HOME WATERS: FISHING WITH AN OLD FRIEND
by
JOSEPH MONNINGER


-HOME WATERS

FISHING WITH AN OLD FRIEND

Broadway Books New York

JOSEPH MONNINGER

BROADWAY

A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1999 by 
Chronicle Books.  It is here reprinted by arrangement with Chronicle 
Books.

HOME waters.  Copyright 1999 by Joseph Monninger.  All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.  No part of this book may be 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Monninger, Joseph.

Home waters: fishing with an old friend / Joseph Monninger.  p. em.

Originally published: San Francisco, CA : Chronicle Books, 1999.  1. 
Fly fishing--West (U.S.)--Anecdotes.  2. Dogs--Anecdotes.  3. 
Monninger, Joseph.  I. Title.  SH464.W4 M57 2000 636.752'7--dcZl 
00-024600 isbn 0-7679-0515-6 00 01 02 03 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1 for
WENDY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 Nellie 13 2 Where Dogs Come From 23

3 The Winds 43 4 Warm Springs 61 5 Yellowstone 83

6 Idaho 99 7 The Sun River 125 8 The Bighorn River 143 9 Tongue River
159 10 The North Platte 171 11 New Hampshire 181 To be successful, fly
fishers must live in a floating world away from the  routine duties and
schedules of life.  They adjust to the flow of the  water, the way of
the trout.  They are wholly preoccupied with finding  a fish that will,
for a few minutes, join them in the dance.  It is a  ballet between
partners--angler and fish--and set to the pace of the  fly above and
the trout below.  The water moves, but the world stops.

MR.  montgomery, the way OF THE trout Any of us who has owned a dog
that has taken a particular hold on our  heart has dwelt on the
unfairness of allocated time.  It seems but an  instant--or at best a
couple of good gunning seasons--and the puppy we  so carefully carried
home and placed on the rug by our bed has suddenly  become a little dim
of eye, a touch slow to get up in the morning, and  more and more
content to lay in some sunny spot and salute our  passings-by with a
turning of the head and a wagging of the tail.  Somehow even through
the dozen dogs I've owned I've never ceased to be  surprised and a
little hurt to discover that today Tippy or Ben or Judy doesn 't race
me to the door to go out but stands in the warmth of the  kitchen and
merely follows me with eyes and heart.

gene hill, fred 1in THE spring OF 1997 I took my eleven-year-old
Golden Retriever,  Nellie, to see the vet.  I had noticed a series of
lumps under her  skin, the lumps particularly dense along her spine. 
Goldens are  notorious for troublesome skin, but Nellie has always been
a beautiful  dog with a gorgeous coat and clear eyes. In the decade I
had lived  with her, she had been sprayed by skunks, quilled by
porcupines, even  attacked by a pit bull, but she had never been ill. 
I didn't like the  feel of the lumps.  One particularly large lump
rested beneath her right front leg, up where a human's lymph node might
be located.  Cancer, I thought, then tried to push the thought away. 
The next day I  watched her when she ran or walked and I checked to
make sure she ate  her food.  She seemed healthy enough, although
somewhat sluggish.  When  I took her on our daily walk she did not dart
off through the ferns and  pucker brush that border my New Hampshire
house.  She stayed beside me,  seemingly content to take a short walk
and return home.  She made it  back before I did and remained
stationary at the door, waiting to be  let inside. The night before
the appointment, I called Nellie into bed and pulled  her up close to
me.  It was April, still plenty cold at night, but I  had the window
cracked near the head of the bed.  Wind skittered  beneath the sash,
carrying the raw, syrup smell of approaching spring  in New England. 
It was a good smell.  I kept the bedside lamp on for a  while, then I
turned it off and pulled Nellie closer, her large back  spooned against
me.  I rubbed her chest.  I tickled the top of her  snout, an old thing
between us, then pet her soft head.  She didn't fall asleep at once. 
She grunted and made low, murmuring sounds.  Burrs  stuck to her belly,
small sticks, too, and I pulled them away and kept  brushing her until
her breathing matched mine.

Before that moment, before having Nellie in bed beside me, I admit I 
had taken her, if not for granted, at least as an immutable part of my 
life.  She was a fact in my daily activities.  Wake up, feed her, walk 
her, check her water. Noon, when possible, sneak home from my teaching 
job and give her a walk. Saturday mornings we loaded my Dodge Dakota 
pickup with our week's garbage, then headed to the Bridgewater Town 
dump.  Nellie rode beside me, and where a pasture stretched to a string
of peaks bordering Newfound Lake, I let her out and threw a Nylabone 
Frisbee a thousand, maybe ten thousand, times to her.  And because the 
pasture sloped gently downward, I could throw the Frisbee for fifty
yards or more and watch her streak through the timothy grass and 
beard's tongue, her fur dazzling in the bright Saturday light.

Eleven years.  That's what I thought about as I pet her in the 
darkness.  She had come to live with me in 1986, when I was married, 
and she had seen me through a divorce, through the beginning of a new 
start at teaching, through the sale of one home and the purchase of a 
new one, through days of wood cutting, through a summer on the Crow
Reservation in Montana, through  hundreds of hikes through the White
Mountains, through swims in the  ocean and lakes of New England and
Canada, and through nights when  sadness or depression closed in and I
could wait and count on the quiet  dip of the bed, the soft, comforting
curl of her coming to rest beside  me.  She was so much a part of my
life that at my office, without  Nellie around, I often spoke to air,
inadvertently mistaking the sound  of a furnace coming on or a
student's key chain for the rattle of her collar as she made her way to
me.  Nell, I'd say, and only realize  after the word was formed that
she wasn't nearby.

Suddenly that presence was in jeopardy.  I knew, lying next to her, 
that I was frightened for myself at least as much as for Nellie.  I 
needed the steadiness other demands, the consistency she brought to my 
life.  I couldn't imagine days without her.  So that night in bed I 
stayed close to her and whispered in her ear that she was a good girl, 
a Frisbee catcher, a lake swimmer.  I told her she had to get well, 
that she couldn't let cancer take hold of her.  She snored in response 
and I fell asleep some time later, a rain waking us in the morning.

At first light we walked down to a creek behind the house.  She 
wandered through the woods, the green leaves pushing from the birches 
almost translucent.  She liked to be out in the morning, I knew.  We 
stopped at Clay Brook and she had a long drink.  Front legs flexed, her
steady pink tongue lapping at water, she kept an eye ready for any 
movement in the woods.  I picked up scraps of pine kindling and bundled
 them against my chest.

When I had a full load, I whistled her up to head back.  She kept 
drinking for a little longer, then pushed away from the stream and 
trotted through the woods. I saw her intermittently as the trees 
obscured her passage, her gold fur visible one moment, then blending
with the early sun the next.  When I reached my  yard, she came up
behind me with a stick.  It was an established game  between us: she
snuck up and let the stick touch my hand and I grabbed  it quickly. 
Then she could lunge back, growling, pretending we were in  the fight
of a lifetime.  She shook her head back and forth, the stick  whacking
against my thighs.  Then it was my job to say okay, it's  yours, and
pretend disinterest.  She trotted back and stuck the stick  in my hand
and the game continued until I told her it was enough for  one day.

I stacked the kindling on the porch and told her it was time to get 
going.  She dropped the stick and came inside.  I gave her a biscuit at
the kitchen sink and she gave me her paw.  For some reason she had 
always given me her paw after the biscuit, not before as most dogs do. 
I found it a more honest exchange and told her so.  She went to lie on 
her dog bed while I got ready for the day.  Her eyebrows flexed up and 
down as she watched me move around the house.  When at last I asked if 
she wanted to go for a ride, she beat me to the door.  She hopped into 
my pickup, glad to be going for a ride on a spring day.

Dr.  Sweet is a large, comfortable man who holds a veterinarian's 
degree from Kansas State.  His office is located in a converted New 
England Cape in Rumney, New Hampshire.  Standing beside him as he 
examined Nellie, I tried to read his face.  I couldn't say for certain 
what he was thinking, though he seemed intent, focused in a way he 
might not be for an ordinary visit.  He took her temperature and said 
it was normal.  He checked her ears, her teeth, then ran his hands back
and forth over the lumps.  He asked me about their derivation, when I 
had first noticed them, how fast they had grown.  I told him I had
felt them now  and then, but they had never pushed as hard against her
skin, I said,  as they seemed to now.  He spent two or three minutes
lifting Nellie's  leg to examine the lump beneath her armpit.  He
explained that Goldens  often get fatty cysts, that lumps didn't mean
that she had cancer, but  that he thought they should probably come out
anyway.  He said he  worried about putting older dogs under sedation,
but that because she  seemed healthy, it might be worth it to get the
lumps out and take a  look.  He said if the lumps came back, then we
would have to start worrying.

"In fact, we could do it now," he said.

"I've got a free surgery block today."

It happened that fast.  A few minutes later, I handed Nellie's lead 
over to Dr.

Sweet's assistant, a young woman who had worked several years for him. 
She explained that they would keep Nellie overnight, that I could call 
at four to get an update on her condition, that someone would check on 
her during the night, and that I could pick her up first thing the 
following morning if everything went well.  She also warned me that 
they would probably have to shave a good deal of Nellie's fur, that I 
should be prepared to see her looking a little grim the next day.  Then
she held the leash while I squatted and gave Nellie a quick pet.  When
I stood, Nellie scrambled on the linoleum to come with me.  The 
assistant checked her with a tug, then took her back to cage her.  True
to her nature, once she understood what was expected of her, Nellie 
didn't resist.

Back in my truck, I found my hands were shaking.  I tried to dismiss 
the sadness, tried to think about other things.  Just a dog, I reminded
myself. Then, for the first time since I was a small boy, I started to
sob.  The cries came so quickly, and with such force, that I couldn't
hold them back.  I sobbed as I had not sobbed  over the death of my
father or mother, or over my divorce, though I  would be quick to
assure anyone that those human lives, that marriage,  counted more on
some humanistic scale than a Golden Retriever who stole  dinner scraps
from the counter or rolled in dead creatures to rob their  scent. 
Still, I cried.  Perhaps it was the notion that she was  innocent. 
Perhaps it was the knowledge that she had never been false  to me, that
she depended and trusted me wholly and without doubt.  It  did no good,
in the warmth of the pickup truck, to tell myself that it  was foolish
to feel so strongly about a dog.  I loved her as truly, and  as
unselfishly, as I had loved anything in my life.

I had classes the rest of the day and student conferences, but at four 
I closed the door to my office and called Dr.  Sweet.  He wasn't able 
to come to the phone, but his assistant told me they had removed 
seventeen lumps, some quite large, from various spots around her body. 
Nellie was resting.  She seemed fine and had taken the sedation well. 
She had been awake for an hour or two, had sipped from her water bowl, 
and had not worried the stitches at all.  They were pleased with her 
condition so far.  The assistant asked me if I wanted to send the 
tumors out for biopsy.  She said they couldn't determine if the tumors 
were malignant or not without a biopsy.  I told her no, I didn't think 
it mattered, that I wasn't going to authorize extensive surgery if she 
did have cancer and that it would probably be better not to know in any
case.  The assistant didn't seemed convinced, but I told her I was 
certain.  She said I could think about it overnight.  I promised I 
would.

The next morning I was at Dr.  Sweet's office when it opened at eight 
o'clock. As soon as Nellie heard my voice, she started to whine from
her crate.  I settled the bill with the receptionist, then waited 
while she explained the dosage for the antibiotics they prescribed to 
fight infection. The assistant passed by the desk to get Nellie and 
she warned me again that they had shaved a good deal of her hair.  I 
said I understood.

The front door of the office opened and a woman with a Pomeranian came 
in, the dog panting heavily for such a tiny creature.  Then I heard 
Nellie's claws raking the linoleum as she pulled to escape from the 
back quarters of the office.  The assistant said, "Whoa, Nellie," which
is a common joke when anyone handles my dog.  Nellie yanked around the
corner and exploded into my hands.  The assistant, I could tell, 
watched my reaction.  The cuts and shaved parts were horrible.  What 
before had been a magnificent coat was now pocked and degraded. The 
stitches stood out in black rows, thick as football laces, and it was
difficult to lay your hands on her without touching an incision.  I 
could tell immediately that she needed to walk because she refuses to 
go to the bathroom in cages or pens.

As quickly as I could, I thanked everyone and hustled out the door, 
Nellie pulling as she does not usually pull.  I took her across the 
driveway and let her do her business on a wide grassy field.  When she 
started to roll, doubtless trying to rid herself of the stitches, I 
gathered her up and got her in my truck.

I took her to McDonald's.  She loves cheeseburgers.  Sitting on the 
tailgate of my pickup, Nellie beside me, I fed her the cheeseburger and
tried to see the damage to her skin and body.  It was extensive, more 
extensive than I had dreamed possible.  Although she ate with good 
appetite, snapping the cheeseburger from my fingers with loud, lippy 
chomps, something had changed. Whether the lumps were malignant or 
not--and I had confirmed my decision not to have them biopsied--Nellie 
was no longer a pup.  I knew that, of course, and had understood it
intellectually for some time, but sitting on the tailgate, looking out
at the scrubby field of brush and sumac behind the McDonald's, my dog 
was suddenly old.

This dog, who had been dear to me for so long, whose only want in life 
was to be with me, was facing the first winds of her own death.

Overly dramatic, certainly.  I knew that.  But I realized--for whatever
psychological reasons others cared to apply--that I was one of those 
people who feel a connection with an animal beyond what others might 
consider normal.

Sitting on the tailgate of the truck, the cheeseburger gone and my arm 
up to hold her head on my shoulder, I decided that I wanted to take a 
last trip with Nellie.  I wanted to go out West, to Wyoming and 
Montana, to fly fish the streams I loved and to have Nellie with me.  I
wanted her to see bison and elk again, to wade in cold Western
streams,  to run across open mountain passes.  I knew that it was
probably  foolish, that to think of a dog in such terms meant that I
was guilty  of the worst kind of anthropomorphic attribution.  At the
same time,  though, I knew Nellie, knew what made her happy, knew what
made her bright and interested.  And more than that, I knew I owed her 
something, that the fidelity and love she had shown me throughout her 
life deserved acknowledgment.  If she was going to die from a cancer 
that might take her body, I wanted to know that I did what I could do 
to make her remaining time joyous. That was the bargain we struck on 
the tailgate behind McDonald's.  It was the reason we headed west for a
 month of fly-fishing.

We could not leave right away, however.  Nellie needed to mend, for one
thing, and I had commitments throughout the spring and summer.  We
aimed to leave in September, immediately after  Labor Day, hoping to
miss the crowds by doing so.  I spent a happy  summer collecting travel
maps, outlining the fishing trip, and getting  my tackle in order.  I
tried to keep my equipment to a minimum, but, as  always happens, my
inventory list soon filled with a float tube,  waders, two fly rods--a
five weight and a nine-weight--a cook stove,  pots and pans, heavy
clothes for the chilly nights I would encounter,  and a bathing suit in
case it became warm.  I brought along my fly  tying kit.  I brought
three flashlights, a tent, a sleeping cot,  matches of all kinds, bug
spray, a baseball hat, flannel shirts, boots,  Tevas, and water jugs. 
I filled a plastic chest with peanut butter and  jelly, tomato soup,
beans and rice, and cold cereal.  I loaded a purple  plastic vat with
Nellie's food, a Frisbee, a brush, and three leashes.  I arranged
everything in my living room, circling the couch little by  little,
until eventually I knew I could take no more without risk to my 
truck.

As soon as word leaked out that I was leaving, and that I was going on 
a prolonged fishing trip, fisher-friends began calling and giving
recommendations.

One knew of a place in Wyoming.  Another had a secret lake in Montana. 
I took down every suggestion and, gradually, began to see that it was 
possible to make a lazy U that would bring me along Route 80 from the 
south, bend up 287 through Wyoming, follow the Wind River Range in a 
kind of hypotenuse, hit Yellowstone, fish a place I knew in Idaho, then
travel up to the Sun River in Montana, bend down on Route 90, hit the 
Tongue River, a few streams in middle Montana, then finish in what is 
arguably the best fishing in the West--the Big Horn River.  I
immediately liked the symmetry of the trip.  I knew that by mid-October
it would be too cold to camp comfortably night after night and I 
preferred, if possible, to be heading east by then.  It may have made
more sense to start on  the northern leg first, but a dear friend of
thirty years, Bob Harvey,  caught the traveling bug when he heard about
the trip and agreed to  meet me in the Wind Rivers to hike in to some
of the alpine lakes where  the fishing, we knew from experience, is
incomparable.  We agreed to  rendezvous in Lander, Wyoming, to hike a
trail called Bears Ear, and to  fish what we could fish.  Bob added
that his brother-in-law, Tom, might  be persuaded to join us.

I spent the night before our departure making calls and arranging last 
minute details.  I checked my fishing tackle again.  Then I made sure I
had the maps, the flashlights, the sleeping bag.  Check and double 
check.  Finally I sat at my dining room table and did little more than 
look out the window where my backyard lay illuminated under a 
floodlight.  As always happens before I leave on a journey, my home 
seemed especially dear:

the sound of the refrigerator coming on and off, the click of the 
furnace, the clink of heat ticking through the registers.

