A story about the one that keeps getting away

This is a fish story about the big one that got away.

It kept getting away until, finally, someone caught it, mounted it and put it on a wall.

Then it got away again.

The fisherman who caught it never quite got over its loss. Emblazoned on his memorial headstone,

in fact, is a reproduction of the front-page newspaper photograph of him holding up that behemoth on the day he caught it.

His proud grin in the photo couldn’t have been any bigger had he known what state fisheries officials now know

48 years later: Louie Schott was holding the evidence of the one Washington state freshwater fishing record almost certainly never to be broken.

And yet that fish is still out there somewhere.

Old Cowbells was the lunker of lunkers.

The anglers who frequented the upper Tieton River named the fish for the arsenal of fishing gear hanging off it, the badges of its many battles won. If you hooked the fish and it came to the surface or jumped, the lures would all clang together. Someone said it sounded like cowbells, and the name took.

This was long before scientists had ever decided there was such a thing as a bull trout, and to anglers in those days Old Cowbells was just a big ol’ Dolly Varden.

It grew fat from a steady diet of kokanee flushed down with irrigation releases from Rimrock Lake, and its reputation grew along with its dangling array of lines, leaders and lures. By 1961, it had grown to 35 inches long, with a robust 22-inch girth.

But Old Cowbells met its match in a relentless angler named Louie Schott.

“He was a dyed-in-the-wool fisherman,” recalls Don King, who used to be Schott’s friend and boss at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 379 in Yakima. “If he missed a fish one day, he’d go back the next day and get it. He never forgot a rock that a fish jumped up behind that he didn’t get later.”

“Any time there was a fish around,” says Harold Allen, another of Schott’s old pals, “Louie was going to get that fish if it killed him.”

An Army veteran who had served in World War II, Schott worked a variety of jobs over the years, but his reason for working those 2-to-6 a.m. shifts as night janitor at the VFW Hall was simple: It left him the days off to hunt and fish.

At 6 most mornings, he’d go home and change. Before heading out again, he’d take a chunk of wood — on which one side FISHING was painted, HUNTING on the other — and set it on the breakfast table, with his day’s chosen activity facing up. That way, his two daughters would know where he was. Sort of.

He knew every hole on the Naches and Yakima rivers. Named them, in fact. There was Coffee Cup Hole, where he’d come upon an old coffee cup he’d lost upriver. There was Goose Hole, where he’d seen some geese one day, and Swimming Hole, and so on.

On April 23, 1961, though, he had a different destination in mind.

That day, he caught Old Cowbells.

***********
At first, Louie Schott thought he’d snagged a log. Or perhaps a cable, or some other debris on the river bottom.

A big Dolly Varden — or, in this case, a bull trout, a landlocked version with a few incremental differences from its anadramous cousin not determined by scientists until many years later — will do that. Hook it, and it will pull back, but not with the near-frantic exuberance of more sought-after game fish.

“A Dolly don’t fight. They’re like catching a log,” Harold Allen says. “But they pull to beat hell.”

As Schott tugged, whatever was on the line began working its way in a circle, and he knew he had something alive … and very big. Upon landing it, he knew he had Old Cowbells. It measured out to be a state-record Dolly Varden, and the local newspaper took some pictures. The next day, the photograph of Louie Schott and his prize dominated the front page of what was then the Yakima Daily Republic.

Schott had the big fish mounted, and it was hung up for display in the VFW hall. Over the years, it had many homes on walls in the hall — in a dining area, near the cigarette machine, in the hallway leading to the men’s restroom.

That mounted fish represented a 35-inch piece of history, one that developed even greater cachet when the state’s landlocked, non-sea-going version of Dolly Varden was determined to be a distinct species — and that species, bull trout, became federally protected a decade ago under the Endangered Species Act.

Since bull trout can no longer be caught in Washington, Louie Schott’s record — now for bull trout, not Dolly Varden — can’t be broken. But Old Cowbells remains an iconic fish either way: Nearly a half-century later, the current state record for Dolly Varden is still less than half the weight of Schott’s 221?2-pound catch.

In 2002, when Louie Schott died at the age of 77, a smaller version of that front-page photo ran with his obituary. He was buried in a fishing outfit, along with one of his oversized fishing poles. Some of his buddies tossed lures into the casket with him. A copy of the newspaper with the photo of the fish was buried with him, too.

But not Old Cowbells.

It’s gone.

***********
Until a few weeks ago, a tattered copy of Louie Schott’s obituary, with the photo and a reference to his old state record, had been tacked to the bulletin board in John Easterbrooks’ office for nearly seven years.

Easterbrooks is the regional fish program manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and ever since he snipped that obit out of the newspaper, he had been meaning to call Schott’s family to see if he could persuade them to part with Old Cowbells. A fish like that had to be mounted on a wall somewhere, and he really wanted to display it in the lobby of the wildlife department’s Yakima headquarters.

But when he finally called Schott’s oldest daughter, Linda Leingang, and her husband, Pete, he received distressing news.

“Somebody stole it,” Linda says.

The timing and the circumstances are hazy. But Old Cowbells was either taken directly off the wall at the VFW hall or from a storage area during an interior wall-painting project.

When they discovered it missing, Schott and Don King scoured every corner of the hall. But Old Cowbells was gone.

“He was really upset,” says Pete Leingang, who became one of Louie Schott’s fishing buddies after Pete and Linda became a couple.

“Fishing,” adds Linda, “is what he lived for.”

The Leingangs would love for Easterbrooks to have been able to display Old Cowbells in the WDFW office. It would be a wonderful tribute both to Louie Schott and to his greatest catch. But nobody knows where it is.

Easterbrooks is determined to find the missing mounted fish, and has asked the VFW to put a notice in an upcoming newsletter asking if anybody knows its whereabouts. He’s convinced it can be found.

“It’s probably in somebody’s attic somewhere,” Easterbrooks says. “I’m hoping maybe some relative will find it in an attic or a closet and give us a call. If it still exists, we’re going to find it and put it up in the lobby.

“This is my Moby Dick. I want to hunt this thing down.”

Louie Schott did just that, nearly a half-century ago.

But Old Cowbells is out there still.

• Outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry can be reached at 509-577-7689 or ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com.