrepancy was made most apparent on one of my rare out-of-state fishing trips that took me all the way to the Boundary Waters of Minnesota with their broad-shouldered, popper-blitzing bronzebacks that would target any disturbance on the surface and just as quickly obliterate it.

Neosho aren’t timid, but like a lot of people from these parts, skepticism defines them, and anything new is cause for suspicion. Fish hanging near the riffles waiting on food to drop in their lap will indeed annihilate a topwater. But those slower water fish, the big ones you see finning through copper-rimmed pools of blue-green, always want to mull it over. And then it’s usually a decline of your offering with a quick disdainful flick of the tail.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I caught the bass despite its innate pickiness and had not a clue about how special it was. But the sum of that experience — the unrelenting sun, the cold and crystalline water, the velvet green of the mountains, the murderous eat, and that connection through thin monofilament to all that is wild and free — seared into me a sense of the land that still smolders now more than forty years later.

Since then, the Neosho has become an imponderable essence of the hills, an embodiment of wild divinity finning through streams still carving an ancient ocean floor lifted by planetary forces eons ago. In my mind, the Neosho smallmouth is so intimately tied to the place it lives that, much like the air and water on that unforgettable day, I cannot tell where the fish ends and the Ozarks begin.

And this knowing of Neosho as both flesh and spirit was discovered through the fishing rod.

But smallmouth bass aren’t the only creatures harboring a vibrancy of the place they call home, and it’s not just fish that define a region by their very existence. What is the Taos Plateau of New Mexico without the butterscotch aroma of ponderosa pine, the tawny bodies of bighorns ghosting over rocks, and Rio Grande cutthroat swirling through the currents? What are the Northwoods without black-bodied moose slogging through evergreens and loon song ghosting over moonlit waters?

I've felt the Louisiana marsh through the silted bursts of a burly redfish I thought would surely overpower my 9-weight fly rod. With Gulf breezes rattling roseau cane and the primal scent of Old Man River making new land, even blindfolded I would’ve known where I was. But the redfish is what brought me to the brackish waters, and the marsh simply wouldn’t be the marsh without it.

Those wild beings peculiar to a place transcend blood, bone, soil, and sap. They transform the lands and waters we roam into living things that speak to the hunter and the angler with a language older than words. We hear them best before our souls become burdened with the ways of adulthood, but they never stop speaking. We just have to listen.

Note: In the short span since I wrote this essay, the science (as science does) has changed. The Neosho is no longer considered a subspecies of smallmouth, but a distinct species of black bass all on its own—Micropterus velox. I considered edits reflecting the updates, but decided revisions weren’t needed and could seriously interrupt the rhythmic river of words flowing here. Besides, my essays aren’t living documents. They’re more like journal entries of who and where I am at specific points along the journey.