I checked Nellie before going to bed.  Her lumps had not returned.  Her
fur had grown back, covering the stitches and making her coat
wonderful  again.  I put her through her tricks.  I made her give me
her paw, sit,  down-stay, then heel. She did everything I asked.  I
gave her a couple  of biscuits from the kitchen, and then told her it
was time to go to  sleep.  She jumped into bed with me, and huffed a
little as she curled  up for the night.  We lay quiet for a while and
listened to the house  close down for sleep.  I felt nervous and
excited, ready to go.  The  acorns kept twanging off the roof, autumn
already here.

WHERE

FROM

dogs ARE A STANDING INTRODUCTION.  I knew that once, but had forgotten 
it somewhere along the line.  A man traveling alone in a pickup truck 
wearing khaki shorts and a baseball cap is often the object of 
suspicion.  But a man traveling with an attractive dog, and a clear 
intent to fish, is another matter altogether.  The first night out, at 
Lake Erie State Park in western New York, I tied Nellie to a long lead 
attached to the picnic table in our small camping spot.  I fed her, 
gave her water, then busied myself setting up sleeping arrangements.. 
It's a distinct pleasure, and a bit disorienting, to find yourself 
putting into practice what you had planned for months beforehand.

Although I had brought a tent along, my design was to sleep in my truck
on an old cot that I had packed for that purpose.  To make room, 
however, I had to unload nearly everything and pile it on top of the 
fiberglass truck cap or squeeze it into the front cab.  Before five 
minutes had passed, I realized I had turned my truck into what used to 
be known in California as a surfing safari wagon.  With an inflated 
float tube on top, plastic vats of dog food and cereal, waders,
flippers, a box containing my fly tying gear,  I was clearly designated
as a man going fishing.  Even the campground  host, who had taken my
ten dollars and pointed me to the appropriate  tent slot, swung by
again on his golf cart and asked where I was going  fishing, how long I
would be out.

When I told him my idea for the trip, he related some of his own fish 
stories, again providing me with a place that couldn't miss, a place 
where the trout did the back stroke and waited to oblige fishermen.

But it was Nellie who made the most friends.  At the end of her lead, 
she stretched to sniff the hands of a pack of children who came by, 
their fingers coated with marshmallow goo.  In the campfire dimness, 
the children circled her and spoiled her, then ran off to wash for bed.
Their place was taken by an older woman who passed with a towel around
her neck and a flowered shower kit in her hand.  She was at least 
sixty, apparently alone;

I had seen her sitting at her own picnic table beside a minivan with 
Wisconsin plates.  Switching her shower kit into her left hand, she 
bent to pet Nellie, who continued to strain at the end other lead. 
When  the woman stood, she said to me, "Nice dog."  Then she shifted
her  towel around her neck again.

That was all it took.  Nellie had served to introduce us, and for the 
next half hour the woman, whose name was Ronnette, kept one hand on my 
dog's back, the other on her towel.  She told me she was on her way to 
visit her granddaughter, brand new, who had been born three weeks 
before.  She said she was going to Massachusetts, heading the other 
way, east to my west, and she had considered flying but it had been 
years since she had taken a long drive and, besides, she actually liked
to camp a little.  She had camped often with her husband, Ben, who had
died three years ago.  They had owned a collie once, a black and
white one, not a brown and white one like Lassie, and it had been a 
wonderful dog, but prone to chewing, especially when left alone.

Nellie gave her complete attention to Ronnette, except when the 
children passed by and again fussed over her.  When the children 
departed, Ronnette said that her collie, KoKo, had died a long time 
ago, probably somewhere in the middle eighties.  Then she thought about
it for a second and tried to remember exactly, performing that curious
exercise that dogs seem to draw out of people.  Dogs, I knew, were 
about time.  For most people a dog recalled a specific period, and I
would find, throughout my trip, that people who encountered Nellie told
me about their own dogs, then inevitably remembered the dog's death. 
And when the people spoke about their dog's ending, they almost always 
kept one hand on Nellie, their eyes looking off in the distance.

When Ronnette went back to her camp, I spent a little while tying 
flies.  I am an atrocious fly tier but I like the idea of doing it even
 if I am ham-handed.

Besides, I needed to replenish my fly box.  I clamped my vise to the 
picnic table and began tying my specialty, a triple-hackled tri co It's
my specialty because it is the simplest fly a person can tie.  After 
wrapping glitter around the stem of the hook, I topped the shank with 
three hackles.  The hackles go on in a straightforward manner-dark, 
white, dark.  The triple hackle, in addition to being a simple fly to 
tie, represents nearly anything moving in the water. It is as close as 
one can come to a universal fly.  I tied it in the darkness by the 
light of a headlamp.  The poor lighting might have been an excuse for a
better fly tier but my flies came out as poorly as they always did. 
Nellie wandered around at the end of her lead.  The campground grew 
more quiet.  I finished four flies before calling it a night.  By then
the campfires had begun to  die and I smelled their sweet fragrance,
the scent of an encampment.  Now and then I saw the silhouettes of
people standing in their tents,  preparing for bed.  The crickets
hardly spoke.

I took Nellie for a final walk.  She is good about such things.  I can 
say "last walk" and she knows it is time to be serious.  We walked 
through the campground, then wandered over to a wide patch of grass. 
The grass led to a meadow, which in turn led to a group of power line 
stanchions.  From there, I figured, you could walk for miles.

At a safe distance from the campground, I let her off her lead.  She 
walked with the high-gaited step she sometimes uses when the grass is 
wet.  She inspected the hedgerow, the dense dam of bushes that pushed 
out from the uncut patches of growth.  She has always liked, as most 
dogs do, the green tidal zone where forest meets meadow.  She spent a 
few minutes sniffing and wading through the olive-colored grass.  She 
looked beautiful in the meadow, the moonlight picking her up enough to 
reveal her fine coat, the white puff of a tail.  She found a certain 
bush that held her interest, then she gave it up and circled around
until she concluded her nightly chores.  We stood for a while afterward
and looked around.  Someone once told me that Charles Darwin
speculated  that eighty percent of the planet's population does not
lift its eyes  above the horizon once a day.  Whether true or not,
whether Darwin ever  said it or not, the quote has stuck in my brain
and I have made it my  routine to look up at least once every
twenty-four hours.  More often  than not, I use my last walk with
Nellie each night to survey the  stars.  I have learned the stars'
names, at least some of them, a  hundred different times, but
invariably I forget them a month later.  I know the North Star.  I
know a few of the planets.  But I  have decided, in recent years, that
it is okay to fail at the  constellations, consoling myself that names
don't change the nature of  a thing.  The stars don't alter no matter
what we call them, so now,  when people from the cities visit, I tell
them all manner of nonsense,  inventing names on the spot.

Nellie, I have noticed, rarely looks above the horizon.  I am not sure 
she has ever done so in her life.  I have tried, at various times, to 
get her interested in a stellar phenomenon--I wondered, for example, if
she would have any reaction to HaleBopp--but she appears to be 
oblivious.  Standing next to her in the field, I let my hand dangle on 
her head.  I rubbed the space between her eyes, then tickled the top of
her skull.  She sat and let me keep going.  I played the childhood
game  of blinking my left eye to make the stars jump one way, then my
right  eye to make them jump the other way.  By doing it quickly, I
could  force one star to leap over the point of a pine.

We went back to the truck.  Nellie walked easily on her leash.  I 
hooked her to the towing ball while I cleaned the picnic table.  I 
packed up everything, stowing it as carefully as I could, and realized,
as I did so, that much of traveling is fussing.  I put what I could on
the roof of the truck, keeping things off the ground and away from 
raccoons.  I figured we would have a frost.

It was likely I would have frost every night from now on.

When I finished wrapping up camp, I put down the tailgate and let 
Nellie leap in first.  I had set up an L.L. Bean cedar dog bed next to 
the cot, but naturally she preferred my bed.  She curled into a ball on
top of my sleeping bag and tried to ignore me.  She went limp on 
purpose, hogging everything, which is a terrible trick she likes to 
play.  I climbed in and shoveled her off, but not without an awkward 
struggle.  Eventually I yanked the tailgate up and we were in,
buttoned up for the night.  A nice breeze  lifted off Lake Erie.  This
cot was home for the next month, I told  Nellie, but she didn't appear
to pay attention.  I turned this way and  that, settling in, adjusting
to the sensation--familiar but always  surprisingly constricting--of
sleeping in a mummy bag.

I nicked on my headlamp and read a bit from So Little Time by John 
Marquand.  I nearly always bring Marquand on camping trips, not only 
because I admire him so, but because his books are about martinis and 
weekends in other people's houses.

His books are like portable black-and-whke movies, the best kind, and 
nearly as important, they take time to read.  You don't want a short, 
snappy book on a camping trip.

After a while I turned off the headlamp and put Marquand aside.  For a 
time I stayed awake, nervous and eager, happy to be started but also 
aware that no one in the world knew where I was at that moment.  I 
reached down and put my hand on Nellie's rising ribs.  She rolled over 
to have her belly rubbed, but I was too tired to oblige her.  I fell 
asleep to her paw gently cuffing my wrist, trying to get my hand 
started.

I was living with my wife, Amy, at the St.  Paul's School in Concord, 
New Hampshire, when we decided to get a dog.  It was August.  Earlier 
that summer we had been house-sitting in Putney, Vermont, and our daily
walk had taken us past a beautiful antique Cape with the requisite 
Golden Retriever outside.  The retriever was old, and somewhat unsteady
on her feet, but she invariably barked twice when we arrived, rose to
a  standing position, her back hips obviously arthritic, then tottered 
toward us, her tail going.  It was a highlight of our walk, if not of
our  entire day. We didn't know the dog's name, but because she was so 
reticent to come forward, and because she barked at us every single 
day, one of us named her Shy Girl. The name stuck.  From that point 
on, whenever we talked about the possibility of getting a dog, we 
talked about Shy Girl.

If dogs are about time, they are also about the romance of steadiness. 
In American mythology, dogs come with screen doors that slam, swing 
sets, leaf raking parties, and jack-olanterns.  For many of us, we want
the idea of a dog long before we want the dog itself.  Shy Girl, 
although she was a loving dog and entirely wonderful in her own right, 
was also a symbol for us.  We had met approximately ten years earlier 
and since then we had lived in Africa, Vienna, and New York.  Our 
travel had been exciting, but we had failed to set roots.  In our 
summers as teachers, we had led student groups to Australia, New 
Zealand, Canada, Holland, England, and France.  Suddenly, however, we 
were thirty-five years old with a limited bank account, no permanent 
home, and a growing suspicion that we needed to settle into something 
lasting.

St.  Paul's seemed to answer that need.  Amy took a position as an 
English teacher, and as a dorm mom, while I taught as a visiting 
professor at the University of New Hampshire.  We were given wonderful 
accommodations in Friendly House, the old converted servants' quarters,
and were put in charge of forty or fifty girls.  Amy was gifted as a 
student advisor.  On dorm duty every second or third night, she made a 
fire in our living room, sat at an old oak table with her work spread 
in front of her, and counseled students, joked with them, talked about 
boys, took temperatures, and, in her quiet moments, wrote lavishly on 
their themes and papers. I think, perhaps, we got a dog instead of
having a child.  I also  think we knew, on some level, what we were
doing, though neither one of  us admitted it at the time.  I'm certain
the people around us, on  hearing chat we were getting a dog, probably
rolled their eyes and said  we should be having children instead.

Looking back, I've often thought that we remained childless because we 
each silently suspected that we were not staying together.  We told 
each other, surrounded by children, that we needed none of our own.

A dog was another matter.  The arguments for a dog were compelling. 
St.  Paul's has always been overrun with dogs.  The school is set on an
exquisite campus, approximately 118 acres of New Hampshire meadows, 
forests, and lakes.  Faculty and staff tend to stay for years, giving 
the entire school a sense of continuity.  When a groomer friend 
mentioned that a friend of a friend had just come into a first-rate 
litter of Golden Retrievers, we didn't hesitate.  It was time for a 
dog.

On a bright September Saturday morning, the first chill of autumn 
making us sit outside and find the sun while we drank our coffee, we 
left St.  Paul's to get Nellie.  We had both had beagles as kids, Amy's
dog named Cookie, mine named Porky, but that had been years ago.  On 
the phone, the trainer had said we could have Brown Boy, a male, for 
$400.  She said we could take a female for $200, but that the breeders 
required an agreement that the bitch not be neutered, and that the 
breeder got to pick the first and third pup from a litter.  The trainer
also said the breeders had a specialist supervising the dogs' breed
characteristics, and that they would find a suitable mate after the 
female passed through two estrous cycles.  We listened to all this 
information about reproduction half-heartedly.  Against all advice to 
the contrary--new dogs owners generally do better with females because
females tend to be less dominant--we wanted a  male.

We drove along Route 7 to a beautiful farmhouse in southern New 
Hampshire and stepped out of the car to find a litter of Golden 
Retriever puppies wobbling around a spacious lawn.  What had been a 
prospecting trip--maybe we'd get a dog, maybe we wouldn't--rapidly 
became a shopping trip.  We were sunk.  The puppies were ten weeks old 
and ridiculously cute.  Brown Boy, when the trainer pointed him out, 
was a large, frumpy piece of fur.  He was very sweet, but somehow,
whenever we looked around, a small female seemed to be trailing us. 
She  had a thinner face than Brown Boy, but she also seemed more alert.
On  our knees on either side of the pack, we asked the trainer to
explain  again the conditions for a female.  She did.  Then she left us
alone to  think about which dog we might like.

The dogs wandered between us, wrestling and sleeping almost at random, 
and we watched them closely.  I wish that Amy and I had talked more 
about what was going on, what the dogs represented, but I suppose it is
the nature of divorce that it has its beginnings in many things, not 
all of them knowable.  Dogs are about time, as I've said, and at that 
time we wanted a dog.  Neither of us was wise enough to look behind 
that desire.

Nellie was the one we wanted.  Her official American Kennel Club name 
was Star Lake Nell.  She came from a litter in Hanover, up near 
Dartmouth.  We wrote a check, agreed to all the conditions concerning 
reproduction, then bundled her into the car.  Amy drove and I kept 
Nellie entertained on my lap until she fell asleep.  Her fur was soft 
and she smelled like doughnuts.

I read books on dog obedience and worked hard on making her sic, come, 
stay, heel.  We crate-trained her.  In the afternoons or the early
evenings, we walked her all over the school grounds,  going through the
Pillsbury fields, the long trail along Turkey Pond,  and even the trout
stream in the center of campus.  A young teaching  intern named John
had just acquired a black Lab puppy named Gusty, so  we walked
frequently with them, letting the dogs run and wrestle, their  bodies
nearly inexhaustible.  If dogs did nothing else for us except  force us
to take to the fields and rivers in all kinds of weather, that  would
surely be enough.

It's likely I spent too much time with Nellie, that I relied too much 
on her companionship, because my wife and I had started to drift apart.
In our continued effort to put down roots, an effort that would prove 
futile, we bought a century-old home on Port Hood Island, Nova Scoria. 
It had belonged to a lobster man originally and had remained in his 
family for three generations.

Financially, it was a crazy move and caused incredible strain in our 
marriage.

We lived fourteen hours of hard driving away from the house.  We would 
have been far wiser to have purchased a house in northern New Hampshire
where we might have had good weekends away from the confinement of
prep  school life, but our vision was that we would spend the summers
at the  island house, improving it gradually every year.  Besides, the
house  overlooked the sea, with wide grass fields sloping down to an 
incredible blue.  It was a place, we thought, to make a stand.  We 
would teach in New Hampshire through the fall and spring, then spend 
glorious summers on an island of grass and ocean.  The same house on 
the Maine coast, we liked to tell each other, would be worth several 
million dollars.

Nellie was part of that house.  She came with us when we drove up that 
first summer.  She was able to swim whenever she liked, dipping down to
the ocean that ran up onto our land.  During the hotter parts of the 
day, she sat in the shade, looking out at the birds and boats.  I
converted a fishing shed to a writing  room, the old gray beams hung
with lobster gear, and Nellie spent her  mornings with me there, laying
in the sunny doorway, tail ready to  greet anyone who came by.  In the
evenings we played croquet with the  kids on the island, Nellie
constantly sneaking in to run off with one  of the colorful balls.  A
picture of those evenings, with the island  kids barefoot, the adults
watching the game on Adirondack chairs,  Nellie running freely, the sea
everywhere, can still fill me with  longing.

One morning in the middle of our first summer on the island, when Bert 
Smith, our local caretaker, and I were approximately a half mile out to
sea checking his mackerel nets, I turned to look landward and saw a 
wake coming toward me.

Occasionally we saw what the locals called "black fish," or harbor 
whales, and I told Bert we had one approaching.  But when I looked 
again and squinted against the morning glare, I realized it was Nellie.
She was nine months old. She had seen me go to sea, so she had gone to
sea.  She was swimming after me, her ears spread on the surface of the
sea, her breathing a chaaa chaaa chaaa, her paws paddling endlessly 
through the swells.  She had been swimming for the better part of an 
hour at least, her gaze fixed on me.  We pulled her into the boat and I
fussed over her while she shook off the water.  Nellie, like most
dogs,  simply accepted that I had forgotten her, that she had rectified
the situation, and now we could go on with the day.  Watching her shake
off  in the sun, Bertie said he had seen deer sometimes swimming miles
off  shore, driven to the sea by insects, then swept out by currents. 
He  said he had seen a deer go down that way, its antlers sinking below
the  surface until a last survival impulse pushed it up again, its
antlers  butting against heaven before it dropped finally into the sea
water. When I told Nellie's story later to a friend, she remarked that
love,  if it was anything, was the ability not to hesitate.  She said
Nellie  had fetched her heart to me and that she would always find me
wherever  I went.  She said the fact that Nellie did not think when she
came to  the water, did not weigh anything, but simply followed what
she loved,  was something, ultimately, to be envied.

