Big Two-Hearted River by Ernest Hemingway - Summary

Part I

The train stops in Wisconsin, in Seney, a town that burned down, and lets Nick off with his pack. Nick surveys the countryside, reflecting on what was there once. Nick watches the fish in the river, and particularly enjoys watching the trout as they cling onto the river bottom or swim upstream. He slings his too-heavy pack on his back and starts a hard climb uphill, but he feels happy and unburdened.

He looks into the distance, where far off he can see unburned countryside. He stops and smokes a cigarette and notices that all the grasshoppers are black from living in the soot.

He crosses the fire line into living forest. At any time he could go to the river but he wants to hit it as far upstream as possible. He reaches a pine grove where there is no underbrush and sleeps there in the afternoon. Afterwards he heads towards the river and makes camp there, leveling the ground to sleep on and making pegs for a tent. He sets up the tent with cheesecloth to keep mosquitoes out and hangs his pack up on a tree with a nail. He makes himself dinner from cans. He is very resourceful. He drinks coffee the way his friend Hopkins used to make it and remembers things about him. He goes to bed.

Part II

Nick wakes up, builds a fire and puts water to boil for coffee. He catches grasshoppers for bait while the morning dew weighs them down and they cannot jump away. He returns to camp and makes flapjacks with apple butter for breakfast. He makes sandwiches and puts them in his pocket for lunch. Then he threads his fishing rod and otherwise prepares it for fishing. He heads to the stream with the rod and the bottle of grasshoppers.

The first trout Nick catches is small so he releases it. He goes deeper to catch bigger trout. He hooks a trout so large that it breaks the leader and gets away. Nick is overwhelmed with the thrill and disappointed. He rests to recover, then puts a new hook on the leader and goes shallower. He catches a trout with which he is satisfied and puts it in a sack filled with water.

Nick knows the biggest trout lie in the shade trees make on the banks in midday. He knows exactly when it was most opportune to fish in different times of day, in different strengths of currents, and different parts of the river. He sees a hollow log parallel to the current through which the water flowed smoothly, and casts his line so that the baited grasshopper goes in the log. He catches another satisfactory trout after a struggle in this way.

He doesn't want to go into the part of the river that turns into a swamp. He feels strongly against wading in the deep fast water and feels that fishing there would be "tragic".

He breaks the necks of the fish by whacking them against a log. He rolls the dead fish up in the sack they were in before. He begins to make his way back to camp, wistfully, a bit fearfully. "There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp".

Ernest Hemingway