We lost the island house in the divorce.  On teachers' salaries, 
neither one of us was able to maintain a summer residence so far 
removed from our daily lives.

We sold the house and divided our other property, including our pets. 
Amy took an old tomcat named Gray Man.  I took Nellie.  I had spent 
more time with her, had trained her, and, in some way, needed a dog in 
a way Amy did not.  After thirteen years together, I moved out with the
 contents of one pickup truck, Nellie on the seat beside me.

Nellie and I arrived in Lander, Wyoming, at noon on our fourth day out.
The entrance to Lander from the south is dramatic.  The land turns red
and begins to tuck closer to the road, forming a ruddy chute that
drops  from the plateau into a valley that contains the Wind River.  At
the  brink of town, you begin to see fishing access signs.  These signs
are  scattered all over the West.  Brown and rectangular, with a white
hook  dangling in front of wide-eyed fish, they are somewhat torturous
to  pass, because each one seems promising.  Fishermen use them to
guide  each other to good spots.  Find the fishing access spot, then
wade upstream, they will tell each other.  I slowed as I passed each
access  point, not because I intended to fish them, but because I
wanted to make mental notes.  My short-term memory is abysmal and 
seems to get worse every year, but I have never had difficulties 
remembering fishing spots.

Nellie, when she felt the truck wind down at these signs, looked 
rapidly from me to the road.  She had been a good sport about the 
traveling, taking our short breaks well and chasing the Frisbee if I 
threw it, but she was bored.  Most mornings she slept with her chin on 
my knee, but in the afternoons she was restless.  Now, with the truck 
slowing to examine the fishing signs, she stood, then sat, then stood 
again.  Her nose rubbed the windshield from inside.  It was already 
streaked with a thousand nose marks, but she found a few new spots to
mark.  It did no good, at this point, to tell her to relax.  She wanted
out and I didn't blame her.  Suddenly, we had arrived.  We had seen
the  sky opening for the last two days and now it was bright above us,
wide  in a way that it is never wide in the East.

I pulled over not next to the river, but on a small dirt road heading 
into what appeared to be a ranch pushed up against the Wind River 
Range.  Side roads are always best for running a dog and this one 
promised to be excellent.  A cattle grate covered the intersection of 
the dirt road and the interstate.  On either side of the road, pale 
green sage spread for miles.  As soon as I stopped the truck, I popped 
open the passenger door.  Nellie flew off the seat, her body so eager 
to be moving she couldn't wait.  By the time I climbed out, she was
already down off the crest of the dirt road, her tail up, her nose 
skimming the ground.

She galloped over the field, whisking through sage, her back legs 
impatient with her front legs, so desperate was she to run.  Now and 
then she stopped and looked at me, apparently not trusting her luck 
that she was free to run as long as she liked.  I told her to go.  She 
didn't need to be told twice. I opened the tailgate, pulled out
sandwich fixings, and sat and  watched.  I had time to eat a peanut
butter and jelly sandwich before  she returned.  She was winded.  Her
tongue lolled out of the right side  of her mouth and her fur was
dotted with burrs.  I brushed her out,  poured water for her, then gave
her a couple of biscuits.  She panted  around, lapping the water and
slopping things onto the dry ground  before she finally found a spot in
the shade under the tailgate.  She  flumped onto the dirt and reclined
backward, happy to have a run, happy  to be cool in the white soil.  As
always, it surprised me that she had  no further expectation.  If I had
decided to stay the next two months  in my truck, living on peanut
butter and jelly and reading books on my  tailgate, she would have
remained gladly beside me.  If I moved to  Boston and decided to take a
small apartment, she would have lived with  me there.

We drove into town a little later.  Lander, like many towns in the 
West, has undergone a conversion to the eco-trade, adventure travel 
business that sustains many western regions in a manner ranching would 
be hard pressed to match.  The fleece economy, a friend of mine calls 
it, referring to the preferred clothing of the clients.  NOLS, an 
organization for outdoor learning, is headquartered in Lander, and you 
can almost always spot the people who work there, most of them driving 
Jeeps and wearing expensive sunglasses.  Lander's streets are wide and 
dotted with tourist shops selling postcards, disposable cameras, and 
Native American gear.  There are also several taxidermy stores, some 
with signs saying they are willing to trade antlers.  Signs throughout
Wyoming tell you how far you are from Yellowstone, and Lander is no 
exception. Lander is not a destination anywhere near as popular as 
Yellowstone, but it is becoming more popular, which subjects it to the
kind of Catch36 22 that threatens hot places for the fleece trade. 
Drawn to out of-the-way places, the fleece trade invades an area until 
it becomes overrun by other fleece traders.  Gradually, then, it 
becomes less interesting, less remote in the best sense, and becomes 
less appealing to a group of people who define themselves by the status
gained by getting away from it all.  The same principle,
unfortunately,  can often be applied to anglers.

Nellie and I had the afternoon to kill while we waited for my longtime 
friend and fishing buddy, Bob Harvey, and his brother-in-law, Tom, whom
I had never met.  I parked in the center of town and found a spot on a
bench in the sun.  The heat felt good.  Nellie curled up in a shady 
spot nearly underneath the bench and pretended to sleep.  I looked at 
my watch.  Bob and Tom were arriving from Salt Lake City near five.  I 
had at least three hours on my hands.  After a while I walked over to 
The Good Place, an outdoor shop specializing in fishing and hunting.  I
tied Nellie to a pole outside and went in to browse the topo maps.  I
hate appearing like a sport, an easterner who has come out West on 
holiday, but it was unavoidable.  Eventually one of the store clerks 
came over to help me. She said Bears Ear, the trail we intended to 
take the next day, was a great hike.

She also said the Popo Agie River ran at the end of town and if I had 
an afternoon to kill, it wouldn't be a bad place to get out the 
kinks.

I paid for a license, which I needed anyway, then followed her 
directions out to the edge of town.  Nellie guessed what was up and had
the jitters at the thought of taking a swim.  We found a brown sign 
that indicated fishing access and parked in a square dirt lot.  The sun
 was still hot.

It took me a while to dig my fishing equipment out of the truck bed. 
Nellie, impatient for the water, kept running to the cattle fence that
lined the bank, inspecting it, then running back to  me.  The water,
when I looked in that direction, appeared a metal  shelf, a glinting
rigid blade stabbed through brown hills and brush.

It took ten minutes to get rigged up.  I gave Nellie a biscuit that she
hardly tasted.  She wanted the water and that was all.  When I slapped
my thigh to tell her I was ready, she darted off and slipped under a 
strand of barbed wire, performing a GI crawl I didn't know she knew how
to do.  I carried a five-weight rod down to the river.  As I 
approached, the water softened.  It was no longer metal, but liquid 
instead, the melt of sun on rock and brown grasses.  Crickets frittered
up and into the light.  Behind me black mountains stretched in a line
toward the horizon.  The land smelled of cattle and barns and corn.

Nellie waited for me chest deep in the river.  She often ruins good 
fishing holes, but her company is worth it to me.  I told her, though, 
that she would have to swim upstream or downstream but she didn't 
listen.  She bent and lapped at the water, refreshed after our long 
days of driving.

The Popo Agie, the section on the outskirts of Lander, was small and 
beautiful.

It rolled back and forth, twisting over farm country, bordered, in most
places, by barbed wire fences.  I walked downstream a bit until I
found  what appeared to be a particularly deep hole.  I unhooked my
fly, a  black gnat, and cast.  The water met the fly and carried it, as
each  river does, toward the sea.

I did not fish particularly well.  I was too conscious of my 
surroundings, of the fact that I was merely killing time, to 
concentrate properly on the river. I believe rivers and fish know such 
things--they detect a fake.  Besides, I had never heard of the Popo 
Agie until an hour before, and I am skeptical of rivers until they
prove themselves to me.  I fished by form rather than with  passion,
hopeful but not avid.  The real fishing hadn't begun, I told  myself. 
Nellie wandered back and forth, exploring the sage and meadow  grasses.
It was good to have her out.  She splashed quite a bit but I  didn't
blame her.

In two hours' fishing I did not have a nibble.  The sun began to run on
the water, taking an angle and tucking shadows next to rocks and into 
the ripples.

Crickets whirled in the light and landed on the water, riding the 
current, passing from sun to shadow.  I watched to see if a trout took 
them, but the crickets rode out of sight, bobbing downstream, 
impervious, eventually tricks of light and distance transforming them 
to water.  I changed flies regularly, trying to match the insects, but 
never unlocked the river.

Around five I called Nellie and we went back to the truck.  While I 
pulled off my waders, she had a good roll in the dust.  We drove into 
town with the windows halfway up, cold slipping down from the 
mountains.  I parked next to The Good Place, the rendezvous spot with 
Bob and Tom, and waited.

The Wind River Range stretched all around us.  I had been in the Winds 
before and knew some of their history.  Though not as famous as the 
Grand Tetons, they are probably the greatest mountain range in Wyoming 
and arguably in the lower forty eight states.  The seven largest 
glaciers in the Rocky Mountain states are located in the Winds. 
Gannett  Peak, at 13,804 feet, spikes the center of the range and is
the highest  peak in Wyoming.  The Winds are granitic and separate the
Green River  basin to the south and west from the Wind River basin to
the north and  east.  The range runs on a north-west diagonal along
Route 287 from Atlantic City at the south end, up past Lander, Ft. 
Washakie,  Crowheart, Burris, Dubois, eventually bleeding into the
Grand Tetons at Moran Junction.  On the southern rim,  traveling Routes
189 and 191, you can hit Hoback Junction, Bondurant,  and Pinedale. 
The range encompasses Shoshone National Forest, the  Fitzpatrick
Wilderness, Bridger National Forest, Bridger Wilderness,  the Popo Agie
Wilderness, and the Wind River Indian Reservation.

What we now call Wyoming is the land of Arapaho, Bannock, Blackfoot, 
Cheyenne, Crow, Sioux, Lakota, Ute, and Shoshone people.  When French 
trappers began making their way down the rivers, sometime in the 
mid-1700s, the Indians were waiting for them, alerted by word of mouth.
The Shoshone, who inhabited much of the Wind River area, were known as
the "snake" Indians.  They formed compact, isolated family groups, who
collected seeds, roots, fish, birds, and small game such as rabbits in
their proper season.  They returned to the same areas once each year 
and referred to each other according to the main food source of a
region.  There were Seed Eaters, Rabbit Eaters, and so forth.  If the 
family units had an abundance of food, they gathered together where 
winter was mild to form a village.  After the Shoshone acquired horses 
from the Spaniards, they became buffalo hunters like the Plains 
tribes.

Sacagewea, who served as a guide and interpreter for Lewis and dark, 
was a Shoshone.  So were the chieftains Pocatello and Washakie.  The 
Wind River Indian Reservation was presented to Chief Washakie in 1868 
in return, our government said, for the Shoshone's friendliness to 
white people and their help in fighting tribes hostile to settlers. 
Washakie was buried in the town named after him, located halfway up the
Winds.  And it was near Ft.  Washakie, just past the Wind River Indian
Reservation, that Nellie and I were going to fish. From inside the
pickup we waited and watched the sun fade to a tired  red, the long
boulevard behind us growing shadowy and washed.  Nellie  nosed at a fly
that had made its way to the dashboard.  I reached into  the truck bed
and grabbed the green L.L. Bean dog pack I had already  loaded with
mittens and hats and her supply of dog food.  I anchored it  across her
back by tightening the straps under her legs and across her  chest. 
She sniffed at the pack, recognized it as hers, then looked  straight
ahead.  Hiking, I told her, but she didn't seem to make much  of that
so I changed it to Walk.  Immediately she perked up and stood, ready to
go.  I grabbed her front paws and made her dance the cha-cha a  little.
I put her ears above her head and told her she looked like a  Russian
peasant woman.  She tolerated everything, although clearly she  would
have preferred a walk.  The bear bells on her backpack tinkled 
whenever she moved. at ten thousand feet in the Wind River Range of
Wyoming, I caught the  first trout of the trip.  Bob and I had been
casting in Dutch Oven Lake  for nearly an hour, our lines sinking in
water so clear that you could  watch the fly drift to the bottom thirty
or forty feet below.  We had  caught nothing, though occasionally small
ducks--buffleheads, I  thought, known locally as Spirit
Ducks--flittered on the surface at the  liquid slap of our five-weight
lines.  It was three o'clock and late  September and the temperature
was dropping again. Tom snapped  photographs of us and lolled around,
watching to see what kind of fishermen we might be.  Nellie stood next
to me, her chin against my  left knee, her eyes waiting for the tiny
explosion that meant trout.

"We should try the feeder streams," one of us said.  It didn't matter 
which one of us said it.  We both understood that the lake fishing was 
futile.

But we didn't move at first.  We were all tired.  We had hiked seven or
eight miles that day with sixty-pound packs, gaining and losing then
gaining again approximately three thousand feet along  Bears Ears.  We
had already set up camp, gathered wood, and staked out  our Eureka
tent.

The night before, in the high winds, the tent fly had torn free and 
flapped most of the night.  None of us had slept well.  Now, as the sun
fell and pushed the temperature closer and closer to forty, it was 
tempting to give up on the fishing and head to our camp.  To move at 
that altitude meant shortness of breath and a rapid heart and there was
 no guarantee that we would catch fish after hiking even farther.

I also think we suffered from a shared willingness to keep fishing no 
matter how unpromising the water.  In fact, as odd as it might sound, I
am suspicious that we frequently preferred not to catch fish.  I have 
never talked to another fisherman about it, but after twenty years of 
fly-fishing I am almost certain most fishermen possess a peculiar bend 
to their makeup.  Fishermen are optimists, and the fish in the future 
is always preferable to the fish at hand. Even the best fishermen 
catch fish only a small percentage of the time, which means we 
persevere in a sport that features failure as its main ingredient.
Truly great days, when the fish hammer the fly as soon as it settles on
the surface, are rare.  They are especially rare in the East, unless 
one happens to be on a river or lake when the stocking truck delivers. 
Bob, I knew, was particularly prone to this low-grade masochism.  One 
day on the Deerfield River in Massachusetts we arrived at dawn on a 
spring morning to find the dam-controlled waters gushing at an 
incredible height.  Given the water conditions, we needed to be on the 
other bank, and after some debate we settled on a five-mile walk back 
to a bridge that traversed the river, then back up along the other side
of the stream.  It took hours, but when we finally arrived on the 
distant side the fishing was rewarding.  We caught six or seven
fourteen-inch rainbow trout within  an hour.

Bob, however, after two or three fish, became itchy.  He knew he could 
catch fish there, he said, so what was the challenge?  When I pointed 
out that we had walked five miles to get in position, and that, 
furthermore, we had been skunked at the Deerfield plenty of times, he 
was unmoved.  He said he knew we could catch fish where we were, so 
what was the thrill?

It's a puzzling perspective to take for people who spend a considerable
amount of time pursuing trout, but I've seen it manifest itself in 
enough fishing companions to know it's a part of the fishing equation. 
Perhaps it's as the wonderful fisherman writer Roderick Haig-Brown 
said: "I want fish from fishing, but I want a great deal more than that
 and getting it is not always dependent on catching fish."

Eventually we moved from Dutch Oven.  We had come several thousand 
miles, after all, and to stop at this point would have been 
disappointing, to say the least.

Nellie led us along the shore until we came to the small stream 
spilling away from the lake.  The stream had no name on our topo.  It 
was a thin blue line snaking away from Dutch Oven, winding into willow 
bogs somewhere in the next valley.  I told Nellie to sit, that we were 
going to fish, but she ignored me.

She splashed into the first pool and drank for the time it took me to 
switch from a Blue Winged Olive to a black Letort's Cricket.  It's 
common fishing wisdom to go to terres trials in autumn, and the Letort 
replicated the small black grasshoppers that skittered the grass along 
the lake.

I cast to the tail of the pool, not far from where a log lay submerged 
beneath a white sheen of running water.  In the instant the cricket 
landed, the white sheen seemed to gather its molecules and become a
trout.  The shape appeared not from the bottom  or from the darkness
near the log, but came, as a thought, to take the  fly.  I lifted the
tip of my fly rod and suddenly the fish swirled and  became separate
from the water, and I saw it as an animal, a creature,  and I led it to
me.  Nellie took a step into the water and watched,  head cocked, to
determine that this was not a stick to fetch.  She  looked back and
forth from me to the fish.  I told her to leave it, and  she did, her
ears tucked forward to listen, her fur dripping a drizzle  into the
cold stream.

It was a cutthroat, seven or eight inches long.  I released it 
underwater and saw it flash back to its hiding spot, light breaking it 
apart and obscuring it.

Nellie took another step forward, unsure of what had occurred.

"Trout," I told her.  After studying the word for a moment, she put her
tongue in the water and lapped at it.  Her fur, where the water
touched  it, blended from golden to mahogany.

"Got one," I told Bob when I walked downstream to join him a few 
minutes later.

He stood next to a beautiful pool, fiddling with his line.  Water 
slipped through three or four rocks near his boots, then blossomed into
a wide pool perhaps five feet deep.  Tom sat well back, his camera out
 and clicking.  Nellie went to sit with Tom.

"What did you get it on?"  Bob asked.

"A Letort's Cricket," I said.

"Black."

"Okay," he said.

I sat and watched.  It took Bob a few minutes to thread the leader 
through his cricket.  We are both forty-four and our eyes aren't as 
quick as they used to be.

"The shrinking world," Bob said under his breath, a common refrain 
these days for him.  Then he had the fly ready and he waved the rod 
back and forth, doing a crossover cast to get his fly into the water. 
Immediately a trout rose and hooked itself.  Bob looked at me and
wiggled his hips  a little in our infamous trout dance.  It's an
inelegant dance, usually  reserved to taunt the other guy that he is
one fish behind.  This time,  I think, it meant that we were at ten
thousand feet in Wyoming and we  had an entire stream of fish ahead of
us.

When he brought it to hand, he said, "Cutthroat."

"How big?"  Tom asked.

"Now?"  Bob asked.

"Or when we talk about it later?"

"Seven inches," I said.

"Looks to be about an inch smaller than the one I caught."

Bob caught three cutthroat out of the pool before we moved downstream. 
Willows covered the riffles in some places, but in flat sections, when 
the water rose from the hummocks and cut banks to produce a glassy 
plain, we found trout.  We fished for an hour and caught a dozen fish. 
Each one was a cutthroat and each one was seven to eight inches long. 
Red gashes marked their throats.  If we were incautious and stepped too
hard near the cut banks, the trout scattered like sugar on a tile 
floor.  But in good moments the trout were willing and they charged our
flies with the greediness of wild fish, the greediness of trout in
small streams who must decide quickly and act accordingly.  We stayed 
with the Letort's Cricket, seeing no reason to change.

We fished until the light became dull and flat and the temperature 
pressed close to freezing.  My hands no longer listened to my 
instructions, or if they did, they did so grudgingly.  Without direct 
sunlight, it was difficult to spot the fish at the bottom of the pools.
Water became opaque.  It was hard to keep track of the cricket,
because  the light turned the air into something like water,
translucent and  white.  John Steinbeck called the evening hour before
true sunset "the  hour of the pearl," and he might have been
addressing fishermen.  Light pulled us away and the  water seemed to
close back over the trout.

Back at camp, with a fire going and a tin cup of Wild Turkey in hand, 
we made instant spaghetti with zucchini.  Then we had hot chocolate and
more bourbon and ate gorp.  We talked about bears and about work and 
dragged out the topo maps so we could see where to fish the next day. 
We decided to hike to Valentine, the largest lake in the area, which 
had feeder streams dripping away to join with Little Valentine.  When I
stood to get more wood, I noticed our tents glimmered with frost, the
V  of their sides white silver, like geese wings bent on flight.

I gave Nellie a biscuit or two and combed her while we sat beside the 
fire.  She was pooped.  She had acquired the lazy, quiet state that I 
love so much in Goldens.  Everything about her was soft and sleepy. 
She  grunted happily when I brushed her.  I checked her paws and legs. 
They  appeared sound.  Then I combed her tail and the feathering at the
back  of her legs.  She didn't like that as much, but she endured it. 
I  whispered into her ears that she was a mountain climber, a pack 
carrier, a squirrel chaser.  She stayed next to me and curled beside 
the fire.  Her fur took on heat and she began to snore.

It was late, close to bedtime, when coyotes began howling.  The sound 
lifted off the peaks and swirled, making it impossible to determine 
where the yelps originated.  Nellie climbed to her feet immediately, a 
long, warm growl rising in her throat.  She moved over to me, the hair 
on her neck raised.  At home, in the White Mountains, Nellie had come 
awake one night to the sound of coyotes in our back yard.  They had 
arrived in the darkest hour, tearing suet out of the bird feeder, then 
yowling in a demented, terrible cry that made Nellie nearly insane with
worry or desire to join them.  This moment was different.  The
coyotes cried from up in the hills surrounding our fire, their voices 
blending, then cracking apart.  I pulled Nellie closer.  Coyotes can 
run a domestic dog to death, I knew, leading them away until the dog is
exhausted.  Then the coyotes circle and kill the dog, betraying the 
cousin-heart of whatever made the dog follow.  But these coyotes were 
not close enough to be a threat.  I made Nellie sit between my legs, 
then closed my arms around her chest.  Her lungs vibrated with her 
growls and her eyes flashed in the firelight.  I whispered into her ear
and asked what the coyotes wanted.  I asked her if she liked hearing 
the coyotes.

I told her when she got older, when she couldn't go much beyond our New
Hampshire dooryard, that she could remember these coyotes on this night
in September.  This was why we had come, I told her.  This was a small
 payment on the debt I owed her.

By the time we reached Valentine Lake the next morning, it had already 
begun to hail.  The hailstones made sizzling sounds as they came 
through the pines.  Bob said he'd fish down, I'd fish up, which meant 
he'd go downstream and look for pools while I worked in from the 
headwaters.  Before he left we had to take shelter under some pines to 
wait out the hardest spill of hail yet.  Lightning whacked at the hills
to the east.  The sun stirred the clouds but didn't break through.  It
was going to be a long gray day.  The temperature, according to Tom's 
thermometer, read forty-three degrees.

Tom went with Bob.  Nellie came with me and we fished the shallows 
where the lake squeezed closed and tightened into the stream.  I fished
with the Letort's Cricket again, but after working several promising
riffles, I switched to a Blue Winged Olive,  then a Muddler Minnow,
then a small Royal Coachman.  Nothing.  Nellie  followed me from rock
to rock, sometimes standing in the water,  sometimes squeezing onto a
perch with me.  She was smart enough to stay  to my left, well away
from my back cast. I talked to her and told her  what I was doing every
time I changed position or switched flies.  When  I finally gave up and
went to find Bob and Tom, she darted ahead and  led me directly to
them.

Bob was having better luck.  He had worked his way down to a waterfall 
about a half mile downstream.  He had already caught four or five, he 
said, right out of the white water below the falls.  I told him I had 
struck out and he did a small trout dance, but not the full blown 
version to torture me.

The hail began again.  It had been coming on and off, pecking the water
for five minutes at a time, then ceasing without any appreciable
change  in the clouds overhead.  This time, though, the hail drove us
under the  pines again.  For a while we didn't say anything.  Bad
weather is death  to camping trips, we knew. We didn't relish the
notion of sitting in a  tent and playing cards the rest of the day.  We
were also aware that we  were approximately eleven miles away from the
trailhead and that to  reach any source of heat besides the fire we
might make, we would have  to climb a pass that took us above twelve
thousand feet.  It was  possible, Tom pointed out, that the hail could
turn to snow and we  would be in a tricky spot.  So we stood sedately
as cows beneath the  trees, our collars up, the hail pelting off us
after it struck.  The  forest floor became covered in white patches. 
The hail resembled rock  salt, the bony crystals one spreads on an icy
sidewalk.  It was a  hailstorm as a child might draw a hailstorm. "I'm
not eating you," Bob told me after a time, "no matter how hungry  I
get."

"We should get over the pass, at least," Tom said.

"Before this gets worse."

We kicked it around a little.  Our original plan had been to spend the 
entire day fishing the feeder streams, then hike either to the 
Continental Divide or halfway out the next morning.  The day after 
that, we intended to push through to the trailhead where Bob and Tom 
would head to Salt Lake City for their return flights, and Nellie and I
would continue on the lazy U that connected to the gradual return
route  through Montana.  We had a month or more; Bob and Tom had only
two  days.

"Your call," I told them.

"But we can fish some nice places along Route 287 in the next day and a
 half. We could make it to Lander tonight, then Dubois tomorrow."

"I vote for a warm motel room," Tom said.

We decided to make a run for it, which meant we had to hike eleven 
miles before sunset.  To make it more difficult, we were getting a late
start.  But we were confident that we could bivouac if we had to, 
bedding down against a rock formation if necessary.  If we stayed, it 
would be cold and miserable sleeping at best, while movement, we 
thought, would be better than remaining stationary. It was worth a 
try, we concluded, even if we only made it halfway out.

My main concern was Nellie.  She had hiked well on the way in, carrying
her food and biscuits in the green dog pack, but she was eleven, after
all.  She was willing, certainly, and that was my chief worry.  I 
didn't doubt that she would stay with us, but I wondered at what cost. 
She had no way to inform us that she was tired or cold.  I also knew, 
from experience, that her feet attracted ice and snow to the hairy webs
between her toes. During our snow shoeing in winter, she stopped
constantly to bite ice  from her feet, at times moving only a few yards
before repeating the  process.  The hail had a different consistency
from snow, but I  wondered if it would plague her, making our progress
slower than  necessary.  Not for the first time, I calculated her age
in human  terms.  The old adage that one human year is equal to seven
dog years  has been revised by most owners.  The current thinking is
that a dog  year is equal to seven human years for the first three or
four years of  a dog's life and four years thereafter.  Using that
formula, Nellie was  a little older than me, in her early fifties.  I
thought she'd make it  fine, though I determined to watch her
closely.

We packed.  The hail stopped for a time, then started again.  My 
clothes and boots were already wet.  The pack felt heavy on my 
shoulders, which were stiff from carrying it the last two days.  Nellie
must have felt the same thing, because when I approached her with her 
dog pack, she shied from it.  After cajoling and calling her closer, I 
finally snapped it on and we started off a little before noon.  Nellie 
led the way.  The hail came and went, came and went, without any 
appreciable change in the temperature or cloud patterns.  We started
up, mounting the switchbacks that would take us to the pass at twelve 
thousand feet.  When it hit the back of my legs, the hail stung.  It 
stung more than I could anticipate, so that each time it came it 
surprised me with its urgency. It wanted to be through me.  It wanted 
to pass my skin and fall on the ground.

It was a dull climb.  The hail kept us pinned to the side of the 
mountain and more than once we huddled together, our backs turned into 
the wind.  Now and then I met Bob's eye.  This was our bad gris-gris 
once again.  As boys we had almost drowned off the New Jersey coast, 
each of us clinging to a jetty rope in waves far too rough, both of us
surviving by miracles of  stupidity, and now here we were again.  He
shook his head at me and  told me it was my fault.  I told him he was
the source of our bad luck.  And the wind kept rising in velocity,
driving the hail sideways against  us.

Nellie, fortunately, climbed without difficulty.  The hail was too wet 
to cling to her feet.  She splashed ahead, apparently untroubled.  That
 much was a relief.

We worried, however, that the trail would be lost in the snow, so we 
could not take our allotted rest, but had to continue climbing, pushing
ourselves to clear the pass.  For at least two miles the world 
consisted entirely of my wet boots, mosquito swarms of snow, and the 
dense rocks and lichen that marked our way.

It took three hours to reach the pass.  We stood for a moment at the 
highest point of our travel.  A glint of sun came out and the hail 
subsided for a moment.

Then, quicker than we could take it in, the sun disappeared again and 
the hail started once more.  The wind, though, had quartered and now 
pressed on our backs.

It made me think that the mountain had finished with us.  We walked 
single file, Nellie leading.  She doubled back whenever she couldn't 
see me, checking to make sure I was still with her.  If I stopped, even
in this storm, I understood she would stay with me.  She wouldn't be 
happy, and she would think we could do better than a spot in a 
hailstorm, but she would stay nonetheless.  Even if I wanted to, I 
could not send her away.

My first fishing trip took place on Mindowaskin Pond in the center of
Westfield, New Jersey.  Westfield is a moderate-sized bedroom community
of approximately thirty-five thousand people, located thirty miles
due west of New York City.  It was not  anything approaching a
wilderness.  Nevertheless, Mindowaskin Pond had  its charms.  The
Protestant church, a wedding white building sitting on  the highest
hill in town, overlooked the water in a pleasing way.  The  church laid
out a nativity scene each December on a small island in the  center of
the pond.  Beyond the island, close to the southernmost end  of the
pond, stood a small footbridge made offieidstone.  On skating  nights,
at least as I remember them, the boys and girls congregated on  the
bridge in order to push one another and steal hats, their fleeing  and
pursuing accomplished in thumping runs before the slap onto ice and 
glinting glide.  A bandstand sprouted near the bridge, a wide, clumsy
affair, where each December the Lions or Elks put on a community 
wassail, the men's voices ruddy in the cold, their scarves bright and 
festive, their long, hounds tooth overcoats as respectable as wood.

My first real experience with Mindowaskin Pond, and with fishing, 
occurred sometime in August of my ninth or tenth year.  It had been a 
listless summer.

Both of my intimate friends, Bobby Mullen who lived behind me, and 
Frank Reynolds who lived up the street, were away at camp.  I had spent
most of the summer reading the Hardy Boys, their delicious brown
jacket  covers leaving a taste of themselves on my finger each time I
wet it to  turn a page.  Curled in a chair on our screened-in porch, I
had already  read Kon Tiki, Call of the Wild, The Leatherstocking
Tales, Tom Swift  and His Magic Submarine, The Kid Who Batted 1,000,
and Robinson Crusoe.  Naturally after devouring a diet of such books, I
was ripe for  adventure.  Although camp was a rather exotic notion to
me, I  desperately wanted to attend.  According to Bobby and Frank,
campers' days consisted of paddling around in birchbark canoes,
shooting arrows  at targets shaped like deer, and winging rocks at the
turtles that came  to sun on the logs of old Camp Kikitah.  I yearned
to be a little  brave, the name given to newcomers.  I determined that
I would be the  finest camper imaginable, perhaps even earning an
Indian name in a  secret ceremony run, again according to Bobby and
Frank, by a  full-blooded Iroquois named Mr.  Brownfeather.

It did not occur to me to bring up the question of camp with my mother 
or father.  I was the last of seven children, a final boy born when my 
mother was forty-two years old, so at the time of my first expedition 
to Mindowaskin Pond, she must have been over fifty.  In our family we 
did not discuss frills, though we were far from being poor.  My father 
was a corporate executive who commuted each day to New York City. 
Nevertheless, we seldom had money for extras, and it was understood, if
not expressed, that one did not ask frivolously for items not covered 
under the ongoing budget.  Even at the age of nine or ten I understood 
this sort of large-family spartanism.

Still, there was the matter of camp.  I'm certain, in my way, I let it 
be known that I was enduring a disappointing summer.  I have no other 
way to explain why my mother sought me out early one summer day on the 
porch with a copy of our local paper, The Westfield Leader, in her 
hand.

"Did you see this, honey?"  she asked me.

"Right there, under the ad?"

It was an announcement for a fishing derby, an open invitation to 
children around town to come fish Mindowaskin Pond.  A benevolent 
organization, perhaps the Elks or Lions, had stocked the pond with 
goldfish.  Three of the fish, the ad stated, were not gold but silver 
instead.  These silver fish were redeemable for ten dollars at the 
Playfair, our local toy store.  In order to be eligible to fish, one
had to be under thirteen years of  age and a resident of the town.

I wish I could say that I embraced the situation, that I agreed with my
mother that this was just the opportunity for which I had been
waiting,  but I was aware this was a half prize:

it was something offered when the better, truer thing is out of one's 
reach.

Like most children growing up in a large family, I had experienced it 
before.  I had worn my sister's white skates rather than the pair of 
hockey skates I coveted.  I had asked for a yellow slicker to wear in 
the rain and had received, instead, a yellow rubber parka, the flappy, 
plastic kind one sometimes carries in a backpack to use in an emergency
as a tent or ground cloth.  The fish derby, I suspected, was a deal 
struck along those same lines.

But as I had nothing else to do that day, and because my mother offered
the outing to me in good faith, I accepted.  One problem existed: I
had  no fishing pole.  My mother, however, had even anticipated that 
objection.  Years ago, when my grandfather had maintained a small house
on the Chesapeake Bay, our family had acquired four or five deep-water
poles.  I knew of the poles' existence. They had remained in the 
southeast corner of our basement for at least a decade.  I had examined
them any number of times, but had always stopped short of ever trying 
to use them because they were "damn good rods" according to the family 
myth.

But this, remarkably, was what my mother proposed.  I was to take 
whichever rod I liked, rig it up, and use it to win the prize goldfish 
down at Mindowaskin Pond.

It was an extraordinary plan.  Soon I was seated in our enormous Buick 
225, a bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the floor beside 
me, a rigid black pole extending from the front seat to the space
beneath the back window.  For hooks, I had a package  of my mother's
safety pins.  For bait, I had the bread of my peanut  butter and jelly
sandwiches and a few hunks of bologna.  The bologna  was surefire bait,
I felt. It would smell better to fish than worms,  and it clung to the
safety pins like fleshy barnacles.  My mother  dropped me near the
bandstand.  I sensed immediately that this was one  of those events
where it was handy to have a parent along, preferably a  father,
although I guessed there would be some well-intentioned men  hanging
around trying to help.  My mother, I knew, would be of no use  in this
kind of enterprise.  I told her I would be home at sunset-it  was early
morning, perhaps nine o'clock--and that there was no need to  worry
about me, I could swim for goodness sake.  She kept the car  idling
while I slowly extracted my chosen fishing rod.  I put it over  my
shoulder and headed to Mindowaskin Pond.

Anyone familiar with the impossibility of casting line from a 
deep-water pole, or of using pocket-warm bologna to bait a safety pin, 
has already anticipated what my day was like.  Because I could not cast
the line more than two or three feet from the edge of the pond, I was 
soon frustrated and angry.  I blamed my parents for not sending me to 
camp.  I blamed the town fathers for holding the event in the first 
place.  I blamed my stupid safety pin hooks which were, I soon 
realized, large enough to yank the liver out of the tiny carp floating
around the shimmering pond.

Time moved.  A few boys I knew from school passed by sporting 
lightweight spinning rods and broke my heart with the ease with which 
they launched their casts.  I wanted to ask their advice; I wanted to 
punch them.  Mostly I wanted to hide the awkwardness of my ridiculous 
fishing pole, my absurd bait, my cumbersome twine leader. Near noon I
ate lunch sitting beneath an old maple.  It was cool in  the shade, a
perfect day really.  I ate two peanut butter and jelly  sandwiches,
gulped down the pint of lemonade my mother had included in  my lunch,
and finished everything off with a chocolate Devil Dog.  I  wanted to
go home.  I wanted to get away from the pond, although I  could think
of no way to return to my mother's questions without  exploding in
anger at her for putting me in such a humiliating  situation.  I hated
her.  I hated myself.  I hated the largeness of my family which had
turned so many simple pleasures into exercises in embarrassment.

Exhausted and gloomy, I fell asleep.  I must have gone out deeply 
because I woke to find it late in the day, probably around four, the 
sun already softening.

Enough time had passed to allow me to depart, and I was tremendously 
relieved. I stood and dusted myself off, then began gathering my 
things.  I had almost finished when I realized the pond was nearly 
deserted.  One or two boys still fished up near the small spillway at 
the north end, but otherwise the water was glassy and lonely.

For reasons I've never identified, I returned to the water, rigged up 
my pole once more, and spent the next three hours entirely lost.  The 
light had changed.

Sunlight no longer reflected so obliquely off the surface, so suddenly 
the underworld opened to my view.  Now instead of casting blindly to 
fish I couldn't see, my hook suddenly rested in plain sight, the 
sluggish carp sucking their way past in endless hope and promise.

I didn't catch a fish, although once or twice I came close.  One fish 
actually ate my bait which made me tremble inside my skin.  I didn't 
lure a fish close again that day--and did not, in fact, catch a fish 
until a distant summer in the Poudre Valley outside of Fort Collins,
Colorado in my twenty-first year--but I had  begun my apprenticeship.

That day marked me as a fisherman.  Whatever it is that draws some 
people to water, and to fishing, bit me then and there.  On that first 
trip I learned that it was possible to enter the water, to forget to 
search arriving cars to see if my mother had come to fetch me.  I 
learned it is possible to lose all sense of time, to look up suddenly 
from a hatch or feeding frenzy and find oneself momentarily removed 
from solid earth.  I go fishing not to find myself, I learned that day,
but to lose myself. on THE LAST FIFTY YARDS OF THE HIKE, Nellie
chased a squirrel up a  tree.  Her movement remained bright and sharp
despite our weariness at  hiking eleven miles.

She had chased squirrels throughout the long day, never coming close to
catching one, but going, at times, alarmingly near to the drop-offs we 
crossed. The marmots at the higher elevations taunted her mercilessly, 
squeaking in a perverse circuit to keep her from zeroing in on one 
individual.  The result was that she had probably covered two or three 
miles more than we had.

As I watched her in that last sprint, I worried again about what it 
would cost her to have walked so far in a day.  Once, while hiking in 
the White Mountains of New Hampshire, we had hiked all day, bagging 
three 4,000 footers in a ten hour stretch.  When we returned to my car,
she lay next to the rear tires as I stripped off my backpack, hardly 
responsive when I called her to get inside.

Eventually I tempted her with a biscuit, but as soon as she finished 
chewing, she fell asleep, her body twitching in exhaustion.  The same 
thing, I was afraid, might happen this time.  And now, of course, she
was a good deal older than  she had been.

But I worried about Tom, too.  His knee had gone out, buckling on an 
old injury, the heavy backpack aggravating it at each step.  He had 
kept on, not complaining, but he was done in.  With two miles to go, 
Bob and I agreed that I should go ahead so that I could have my truck 
warmed and ready to move.  It meant that I had to walk an extra quarter
mile to the parking area, but that was all right.  I felt surprisingly
strong, my only problem a numbed left arm where my shoulder strap cut 
too sharply into my circulation.

Nellie, to my delight, climbed into the passenger side when we arrived 
at the truck and fell instantly asleep.  She climbed in without 
difficulty.  I woke her for a moment to give her a peanut butter 
cracker with a Bufferin secreted in the goop.  She ate it in three 
quick chews, then put her chin back on the soft seat cushion.  She did 
not bother me for more crackers.  I thumbed the pads on her feet, 
checked her legs, and then let her rest.

Tom and Bob had gained the trailhead by the time I returned to them 
with the truck.  When I pulled into the loop beside the brown trail 
sign, Tom's voice was wobbly with cold.  We had been chilled down to 
the core, the snow and hail making every step wet.  All of us steamed. 
The truck heater could not heat us down to where we were cold.

As we threw our packs in the truck--everything wet and dank 
smelling--Bob pulled out beers and passed them around.  It was close to
six o'clock.  We had hiked approximately eight hours without a 
substantial rest.  I couldn't speak for the others, but I felt the 
elation that always comes at the end of long physical days.  I was 
conscious of my body--its workings, its aches and pains--in a way that 
my everyday life does not demand.  The beer tasted good.  The heat
inside the truck cab, when I  ducked inside to stack my equipment, was
incredibly welcome.  I liked  knowing what we had done, how far we had
hiked, what we had endured.  I  liked the memory of those trout living
beneath the cut banks, their  bodies quick and hidden.

The road off the mountain, and through the Wind River Indian 
Reservation, followed a series of long switchbacks, each one bringing 
us close to the edge of sheer drop-offs, only to catch us and make us 
hug the mountain again.  The sun fell behind us and we could look out 
and see fifty, sixty, seventy miles of the Absoraka mountains.  Cattle 
grazed on the side of the hills, and occasionally pronghorn antelope 
lifted their heads at our passing.  I kept my hand on Nellie.

She slept with her chin flat between her front paws, her eyes solidly 
shut.

Once, when we were halfway to the bottom of the switchbacks, she made 
the half barking, half crying sound that she makes in deep sleep.  Get 
him, I whispered to her, imagining, as I always did when I heard that 
sound, that she chased rabbits through open meadows, the pursuit more 
exciting than the catch could ever be.

Forty-five minutes later, we were back in Lander at a modest motel.  A 
tall blonde woman who smelled sharply of cigarette smoke rented us two 
rooms for thirty-five dollars apiece.  She said she had no problem at 
all with a dog staying in my room, a healthy attitude that I 
encountered throughout the West. I pulled my truck over to room 
fourteen and parked.  Nellie did not stir when I turned off the engine,
which was a bad sign.  I went around the truck and opened the room 
door, set up the dog bed near a heating register, then came back for
Nellie.  As quick and curious as she is normally, she refused to budge 
when I called her to climb down.  Her tail nicked once or twice in  the
manner that indicates she heard me, likes me plenty, but I can go to 
hell.  In the end I had to lift her out of the truck, putting her 
gently onto her feet.  I patted my thigh and got her to follow me into 
the motel room.  She did not bother with the dog bed, but folded flat 
on the floor as soon as she crossed the threshold, ignoring food when I
 poured it out and the water that I put near her nose.

"You okay?"  I asked her.  I knelt next to her and patted her for a 
while.  She didn't acknowledge my hand at all.  I massaged her legs a 
little, kneading the muscles lightly with my fingers.  After a while I 
stood and unpacked the truck, then took a long hot shower.  When I 
checked on her again, she hadn't moved.  She still did not respond to 
my hand.  I was petting her when Bob and Tom arrived, ready to go out 
for hot food.

I was reluctant to leave Nellie, but I didn't know what I could do for 
her in her current state.  We went in their rental car to a diner at 
the edge of town.

Tom's knee was slightly improved.  We sat in a booth and hardly talked.
We were tired.  We were also stunned to find ourselves out of the 
mountains and in a restaurant, a warm bed waiting down the road.  We 
ate full dinners, slices of pie, and several cups of coffee.  When we 
arrived back at the motel, Nellie still hadn't moved.  After I said 
goodnight to Bob and Tom, I lifted her into bed.  It wasn't easy.  I 
had to kneel next to her, work my hands under her like the arms of a 
forklift, then hoist her slowly.  She grunted a little as I lifted her,
but she didn't move otherwise.  I put her carefully on one side of the
bed, covered her, then climbed in beside her.  I was as exhausted as 
she, but I also felt the wonderful exhilaration of being in a clean, 
comfortable bed, feeling warm, knowing that I could get up and get a 
cup of water or use the bathroom--luxurious things after camping.  When
I finally became too tired to stay awake, I rolled over next to her
and rubbed  her belly.

She wasn't too tired to lift a leg to give me better access to her 
stomach and I took that as a promising sign.  I listened to her breathe
for a time.  Then I was out and didn't have another thought until 
morning.

When I woke after eight hours of sleep, Nellie hadn't changed position.
I showered again and dressed, then attached Nellie's leash and coaxed 
her off the bed.  She didn't like it much, but at least she was able to
move.  We walked slowly across the street to a weedy lot I had seen
the  night before.  She did her business deliberately, then followed me
back  to the motel room.  I tried to lift her with my voice, getting
her to  feel some excitement, but she wasn't buying.  I forced her to
eat  another peanut butter cracker with a Bufferin, then shook her
uneaten  food in her bowl.  She took two or three nibbles and I
understood, just  by the return of her appetite, that she would be
okay.

By mid-morning Nellie was moving better.  We drove to Dubois for lunch 
and spent an hour poking around town.  While we had been in the 
mountains, the season had changed.  Although there were still some fly 
fishermen along the Wind River, Dubois was given over to elk hunters. 
The wide streets were dotted with pickup trucks and campers, men in 
orange jackets standing beside them.  Up in the mountains, as we well 
knew, snow had already come.

Bob and I visited the Orvis dealer in the center of town.  I don't much
like fly shops, feeling, as I do when I enter them, the pressure of 
commercialization.

Twenty years ago, when I began fly fishing, I bought a pair of Red Ball
plastic waders, a twenty dollar fly rod, and a package of flies from a
local sporting goods store.  It never occurred to me that I wasn't 
properly outfitted.  Now the sport is filled with anglers who fly to
Montana  for the weekend, spend hundreds of dollars on fancy waders and
wading  sticks, buy fly jackets with emergency inflatable collars, and
fork out  three to four hundred dollars a day for float trips.  I
suppose many of  these men are fine anglers--and on the streams they
are quick to tell  you about hatches, water temperatures, emergers, and
spinner  returns--but something is inevitably lost in such elaborate
packaging.  It seems a particularly American failing to take a sport
that is  ideally about quietude and symmetry and turn it into a
marketing campaign.  I don't want a lamp shaped like a trout; I don't
want a  trash can with a picture of a trout rising to a fly on the
side; I  don't want a trout phone.  As a result, I do most of my fly
gear  shopping at a local hardware store where I can pick out leaders
that  are hung next to red and white bobbers, hooks next to barbecue
forks.

But the clerk at the Orvis store--a southerner from the Carolinas who 
moved west after trout--was helpful and lowkey.  Because Bob and Tom 
had to leave by five that afternoon, we inquired if there was a river 
or stream nearby that might entertain us for the afternoon.  The clerk 
didn't hesitate.  He directed us to Warm Springs, a stream a few miles 
outside of town.  He told us that it was fine dry-fly fishing, that we 
could wade it easily, and that we should fish up from the bridge that 
crossed the water.  I decided that if it was suitable, I'd camp there 
for the night.  The Orvis clerk told us to be mindful of bears.  As all
people who live in the West seem to delight in telling bear stories,
particularly to people from back East, we listened to the usual litany 
of bear sightings, confrontations, pepper spray encounters, and reports
of bear activity.  We said we'd keep an eye out.  Then we headed up 
into the mountains, driving this time instead of walking, the sun at 
our backs. Most anglers, just before sleep, cast to remembered trout
on  remembered summer days, reading water as it breaks over sandbars, 
wading in sunlight, a hatch of mayflies sugaring the water just 
upstream.  Hemingway, perhaps, wrote first about the practice, but I'm 
sure it is a habit as old as fishing itself.  Lying awake just short of
sleep, I cast to fish on the Wood River in Rhode Island, the Deerfield
in Massachusetts, Hall Pond in New Hampshire, and a nameless pond I 
once fished in Canada, one where a shoreline of young salmon took my 
March Brown fly on every cast and a bald eagle halved a summer moon 
when I happened to glance up.  I think, too, of Burkina Faso, West 
Africa, when as a young Peace Corps volunteer I went to the 
tsetse-covered Black Volta River and fished for electric catfish, 
catching them in water still and black.  Near sunset a python dropped 
out of a tree and landed in the water next to me, its meated body
touching mine for an instant before it decided, for reasons I've never
understood, to swim across the river away from me.  I remember that.

The bridge to which the Orvis clerk had directed us spanned a steam
approximately thirty yards wide.  It is a stream I will remember for 
some time. A level gravel parking spot spread beneath the bridge, and 
I backed in close to the river, so that, in sleeping, I would hear the 
rush of water over rocks. When I opened the door for Nellie, she 
hopped out immediately, her legs good, her movement vastly improved. 
She waded into the stream and took a long drink. Tom decided to stay 
with the vehicles.  His knee still hurt and, besides, he had no 
interest in fishing.  I gave him a folding camp chair to use, then 
went with Bob upstream, both of us using black Letort's Crickets
again.  The  stream bent under the bridge and flattened, and I
imagined, as I often  do when I begin fishing, that the river had no
bed, that the fish  inhabited a seam in (he earth.

Bob said for me to go upstream a few hundred yards, that he would fish 
the bottom ripples, and that we would rendezvous in about an hour.  I 
agreed and headed off.  Nellie went with me, her tail up, her chest 
crashing through brush and the tall grasses that lined the water.

Fifty yards away, I stopped at a pool that arced in a half moon to my 
right, noon to three o'clock.  Water chiggered over rocks, flooding in 
white arrows down toward a deep wedge that settled against the far 
bank.  I watched the water for a while and made certain that Nellie 
didn't clump into the pool.  The sun fell hard on my back, the heat 
sufficient so that the water splashing onto the flat rocks at the edge 
of the stream dried before it could stain the rocks dark.  It was about
 three o'clock.

I made sure I had enough slack in my line before attempting the first 
cast.  I did three quick back casts, then let the fly settle on the 
surface of the water.

A trout rose immediately.  I saw its body flash through the water 
first, the glint of something moving, then it grabbed the fly and 
soared clear of the water.  It was a seven-inch cutthroat, light but 
urgent, and I led it easily to the slack water at my feet.  When 
released, the trout shot through water that seemed too shallow to 
accommodate it.  I waited a moment before casting again, letting my 
heart slow.

It took five casts to catch another trout.  Another five to catch 
another trout.

Each time the fly landed on the water, I saw the glimmer of trout 
rising to inspect it.  It reminded me that trout do not truly swim 
toward a fly, but instead cock their lateral fins and soar upward on 
the force of the approaching water, like children, arms out,
pretending to fly into the wind.  In moving water  a trout rise is not
the product of rhythmic strokes, but a dive into  air.

Some time later Bob passed behind me.  He said he had caught a few 
below and was going to leapfrog me, heading up above to try his luck 
there.  Nellie trailed after him.  I told him I'd catch up with him in 
a few minutes.  The pool in front of me continued to be productive, 
although it slowed until I had to cast fifteen or twenty times before I
had a strike.  Still, I have spent days casting in the East without a 
single hit and I was happy to run the fly over the pool. I came to 
know one particular dip in the water where the trout apparently
clustered.  I changed flies twice, opting finally for an auburn dry fly
I had tied myself.  I caught three fish on it, proving that trout 
cannot distinguish a well-made fly from one of my homely efforts. 
Water  sounds covered me, and it was not until I moved away from the
stream,  taking a path through the grasses to join Bob, that I realized
the  sound of my thinking and the sound of running water had combined
for  more than an hour without my detecting it.

I found Bob standing at a bend in the river, Nellie beside him, his 
attention focused on tying a new fly onto his leader.

"Two up under that bank," Bob said when I approached, his chin pointing
upstream, "and then I lost my fly."

We poked around for a while.  The water slid against the rocks in just 
the right way.  I changed flies once or twice, but it was more to stop 
and think about things than any sort of response to the river.  I liked
being on the river with Bob.  Watching him, I could frequently see the
boy that he had been glimmering just on the edge of his movement.  It 
made me glad to know that boy was still around. We fished downstream
and I caught nothing until I arrived at the first  place I had tried. 
Immediately I tied into three fish.  I've often  wondered about the
luck of a specific pool, whether it is simply that  water is rich with
fish in one location, or whether, catching  something, we become better
anglers because our casts count for  something.  Either way, the fish
cooperated.  The sun, however, had  started to settle on the shoulders
of the mountains and the water began  to smoke with the first evening
chill.  Bob fished the pool near the bridge again, but didn't catch
anything.  I was reminded that we never  know which fish might be our
last.  I tried to make that into a large,  philosophical finding, but I
was too lazy and tired from all the  hiking.

We walked back to the truck and found Tom reading a book, content to 
sit by the river on such a fine afternoon.  But the cold had found him,
too, and he had pulled on a jacket.  We all talked for a while, then 
Bob said it was time to get going.  It took only a minute for them to 
pack and get ready to leave.

I told Bob that we would do some ice fishing in the winter.  He agreed.
I shook Tom's hand and said it was good to meet him.  Then they took 
off, at five, disappearing over the hump in the road that led down to 
Dubois and then on to Jackson Hole.  I heard their engine for a while 
until the water behind me swallowed it and I was alone.

I made oatmeal with maple syrup on my cook stove while the temperature 
dropped and numbed my hands.  I ate sitting on the camp chair beside 
the water, Nellie scouting around, but I knew it would be an early 
night.  For a while after dinner I did nothing at all.  I sat in the 
chair and listened to the water, felt the cold fall out of the 
mountains and surround me.  Nellie returned from her exploration and 
butted me with her head until I let her lay her chin on my lap for a 
long pet.  We stayed like that for a time.  Later I got up and washed
the oatmeal away in the stream,  scrubbed the spoons and cups, brushed
my teeth.  For a moment I  squatted next to the stream, a man panning
for gold, my hands and  wrists red with cold.

Not later than seven, I climbed into the back of the truck.  It was too
cold to stay in the open air.  I closed the back and slithered into my
sleeping bag, kicking my legs a little to get warm.  Ice began to form
on the inside windows of the truck.  I fell asleep immediately, but 
woke, at two, to Nellie's shivers. I unzipped the sleeping bag and let 
her climb inside, awkwardly wrapping it around us both.  She lay next 
to me, her chin on my gut, her shivers pulling us awake to the noise of
 the river--this one, or a thousand like it--sliding past rock.

At our house on Port Hood Island, Nova Scotia, lobsters lived in the 
shallows off the beach.  It was illegal to take lobsters in pots unless
one was properly licensed, but catching them by hand was dubious local
custom.  It had turned into a game for Nellie and me and after working
in the fish shed most mornings, we ate a quick lunch and headed off on
 safari, a trout net our only weapon.

We kept a trim lawn for perhaps an acre around the house, but that acre
quickly gave way to luxurious tall grasses, waist high at least, 
through which I had cut a sick led path.  Nellie loved fishing for 
lobsters.  As soon as she saw me grab the flippers she shot off down 
the meadow path, her tail a white puff retreating through the grass. 
By  the time I strapped on my nippers and adjusted my mask and snorkel,
she  had already climbed onto the barnacled rocks that lined our beach,
her  eyes impatiently scanning the surface.  Minutes later, when I
flattened  onto the water, my nippers twitching me forward, she crashed
into the  water beside me.

Some days she carried a tennis ball in her mouth, but most days she 
simply paddled for the sake of paddling, her breathy chaaa chaaa chaaaa
 the motor of our enterprise.

Once we settled in the water, I hooked a hand on her collar and let my 
weight dangle in the smooth swells.  The water quickly deepened, 
dropping off to twenty or thirty feet in no time at all.  Clinging to 
her and paddling with my feet, I let her guide me around the small bay,
 my eyes locked to the kelp beds below.

Lobsters are not easy to spot.  They are not red, of course, until you 
cook them, so their black backs blend with the ocean bottom.  Not until
they venture into the small squares of sand that connect the kelp beds
 are they readily visible.

Moreover, the water refracts their outline, making them appear small 
and inconsequential.  They might be an insect, or a dot of grass, and 
it is not until you dive below, the water a rubbery pressure, that you 
know what you have.

In August during our second year on the island, Nellie learned to dive 
after me.

We had experienced a string of warm afternoons, the heat rising out of 
the ground.  Our excursion was tied to the tides, because I found it 
easier to hunt lobster when the water receded and the rocky shore 
arched its back into the sun.

A bald eagle at the far end of the island accompanied us, its flight 
out to a distant breakwater hectored by starlings and crows.  I spotted
the first lobster about twenty feet from the beach.  Taking a deep 
breath, I did a frog dive, angling at forty-five degrees to the square 
of sand where I had seen the lobster.

As soon as it spotted me, it began the oddly mechanical retreat I 
counted on.

Backing and lifting its pincers like the blade of a bulldozer, it
waited for me to advance.  I knew what to do.  I waved  one hand at it
to get its attention while I scooped behind it with the  trout net.  It
backed into the net and I hoisted it, my lungs starting  to ask for
oxygen, my body chilled in the white current at the bottom  of the sea.
Usually I would push up from the ocean floor and swim  toward air as
rapidly as possible.  This time, however, I chanced to  look up and saw
Nellie swimming through the ocean above me, no longer a  creature
flattened on the surface, but instead an ursine presence, a  polar bear
threading through water toward me.  She could not go deep.

I doubted her back was beneath the surface by more than a foot or two, 
but the sun stood as a disk behind her and she was under the sea, bars 
of light connecting us.  The entire episode lasted only an instant.  It
seemed, though, that she floated in air, her paws boxing the dull gray
of the sea water.  In the silence from below I saw her fur rising and 
falling with the motion of the water, saw her drifting away from me on 
the tide even as she tried to follow.

Then it was finished and I shot up to the surface, the lobster a rocky 
weight in the trout net.

It was a perspective I had never had before.  We lolled in the surf, 
playing at the diving game.  Her body fat kept her afloat, but I found 
she could sustain a bobbing sort of bear dive, a leisurely wallow 
through the easy summer swells.

She knew how to hold her breath.

I hadn't thought of the diving game in years, but at a deep pool a mile
from the campground, I remembered it.  I stopped at the pool for
lunch,  feeling contented and rested.  I felt the hike down in my
bones.  I let  Nellie explore. She turned over sticks and sniffed one
area, at the  base of a tree, for an inordinate amount of time. 
Something had  doubtless marked it with scent.  She turned one shoulder
to it  eventually and rolled to take on the odor.  I told her to leave
it alone, that I had no desire to sleep  in the back of the truck with
a smelly dog.  She ignored me.  I sat for  a while on the shoreline,
astonished, as always, at the joy she took in  discovering a new, fetid
smell, then stood and went to the water.

I had no intention of swimming, but I wanted her to swim.  Wearing 
Tevas, I waded in and found the water numbing.  Nellie splashed in 
beside me, her tail and rump flattening on the water in a beaver 
silhouette.  She made a small circuit of the watering hole, then came 
back and shook water all over me.  I bent and sniffed near her.  She 
smelled horrible.  The water, only half applied, made the odor worse. 
Cursing a little under my breath, I decided to wash her.  I stripped 
off my clothes and dove in, the cold whacking me.

The pool wasn't large, but it was deep.  My breath huffed in my lungs. 
Cold, I kept thinking, until I moved enough to be, if not warm, at 
least momentarily comfortable.  Nellie stayed with me.  Chaaa, chaaa, 
chaaa her breath came.  I grabbed her collar and let her pull me.  I 
splashed water on her back, up on her head, everywhere I could reach. 
We were washing and swimming like that when I remembered the lobster 
game.  It had been eight years at least since we had visited Port Hood 
Island, since the house overlooking the sea had been sold, since Amy 
and I had divorced.  I dived down, pulling for the bottom, then tucked
myself into a ball and looked up.  The water was not particularly 
clear, but Nellie was there, tugging at the strings of light that 
passed through the surface, her body fighting its own buoyancy.  For a 
moment neither of us advanced or retreated.  She hung her head down, 
searching for me.  Then I started for the surface and she went up for 
air. The next day, I gave myself a lazy morning.  As soon as the sun 
cleared the surrounding mountains, I moved my camp chair over to the 
light and sat with a large cutting board on my lap.  The cutting board 
is my own invention, a kind of portable fly tying bench.  If I sit just
the right way, I can clamp the cutting board between my knees and hook
the vise to the left edge.  The rest of the board provides a platform 
where I can lay out materials or put the finished fly when I am done. 
Because I am an atrocious fly tier it hardly matters that the setup is 
a bit rocky.  I managed to churn out a few Hornbergs.  The Hornberg is
a multipurpose fly, replicating as it does a suggestion of caddis life 
and the weedy lives of minnows.  I tied it because I am slow and 
because it gives me two flies, so to speak, for the price of one.  I 
have always found it an effective scouting or attractor fly, one you 
can cast to empty water in the hope of finding where the trout might be
hiding.  I tied four of them before getting bored.  Then I had a good 
time sitting with the board between my knees, winnowing out the used or
 rusted flies I had been carrying around for years.

I also tied together a new leader, which is my least favorite part of 
fishing. I am not particularly good at knots or understanding the 
calibrations of micrometers.  I tie leaders in much the same way as I 
visit the dentist--because it is good for me once or twice a year.  I 
also have little patience for the intricacies of tippet size, the thin,
 final connection between the fly and line.

I have been on a river or pond too many times when I have caught 
twenty, thirty, even forty fish in a day.  I am the same angler, I 
reason, when I catch nothing at all.  My sense, after years of
fishing, is that fish will bite if they're there.  Proper  tippet size
is a help, certainly, but it is not the necessity many  sporting
journals make it out to be.  Besides, (here is an ongoing  balance
between equipment demands and actual fishing time.  I prefer to  toss
it and let the trout decide to play or not.  The advice I once  heard
attributed to a Scottish guide has always seemed correct to me.

"Keep your eye on the fly," he is supposed to have said, "and your fly 
in the water."  It's easy, in other words, to get caught in too much 
fussiness.

As I finished tying my leader, a camper pulled off the road and began 
backing into position twenty yards from my truck.  I was disappointed 
to see it because I had hoped to spend a day or two sitting beside the 
river without any company besides Nellie.  I saw at least two men in 
the front of the camper.  A third jumped out of the side door and began
giving the driver instructions, itching with his fingers to back a 
little more, a little more, there.  I held Nellie's collar and waited 
to see how things developed.

They were elk hunters.  The men popped out of the camper and waved to 
me.  They all wore camouflage pants.  The driver got busy setting jacks
and making the camper level.  The other two fellows began unloading. 
In  no time they had coolers in a circle around them, folding chairs 
arranged, a small awning cranked out of the side of the camper.  They 
had brought their back porch, in other words, and appeared immensely 
pleased that the comfort they expected at home could be transported to 
this remote spot in Wyoming.  I felt crabby watching them.  I knew I 
was being selfish, but I couldn't help it.  Something inside the camper
 hummed.

Maybe it was a heater, maybe it was a fan, but I wanted it off so that 
the sound of the water would remain unobscured. Nellie strained to go
visit, so I called over and asked if they minded  if my dog came over. 
No, they said, no problem.  I let Nellie go and  she began shamelessly
wagging her entire hindquarters before she had  covered half the
distance between us.  I knew she was setting them up  for future food
begging, but they didn't know that.  She was on her  best behavior and
went from one man to the next, happily stepping on  their toes.

I decided I'd fish a while and see how things sorted themselves out.  I
pulled on my waders and slipped on my fly jacket.  Nellie came back, 
ready to go.  I waved to one of the hunters who had noticed my 
departure, but the other two had disappeared inside.  I headed 
downstream.  Nellie happily trotted with me.

Almost at once I came to a good pool where the water bent against the 
bank and deepened into a thick black.  I tried my most recent Hornberg 
and caught a five-inch trout on my third cast.  I did not take my 
success as an endorsement by the trout of my fly tying It was likely 
that the trout had been waiting, happy to skim up to the surface for 
nearly anything.  Still, it felt good to cast one of my flies and have 
it taken so quickly.

I fished downstream, which is contrary to British protocol and their 
notions of sportsmanship, but I didn't care.  The British claim one 
must fish upstream, preferably casting to visible fish, but a Hornberg,
for my money, is always better quartered downstream and swung through 
the tail water In this instance, at least, it worked, because I caught 
five trout in ten casts, all of them taking solid whacks at the 
Hornberg as it lolly gagged into the slack water.  A hit on a streamer 
is always solid, I've found, and I cast until the pool gave up.

I continued downstream, partially because I wanted to be away from the 
hunters, but also because I suspected, due to my nature, that the
guide at the Orvis store might have directed us  upstream in order to
keep the bigger, more interesting fishing to  himself.  That indicated
a dim view of humanity on my part, but I  couldn't help it.  To feed my
suspicion, I uncovered three pools, all  healthy looking trout habitat,
within a half mile of the camping spot.  I kept the Hornberg on and did
pretty well.  One fish, the largest of  the morning, hit and threw the
fly after taking one spectacular leap.

Through some combination of forces, it happened to reenter tail first 
and so made no splash at all.  Had the trout been the blade of a spade,
 it could not have entered more sweetly.

I fished until noon, then sat on an old log and read while eating a 
cheese sandwich.  The cheese sandwich was not very good, but the book 
was excellent.

Birds came and studied me, then took off.  After a time I put the book 
down and crawled onto the rocks, using my balled up fly jacket as a 
pillow.  Years ago I heard that Picasso, after lunch, permitted himself
a short nap.  Apocryphal or not, the story maintained that he sat in
an  easy chair and held his coffee spoon just above his empty cup,
which he  had set on the ground at his side. When he relaxed
sufficiently to  loosen his grip on the spoon, it fell the few inches
from his hand,  clattered against the cup, woke him, and he started on
his afternoon's  work.  I have always liked the story and stand by it
even if it isn't  true, primarily because I like a nap after lunch.  On
this day I fell asleep hard and slept about twelve minutes, the rocks
like warm bones  beneath me.  Nellie didn't sleep, as best as I could
tell.  She lay  next to me, her head busy scanning the countryside, her
nose active in  testing the wind.

Later in the day we came to a magnificent pool, one in which the 
central feature was a submerged log.  The water ran over it in a sheer 
curtain, the surface water pulled as thin as fabric.  I stood for a
while and studied the fall of water, thinking  that if I could puzzle
it out correctly, the fish would volunteer  readily enough.  The
Hornberg, happily, seemed the proper fly, because  it would be
sufficiently buoyant to skim over the log, then heavy  enough to drop
below the water when the current pushed downward.  I  walked downstream
so I could fish back up to the log, then spent a few  false casts
drying the Hornberg by flicking it back and forth.

When I thought it was ready, I let the fly fall on the stretched skin 
of water.

Things happened quickly, because the water grabbed the fly and yanked 
it below.

Then nothing occurred for a two count, and I imagined the fly drifting
momentarily in relatively slack water, only to push up again toward the
surface after it had hit bottom.  I worried about snags, but could do 
little about it.

When the fly moved past the bottom water, it began up again, and 
suddenly a fish hit.  It hit hard and shot downstream, eager to be away
from whatever had caused it such surprise.  My line went with it.  The
 fish porpoised three times.

Eventually it swung down to the shallow water and glimmered against the
rocks, a bright, native cutthroat, its gills working hard.  I released
 it carefully.

I caught fifteen fish out of that pool.  Each fish took almost exactly 
the same way; each took the Hornberg.  The sun softened and when it 
struck water its reflection rode at the mercy of the current, widening 
and narrowing as the water changed.  Near the closest bank the current 
sifted through a thicket of willow, and the water made a deep liquid 
cricket hum on the quieter air of evening.

When I finished, I dug a tennis ball out of my pocket and tossed it for
 Nellie.

She had been patient with my fishing, but as soon as she saw the ball 
she became intensely interested.  I lobbed it into the pool and watched
her charge into the water. She swam with the current and caught up to
the ball with a chomp, then  angled back and shook herself.  She
brought me the ball and we repeated  the process three or four times. 
Each time she snagged the ball just  before it reached the shallower,
faster water.  I loved to see her  swim.  I loved to see her retrieve,
too, and have often thought that I  did her an injustice by not
training her as a bird dog.  She loves to  fetch and I have lost
numerous socks and hats from her habit of  carrying things to me at the
oddest moments, dropping them near me even  if I am not watching.  Each
spring I have found gloves and T-shirts  soggy and waiting beneath the
snow, evidence of her desire to give me  things.  Her mouth is always
soft and the garments are never harmed  except by their long sleep in
the snow.

On my way back to camp, I decided to spend one last night.  It was too 
late in the day to start for somewhere else.  I hoped the elk hunters 
might be off hunting, but when I arrived back at camp they had a large 
fire going and were drinking a few beers.  Nellie beat me over to them 
and they hooted a little when she went for some food left out, but then
 they called over and offered a beer.

I went.  They greeted me warmly, happy to have company.  The man who 
handed me a beer--a large man whose knuckles were as outsize as 
walnuts--introduced himself as Phil.  The middle-sized one, a solid guy
in a black cowboy hat, said he was Mike.  And the last one, the 
smallest of the three, touched his fingers to his baseball cap and said
that left him to be Rich.  Rich said he had been studying the New 
Hampshire license plate and its motto, "Live Free Or Die," and he
wondered what the hell that meant exactly.  I told him I didn't know, 
but that we usually amended it to say Live Freeze and Die.  That 
introduced the entire topic of weather and we were off for the next
twenty minutes talking about approaching winter and the trouble  you
could have in the hills.  I told him about our hike out over twelve 
thousand feet, and they answered that it wouldn't do to get caught on 
the mountainside of a twelve-thousand-foot pass this late in the 
year.

"You think you can hike out no matter what," Mike said, "but the truth 
is, the snow can catch you.  I never go over a pass this late in the 
season."

"You never go into the woods this late in the season," Rich answered.

I asked about elk hunting.  They said it wasn't as good as it had been,
but then, what was?  They offered another beer and I thanked them but 
said I was going to cook an early dinner and call it a night.  Come 
back if you want a nightcap, they said.  I told them I'd consider it.

I cooked up a pan of beans and rice.  It was pretty good.  Afterward I 
let Nellie clean the pan while I washed the silverware.  She nosed the 
pan in a circle around the rear of the truck, the aluminum bumping 
against the rocks.  I finished the dishes and then pulled on a parka 
and added a wool cap.  We sat for awhile and did nothing at all.  It 
had been a good day.  I told Nellie we were lucky.

I told her she was a sock monster, the scourge of bedroom floors.  I 
asked her if she remembered Gusty, her Labrador friend from her St. 
Paul's days, and that got her turning her head, looking for her old 
companion.  Then I asked if she remembered Amy, the Gray Man, our 
former life.  She edged closer and put her weight against me.  We 
stayed that way and watched sparks come off the campfire, cinders 
falling into their own reflections on the water. YELLOW SToNE

when I drove through the south entrance to Yellowstone National Park, 
it was three o'clock and already cold.  Yellowstone, as anyone knows 
who has visited it, is a strange place.  A high, anomalous plateau 
where sulfuric fumes mix with pine smells, it is indisputably one of 
the most beautiful parks in North America.  The majority of visitors to
Yellowstone remain on the loops of roads that meander through the
park,  lending it a grocery store feeling.  To your left are elk, to
your  right, bison, and up ahead, if you're lucky, you may spot a
moose.  Bears occasionally waddle through the campgrounds or across
roads, and when they do you have long lines of traffic complete with
people  jumping out of their cars to snap photographs.  The campgrounds
are  jammed.  The lines at Old Faithful, and at other well-established 
viewing destinations, are endless.  Gift shops sell funny bumper 
stickers, cups and glasses shaped like wolves, plates with maps of 
Yellowstone painted on them.  Most visitors don't seem to mind.  I
suspect that many of us are so accustomed to watching television that 
we see nothing unusual about viewing wildlife through the square
windows of our vehicles.  It's the Nature Channel, only better.

The first time I visited Yellowstone, five years before, I nearly died 
from an odd set of circumstances.  I had been fishing all day, wading 
the Madison River and hooking a number of trout on a sink tip line and 
a leaded hare's ear.  Most of the trout were good sized.  I also hooked
a fair amount of mountain whitefish, a toothless cousin of the native 
trout which take flies, especially nymphs, in much the same manner as 
trout.  It had been a good day and I should have broken off in the 
afternoon, happy to have had my fill, but it was Yellowstone and I was 
simply going back to a tent, so there was no reason to end the day.

Near sunset I began picking up heavy trout along a channel undercutting
a grassy bank where tourists passed by to snap photos of the wandering
bison herds.  More than one tourist shouted over to ask how I was 
doing, and I replied that it had been a good day and left it at that. 
After figuring out how the trout positioned themselves against the far 
bank, I was having uncanny luck. Standing in waist-deep water I cast a 
small weighted Muddler Minnow to the head of the pool, drifted it, let 
it bounce on the gravel two or three times, let the slack build in the 
loopy section of lazy water, then, just as the streamer moved past a 
small zone directly opposite me, bingo.  The fish hit with sudden,
thick heaves, as if they pulled the lines over their shoulders rather 
than took them in their mouths.  I lost count at ten fish.  In fact, 
the fish came so suddenly, and so regularly, that I began to fantasize 
that it was always the same fish, that one particularly aggressive 
specimen leaped off my line, then, in cartoon fashion, screamed into 
position again, ready for more combat. An hour passed, maybe two, and
when the sun had finally left I reeled  in my fly line and hooked the
Muddler to the rod.  Deep, fluttery  shudders began to migrate up from
my spine and I realized, not for the  first time, that I was slightly
hypothermia.  A day in the water, I  thought, and dismissed it.  But
when I tried to retreat, to back away  from the crescent of the pool,
my legs refused to move.

Specifically, my right leg felt anchored to the streambed and when I
concentrated and tried to understand what had occurred, I realized that
my waders--a cheap, rubber pair I had patched repeatedly--had leaked. 
I  had been so cold that I failed to mark it, and the water had filled
and  swollen the rubber leg until it appeared, in the last light, as
wide  and as stretched as a frog's stomach.  Standing still, the water
in my  boot was hardly noticeable.  If anything, the added weight had
made me  more steady on my feet, so that I had cast to the trout
without moving  in hours.

Now, ready to depart, my foot had no sensation whatsoever, which would 
not have been dangerous if the force of the stream weren't pressing 
hard against my thighs.  To escape I would have to wade twenty yards or
more onto a gravel bed where I might be able to drain the water from
my  boot and regain a sense of balance.  If I fell, a possibility that 
seemed more likely than not, I doubted seriously that I could right 
myself again.  Once the bib of my waders dipped underwater, the rest of
the rubber would be stuffed with liquid weight, and I would bob down
to  the bottom, dragged by my concentration on angling, the trout
having a  final ironic victory.

I saw the humor of the situation.  But when I tried to shift my foot on
the streambed, I couldn't lift it.  I experienced what I imagine 
amputees experience on first waking to find their limb gone.  The term 
for it, I remember from high school health class, is called phantom
limb.  The patient believes the limb is still  present, despite
intellectual evidence to the contrary.  Similarly, I  looked down
through the darkening water and asked my foot to perform a  task it had
performed millions of times.  It couldn't.  I tried two or  three
commands, and my foot disobeyed.  I remember grinning at the far  bank
after the third time, smiling at this inexpressible betrayal,  assured
that eventually circumstances would reverse themselves.  It was 
inconceivable that my leg wouldn't work, that the weight of combined 
water and numbness would keep me, like Hercules, powerless if I removed
 my foot from the earth.

Before I could move, I heard bison galloping across the flat ground 
behind me.

Normally I would have turned to watch, but now I was nervous about my
situation.

It occurred to me that I might die.  Stranger accidents happened every 
day, and certainly anglers drowned often enough, their waders filling 
and dragging them down.  I had never fallen in the water, not in 
fifteen years of fishing, and I forced myself to remember that simple 
fact as I clamped my fly rod in my teeth and bent close to the surface,
 my hands going underwater to hoist my leg.

It took me half an hour to lift, then step, lift, then step.  Happily 
no one saw me, because I certainly must have appeared ridiculous.  I 
faltered only once. The water had drained down to my thigh and the 
liquid slurp in my boot had become nearly manageable when I suddenly 
slipped on a smooth rock.  I went down almost to one knee, my hands out
like a telemark skier traversing a hillside, the fly rod quivering 
idiotically in my mouth.  At the gravel bank I stood and let the boot 
disgorge its water, my shivers deep and hard.  All around me the bison 
continued to graze, their grassy aroma like old hay in an autumn barn.
It was difficult to see them.  When I did spot them, it was from the
absence of light their black bodies created, the outline of  shadow
they pulled from the pines behind them.

As I drove beside the Madison River on my way to the campground, I 
pointed out three elk to Nellie, but she seemed unimpressed.  The 
bison, however, were a different matter.  She liked seeing the bison, 
particularly when they appeared in geyser vents, their black bodies 
ghostly in the sulfuric mist.  I tried to confuse her and tell her they
were dogs, but she didn't buy it.  She sat straight on the seat beside
 me, her nose bumping constantly against the front windshield.

The Madison campground was a flat, ugly area at the confluence of three
world-class trout rivers--the Gibbon, the Firehole, and the Madison. 
It  is sound policy to give over as little land to campgrounds as
possible,  but the result in this instance was a cheerless place.  I
kept Nellie  tied securely to the picnic bench, a limitation she did
not seem to  mind.  She sat and watched the Richardson squirrels, which
were  everywhere, pop in and out of the ground.

It was too late to fish, so I contented myself with setting up camp and
tying a few flies.  I tied a sort of Zug Bug, a black, thick-bodied 
insect that suggests a number of stone flies to a trout.  Then, for the
heck of it, I tied three dry flies using my own gray hair as the 
hackle.  They came out looking something like an Adams, with a 
gray-green body and dun hackle.  On the last fly I cut a swatch of 
Nellie's hair and used it as dubbing fur.  I called the combination the
 Nellie Importuner and tossed it in my fly book.

The next morning I woke early and headed to Trout Lake in the
northeast quadrant of the park.  Trout Lake had been where I  first
spotted trout in Yellowstone.  Driving in from the northeast  entrance
on the trip I had taken five years before, the trip where my  waders
had filled and nearly drowned me, I had spotted a sign that said  Trout
Lake.  I had found the name ironic, the kind of broad,  unmistakable
sign that one couldn't ignore if one were an angler.

Needing to stretch, I had hiked without fishing gear up a thin trail 
the mile to the lake, prepared to simply turn around.  At the top, just
before reaching the water, I ran into an older gentleman who told me
he  had never seen so many large trout patrolling such a small body of 
water.  He said he had seen fish pass by that went at least twenty 
inches, some larger.  His report started a nervous gnawing in my 
stomach, one that I couldn't satisfy that day because I was on my way 
to meet someone.  When I gained the lake, I squatted in the shade of a 
large pine and watched as one fish after another cruised the shallows,
each one solid as a block of cord wood.  Unfortunately, I had arranged 
to spend the remainder of that trip on the other side of the park and 
didn't have a chance to return.

Trout Lake had remained an El Dorado, a mythical place in my mind that 
kept me awake nights.  Now, with Nellie, I planned to return.  I had 
carried my float tube two thousand miles with the express purpose of 
using it in Trout Lake.

The hard part was explaining to Nellie it is against park regulations 
to take a dog into the back country.  I had asked a ranger about the 
policy and he had told me that dogs occasionally scout out bears and 
agitate them, and when the bears pursue, the dog brings the whole 
growling mess back to the owner.  That seemed like a reasonable 
explanation, but I didn't much like it.  Nellie wasn't pleased with it 
either and when I locked her in the back of the truck, she whined to 
come with me.  I was firm with her and caved only enough to give her a
biscuit.  I felt selfish  leaving her, but the gnawing sensation in my
stomach, delayed several  years, had returned.  Hiking up the rooted
trail to the lake, I was a  happy man.

The lake sat in a bowl of hills, large pines ringing the eastern end. 
Druid Peak, at 9,583 feet, stood in snow to the west.  My breath plumed
 in front of me.

The temperature was in the low forties, but I still felt warm from the 
truck heater.  I wore neoprene waders and several sweatshirts, a watch 
cap, sunglasses, and a pair of wool mittens.  I used the aluminum case 
of my fly rod as a bindle stick, the float tube as a hobo's bandana. 
It  took ten minutes to get to the lake.  When I arrived I squatted in
the  exact position I had squatted several years before.  The trout
didn't  disappoint me.  In the first minute of my arrival, two large
fish swung  through the shallows, their tails moving leisurely, their
size enough  to make stringing my fly rod an exercise in suppressing
impatience.

I tied on a weighted caddis nymph and backed into the water.  For a 
moment, as always, I mistrusted the simplicity of the float tube.  To 
sit in a tube, to paddle with one's feet, to have one's hands free to 
fish, seemed--as it did every time I took to the water in a tube--a 
child's cockeyed invention, 'the mistaken notion of a ten-year-old, 
leaping from the garage roof and trusting to an umbrella to float him 
down.  But I knew from experience it worked beautifully.

I kicked my way to the center of the lake, cold creeping up my knees 
and thighs.

I did nothing at all in the middle except look around.  Here, I told 
myself, was a good moment.

I worked up to the western end of the lake, cast three or four more 
times, and hooked my first trout on the retrieve.  It was a heavy, 
solid fish, the type that lifts the line free of the water, stringing
it back to the angler in one enormous tug.  Immediately it began to
run, knicking the leader through the roped  strands of grass tethered
to the lake bottom.  I let it take as much  line as it needed, my
stomach fluttery, my hands nearly too quick.  I  wanted this fish.  I
wanted it because I knew to lose it meant that I  would be haunted by
it, would think about it before sleep, that any  fish after this one
could get away without any concern on my part, but  that this first one
was a test of something.  That was probably overblown and silly, though
that's how I felt.  As the fish ran I  looked at the hillsides, at the
pines, and I tried to think down the  line, to guess the fish's next
move.  When I succeeded in bringing it  closer, I saw that it was big,
probably somewhere around seventeen  inches.  It was sodden with
approaching winter.  I kept the rod tip up  and let it fight the bend. 
I knew that I shouldn't permit the fish to  become exhausted so that
its survival was jeopardized.  I pulled it  closer so rapidly I risked
its early escape.  The hook remained solid  and I held the fish
submerged for a moment, a sort of handshake, then  worked the hook free
and let the trout slide through my fingers.  It  swam away crisply.

It was satisfying, and perhaps a good omen, to have the first fish of 
the day quickly behind me.  It's rare that I catch only one fish.  More
common is to be shut out altogether, or to catch three or four fish in
a hurry, as it happened that day.  The nymph must have been the
correct  fly.  I caught a second fish, equally as heavy as the first,
in the  next few minutes.  A third after that. Then a fourth.  For a
long time  I caught nothing at all.  Cold began to build in my limbs
and travel  into my hands.  A light snow started to fall.  Flakes
landed on the  surface like white water striders.  I sat for a while
and watched.

When the cold became too much, I paddled back to the shore and climbed
out.  Deep, wooden shivers worked through my bones.  I jogged up and
down the trail for a few minutes, hopping at the end of  each sprint,
trying to get my body heated.  It worked fairly well,  although every
time I Stopped I felt the cold tunneling through my  chest.  Now and
then a trout rose and forced me to consider fishing  from the bank.

Generally I am reluctant to start fishing again once I have stopped, 
especially when the earlier attempt had been successful.  I decided to 
leave well enough alone.  I packed up and hiked down to the truck. 
Nellie sulked when she saw me. I gave her a biscuit and let her sniff 
around the truck as I stripped out of my waders.  I told her I had 
caught a few good trout.  She didn't seem to care.  She trotted up the 
hill toward the lake, tail flopping back and forth, to ask me to go for
a hike.  I told her she had missed this one, but I compromised and
took her to a small creek that drained from the lake.  Water tipped
over  rocks, clicking in white splashes, shelf to shelf, until the
sound  merged with the wind sifting through the treetops.  Nellie
drank.  I  let her roam around for awhile, her tags jingling. 
Somewhere I read  that a dog's sense of smell is one million times more
sensitive than  ours.  I tried to imagine what it must be like to be in
a strange land,  with strange plants and animals to discover, her nose
drawn and pushed  by scents indecipherable to us.  She seemed impatient
with each new  smell;

her snout jumped back and forth, jerking to discover a fresh scent 
before it had adequately tested the first.  I let her run until she 
calmed down.  She returned to the water, drinking from one pool until 
her tongue sounds linked to the noise of the stream.  When she looked 
up, we both spotted the deer at the same time.

The deer stood uphill, stiff against the backdrop.  Maybe it had been
there for a time, its scent driving Nellie to impatience.  It  was a
male mulie with a large rack of antlers and a solid brown body  barely
lifting it free from the autumn colors behind it.  It could not  have
been more still. Nellie let one puff of air come up from her  throat,
the exhalation puffing her cheeks, but she did not truly bark.  She had
seen deer before, naturally, but usually at a greater distance. 
Somehow we had ended up fairly close to this deer, the distance between
 us not more than a fallen birch tree.

For a moment nothing happened.  Then the deer seemed to gain life in 
its ankles and it trotted away, moving swiftly, its head ducking 
slightly to move beneath the trees.  Nellie took two steps and I told 
her no, leave it, and she did.  I watched the deer, thinking that I 
would be able to note the exact moment it disappeared, but a 
combination of the gloomy day and the brown background made the deer 
seem to vanish.  I looked at Nellie to determine if she still saw it. 
I couldn't say if she did or not.

She bent back to the water.  I slapped my thigh and we walked back to 
the truck.

While I had been fishing, the temperature had dropped.  Although it was
only mid-afternoon, cold had soaked down through the higher elevations
and had covered the valleys.  At first I thought I was merely chilled 
from fishing, but when I checked my thermometer it registered in the 
thirties.  Given the temperature and the long afternoon and evening in 
front of me, I decided to have dinner at the Old Faithful Lodge, one of
my favorite places in the world. Old Faithful Lodge is, of course, a 
tourist center, but that doesn't diminish the beauty of its 
construction.  Built of interlocking pine beams around magnificent 
stone hearths, the upper floors stretching skyward nearly beyond view, 
it is one of the true grand hotels in our nation.  It took me an hour 
to meander through the park, stopping frequently for construction
along the  Madison-West Thumb stretch of road, before I entered the Old
Faithful  visitor center.  By the time I arrived, despite the warmth
from the  truck's heater, the cold had soaked into my bones.

I left Nellie in the truck and went in to take a shower.  It's a little
known secret that one can pay a minimal fee and take a shower in the 
Old Faithful Lodge.  Perhaps it started as a service for hikers and 
campers, but in any case the desk manager did not flinch when I 
requested a towel and soap.  I paid the fee, then followed his 
instructions to a private bath down the long hall on the first floor.

It had been a while since I had showered.  I tried to calculate 
backward, but came up with nothing definitive.  I lingered in the 
shower long past any decent period, then dressed in fresh clothes and 
went out and sat beside the large central fireplace.  I considered 
getting a newspaper--I had been fairly out of touch for the past couple
weeks--but then, without any active decision, found myself content to 
simply sit and stare at the flames.  The wood smoke smelled western and
 sharp and fragrant.

I felt happy; I felt revived.  The Aborigines in Australia believe in 
the restorative power of walkabout, the periodic benefit of abandoning 
one's routines and admitting the need of an individual to exist on a 
more physical basis for a time so that the mind might be cleansed. 
Obviously it is a much more complex notion to the Aborigines, and I was
in a Dodge Dakota, not in the outback, but for a moment I may have 
understood a little of what was at the center of that power.  It counts
for something to get away from our usual routine.  It counts to get 
outdoors.  Most of my life I had felt an urge to light out, to get 
away, to travel simply to be in motion, and I had given in to it
repeatedly.  Sitting beside the fire, I no longer felt guilty about 
that.  Trout streams provided an excuse to go, and luckily the streams 
existed, by and large, in beautiful country, but I might have just as 
easily traveled to collect rare walking sticks, or antique sideboards, 
or copies of first edition books.  It didn't matter.  I had been going 
before I discovered fishing and would continue to go if my legs could 
no longer connect me with water.  I traveled for the contentment I 
experienced sitting next to the fire in the Old Faithful Lodge, for the
acknowledgment that travel forced on me that I was alive, that I lived
in a period of history, that I would soon be, as James Joyce said, a
shade.

I roused myself and went into the bar where I ordered a bowl of pasta 
and a glass of scotch.  I watched a little football on the TV.  I ate 
some nuts.  When the food arrived, I devoured it with what used to be 
called a cunning appetite.

Now and then, in the quiet moments, I felt the trout-taking in Trout 
Lake.  I pictured the line going up, connecting me with a fish, felt 
the frantic, waggy run of them as they scattered from my fly.

That night, in the back of the truck, I discovered two lumps on Nellie.
I felt them for a moment without realizing what they were.  Rubbing
her  belly while reading, my hand had traveled up to her ribs and at
first I  took the bumps to be nothing more than the xylophone of bone
beneath  her skin.  But then my fingers probed a bit more and I put
aside my  book.

"Good girl," I said to keep her steady, then sat up and shined my 
flashlight on her side.  I couldn't make out much, but yes, she had 
more lumps.  I smoothed her fur and continued petting her, this time 
with more purpose.  I found one more spot on her shoulder. None of the
spots seemed tender.  She continued snoring through most  of the
examination, her front paw occasionally lifting to push my hand  to
continue.

The next morning I made her stand on the tailgate for a beauty shop, 
our phrase for a brush out.  Wicking her fur, I found the lumps 
immediately.  They were not large.  Twice while I inspected the lumps 
she licked my hand.  I finished the beauty shop, then gave her 
breakfast while I considered my options.  There was little I could do, 
I concluded.  I remembered a Scottish expression I had always liked. 
It  said that each person had to dree his weird, which meant that we
all must live our fate.  Nellie was no different.  Besides, her
appetite  was good and her spirits strong.  I decided to keep an eye on
the  lumps, but otherwise to put them out of mind as much as
possible.

We spent the morning fishing the Yellowstone, which in some sense is 
the Mecca of fly-fishing in America.  The river churns through the 
heart of the park, falling from Yellowstone Lake and the Fishing Bridge
into the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.  The stretch from Le Hardy 
Rapids to the Pelican Valley provides the potential for superb fishing.
Anyone with waders and a pair of polarized sunglasses can walk halfway
into the river and look down to see spectacular trout.  The trout run 
from fourteen to twenty inches, all of them facing south, one after 
another, beads of fish in a net of water.  The Yellowstone is closed 
until well after the spawning is finished in August, which makes for a 
relatively small window of opportunity.  Anglers from around the world 
come to the Yellowstone in August, September, and October.  On the day
that I fished it, I stood shoulder to shoulder with a group of five men
 from Germany.

On the two trips I've made out West, I've never had much luck on the
Yellowstone.  Frankly, I've rarely seen anyone catch many  fish,
although anglers talk about the magic of the Yellowstone.  My  sense is
that the fish are big and the bait is small.  The few fish  I've caught
have all been taken on midges.  Only once did I ever cast a  dry fly
and have the fish rise to it.

Otherwise the fishing has been on the bottom, a matter of drifting 
minuscule caddis nymphs and stone flies to remarkably uncooperative 
trout.  It is one thing to have a poor day when you are fishing on an 
eastern pond, the fish below your hook six to twelve inches.  It is 
another thing altogether to fish over enormous trout, trout that are 
stacked up throughout the river, trout that are perhaps the best trout 
in the lower forty-eight states, and catch nothing.

I brought Nellie with me down to the river and put her in a down-stay 
beside a large log on the shore.  It was late morning.  The thermometer
read forty-one degrees.  I sat on the log and tied a pink shrimp onto
a  light tippet.  A dozen anglers already worked the water, none having
any luck that I could see.  Out of curiosity, I did some quick 
estimates about the money involved on the river that morning.  Not 
counting the cost of travel to get to Yellowstone, which in the case of
the Germans would be considerable, a conservative estimate put the
average cost for each angler to step to the water at somewhere around 
$500. That was on the cheap side.  The anglers wore neoprene waders, 
fly vests, flies, boots, and carried fly rods.  A single fly rod could 
cost more than $500, I knew, so it was possible the total cost could be
double.  In any case, I calculated that at least $6,000 was
represented  on the water that morning.  It was strange to think in
those terms.  Certainly fly-fishing was not as expensive as yachting,
or even Alpine  skiing, but the cost was not negligible.  My own kit,
when I ran it  through a calculator, came out at about $600.  The one
expensive rod I had owned--an Orvis Henry's  Fork--had broken in an
accident years before, shortly before Orvis  instituted its policy of
unconditional guarantee.  Now I used  utilitarian rods and the cheapest
flies I could find.  Each year, in  fact, left me feeling less and less
interested in the nuances of  equipment and more and more annoyed with
people who turn fishing into a  shopping trip.  Nevertheless, if I
added up the cost for trips I had taken, equipment lost, time spent
away from work, it probably came to  $20,000. Measured against the
pleasure I had gained over twenty years  of fishing, it hardly seemed
exorbitant.

On my first cast I had a strike, then didn't have another nibble 
throughout the morning.  Nellie had more luck.  Whenever a new angler 
arrived, or a wet one left the water, he made his way to the log and 
sat with her.  She hammed it up, of course.  Two girls came down with 
their dad and asked if they could take her for a walk.  I said it was 
fine as long as it was in the immediate area where I could watch. 
Their  dad said the girls had a dog at home so it should be okay.
Nellie  yanked them through a pine grove for a few minutes, then towed
them back to the log.

Near noon I took a break and sat with Nellie eating a sandwich when a 
bunch of car doors slammed on the road above the river.  It was a 
fairly busy place, but I wasn't prepared for a group of ten to file 
down the dirt path.  Nellie got to her feet and waited to be greeted, 
but this time the men passed her by and went directly into the water. 
It took a moment to understand what was going on, until a chubby fellow
in an enormous pair of waders began shouting down the line that we had
a nice tri-co hatch on.  Another fellow at the other end asked the 
first fellow if he thought so, was he sure?  Listening to them I 
realized that I was witnessing a group lesson, something I had never 
seen before.  The men in line between the two guides were mostly
beginners.  Their casts were wobbly.  Now and then they got hooked on
their  clothing, or threw a bee swarm of line around their heads.  When
they  did, the guides splashed over to them and sorted things out. 
Throughout  the session the guides shouted back and forth about the
hatch, what  might be expected, how the trout might be taking.

Tri-cos seemed to be the order of the day, though no one caught 
anything while I watched.

Maybe it was because I was having no luck in any case, but I decided I 
had had enough of the Yellowstone.  The sight of a group lesson ruined 
the day.  I didn't like how quickly they had entered the water.  I 
didn't like the two guides shouting up and down the river, the 
beginners holding out their rods to the guides to have them untangled, 
the lecture about feeding habits as the men fished.  The guides were 
teaching them everything, I thought, and nothing at all.

Like an old grump, I led Nellie back to the truck.  I gave her a few 
biscuits and told her she was a good girl.  My plan had been to fish 
the Madison and the Firehole, going to the other Yellowstone spots I 
remembered, but I decided instead that I was finished with Yellowstone.
I was finished with the traffic, with the crowded campgrounds, with 
group lessons on the exquisite streams.  I knew a place I wanted to 
try.  The next fish, as always, was better than the last. 6

IDAHO

it must have been fate that I came across the story ofGreyfriar's Bobby
while preparing for this trip with Nellie.  As a boy I had read Albert
Payson Terhune's Lad stories, and of course Wilson Rawls's wonderful 
Where the Red Fern Grows, but it had been years since I read stories 
about dogs.  The legend of Greyfriar's Bobby, when I spotted it in a 
used bookstore, seemed too improbable to be true.

The story was printed on a single page in a general reference book 
called The AKC's World of the Pure Bred Dog.  I had no intention of 
buying the book and was only thumbing through it for pictures of Golden
Retrievers.  Then a small sidebar on page 194 caught my attention. 
The  sidebar explained that a statue had been erected in Edinburgh, 
Scotland, to commemorate a dog's devotion to man.  Every day for 
fourteen years, from 1858 to 1872, Bobby stood vigil over his master's 
grave in Greyfriar's Churchyard.  The statue, from what I could make 
out in the poor photograph, seemed to be a simple column with the 
figure of a small seated dog on top.  Its fur was rough.  It appeared 
to be a terrier, although I couldn't be certain. The story struck me
and I wondered how I had never heard of it before.  I especially
wondered if it could possibly be true.  On a whim I called  the
American Kennel Club library and asked about it.  The librarian  there
had never heard of Greyfriar's Bobby either, but she happily  checked
the library's database and came up with three book titles.  An  early
account, published in 1929 and reprinted in 1940, was written by 
Eleanor Stackhouse Atkinson. Entitled simply Greyfriar's Bobby, it 
looked to be, according to the librarian, a children's story.  The True
Story of Greyfriar's Bobby, by Henry T. Button, came out in 1902 and 
was only twenty-nine pages long.  With its serious, scholarly tone, it 
seemed intent on putting the matter of Greyfriar's Bobby straight.  And
finally Ruth Brown, a watercolorist, published The Ghost of Grey
friar's Bobby in 1995.

I asked the librarian if she had any of the books on hand and she said 
no.  I called the University of New Hampshire library and the 
interlibrary loan librarian said the two earlier books were available. 
The Atkinson book was in the special holdings section of the state 
library; the twenty-nine-page account by Button was at the Washington 
State University library.  I asked to borrow both, then I called my 
local bookstore and ordered the Ruth Brown book.

I saved these books as a treat, because I knew being on the road with 
Nellie would put me in the mood for dog books.  But I had forgotten 
about them until I arrived in Ashton, Idaho.  A friend had recommended 
Idaho in general and the Henry's Fork River specifically.  I discovered
an excellent campground on the Falls River at the edge ofTargee 
National Forest, a short drive away from the Henry's Fork.  My 
designated spot, pointed out by two retired park hosts, sat on a grassy
lawn that formed a perfect terrace above the ambling current.  After
the crowding at Yellowstone, I was happy to see that only one tent
site was occupied,  and that by a sagging lean-to that appeared to be
abandoned.  Pulling  into my spot, I felt luxurious and comfortable.  I
backed around and  fussed in order to get the rear of the truck to
overlook the water.  Then, taking my time, I erected my tent, threw my
baggage in it, then  carefully laid out my cooking things.  Nellie sat
and watched,  occasionally ducking off to wade in the river and drink. 
It was during  my unpacking that I came across the Greyfriar's Bobby
books tucked away  beneath a bunch of maps.  A fishing trip could be
flavored by what one read.  My sense was that this was the place to
read about dogs.

At dinnertime the campground host, Dale, came to my site and said that 
he saw I was a fisherman.  He was a tall, slender man, the kind who 
stays thin by working on engines.  Retired three years from California 
where he was a fleet mechanic for a large shipping company, he and his 
wife, Jess, now spent summers in Idaho living as campground hosts.  He 
liked this particular spot, he said, and he wanted me to know that the 
fishing was pretty good directly behind the campground.

"I don't fish, myself," he said, "and neither does my wife.  Most 
people go over to the Henry's Fork, but I figured you might like to 
know."

I told him I had been traveling for about three weeks and the prospect 
of sitting still for awhile was appealing.

"This is the place to do it," he said, "although we'll be closing the
campground the first week of October."

"Any bears?"  I asked.

"Some," he said.

"They'll be denning soon, though."

After dinner I strung up my fly rod.  I didn't bother with waders, 
thinking that if there were fish in any number, which I doubted, I 
could come back tomorrow to take them on seriously. I walked Nellie up
a railroad bed that followed the Falls River,  watching her movement. 
She appeared completely recovered from our hike  into the Wind River
Range.  She weaved back and forth, checking both  sides of the railroad
bed, her tail a white spot among the grasses.  Each time she crossed
tracks she checked to make sure I was with her,  her glance precise but
hasty.  We had hiked a thousand miles like this,  but I still took
pleasure in seeing her move ahead of me.  I knew if we  came to a fork
in the road she would sit and wait, never being stupid,  always being
wise about such things.  More than once I had told her to take us home
and then stood back to let her lead us.  Now, as we  walked, I let her
zigzag across the trail, her steady eagerness joyful  to watch.

The rail bed led to a smooth portion of the river just above a small 
dam, no more than two hundred yards from my campsite.  In the late 
light the water flowed the color of tea, but I suspected that during 
midday hours the water would glimmer over the red, rocky bottom.  I 
veered off to the right and climbed down a muddy bank, then stopped on 
a wide, pebbled beach.  The river bent in a pizza crust to my right, 
the farthest edge the thickest and deepest.  Trout rose everywhere I 
looked.

A thousand trout.  A million trout.  I could not believe my good 
fortune.  As I stood quietly and listened, I heard the gurgle of water 
passing over rocks, the sound snapped to life by the quick surge of 
trout.  I guessed the fish were small, but it would be difficult to 
imagine a more perfect half mile of trout water.  Again I thought of 
the trout cocking their lateral fins into the current, the flow of 
water rocketing them up.  The rings of their feeding drifted above 
them, then disappeared in the water's pull.  I remembered Andre Gide's 
line:

"Fish die belly-up and rise to the surface; it is their way of 
falling." I forced myself to watch the water for five minutes before I
cast so  that I would not put them down in my hurry to fish.  One
particularly  aggressive trout broke the easy roll of water against the
far bank.  It  rose repeatedly, whacking at something that drifted in
an eddy beneath  a fallen branch.  Terrestrial, I thought, but wasn't
sure.  I turned  over a few rocks and examined the bug life beneath.  A
small black gnat  nicked around my ankles.  On an eastern stream I
might have tried a  weighted caddis nymph, but the moment was too good
to fish with a  submerged fly.  I tied on a size twenty hair-wing fly,
a tiny black  dot, then waded in to my ankles.  Nellie came out of the
grasses and  stood beside me, her fur drizzling, her tongue
occasionally dipping to  take a drink.

I didn't catch a thing.  Not at first.  I cast a dozen times to the 
rising fish near the fallen branch, but it fed next to the fly and 
ignored my cast altogether.  I started to smile.  The sun had left the 
sky and I stood on the bank in the cool evening light, my breath 
visible, cold creeping into my movement.  I cursed that I hadn't worn 
my waders.  I cursed that I hadn't dressed more warmly, but I hadn't 
anticipated this many trout.  After a while, I abandoned the aggressive
fish against the far bank and drifted a fly through a small ripple 
above me.  A trout hit.  It hit with a short, nervous take, then spit 
the fly back to the surface; It had been a small fish.  I cast three 
times for it, then returned to the fish against the far bank.  On the 
tenth or twentieth cast, I decided to change flies.  Holding the tippet
at eye level, the light nearly gone, I snipped off the hair-wing fly 
and tied on a gray-black midge.

I knew before the fly landed near the rising fish that it would take 
it.  I'm not sure how I knew, but I did.  The fly had barely settled on
the water when the trout had it, its run through the main body of the 
river explosive.  It felt surprisingly heavy, not at all like the
miniature tug of a fingerling.  The leader sawed  the water surface.

I don't want to make too much of what happened next, but it had a 
strong impact on me.  When I played the fish within reach, I stooped to
unhook it.  Naturally I examined the fish quickly, expecting to find a
cutthroat or rainbow, perhaps even a brookie.  What I found instead
was  a golden trout.  At least it appeared to be a golden trout.  I had
heard about golden trout before and knew of their existence, but I had
never seen one.  I had certainly never caught one.  For a moment I 
lifted it free of the water.  The fish did indeed appear golden.  It
had the general shape of a ten-inch rainbow, slender and thin where a 
cutthroat may be slightly blunt, but gold radiated from its sides.  I 
would have given a great deal to have had someone beside me, someone 
who could have confirmed or dismissed my observation.  I held the trout
 free of the water.  Nellie sniffed it.

I had always associated golden trout with California and although I had
now crossed the Continental Divide, I considered it improbable that I 
had caught a golden trout.  I knew that the Bighorn Mountains held some
 golden trout, but I was a long way from them.

I released it and stood.  Fish still rose everywhere, but I was 
finished with them for the evening.  I wondered if the entire section 
of the river was populated by golden trout.  It was possible that 
golden trout were more common than I imagined.  I remembered in Nova 
Scotia hearing about a lobster man who pulled up a blue lobster, 
something the local papers said was a one in ten million possibility. 
I  doubted a golden trout was as rare, but it was still rare to me.

I told Nellie we were done for the night.  She seemed grateful.  We 
took our time going back down the railroad bed, adjusting to the easy
gait we always assumed on our last walk of the  night. Bats wicked the
air above us.  I felt cold and ready for bed.  Each time Nellie
returned to me she smelled more strongly of the sage  and mint that
must have grown near the water's edge.  After awhile she  stopped
crossing the tracks and wandered with me at a companionable  speed. 
The mountains rose black above us and the moon came up behind  the
trees.  I told Nellie this was one of the good nights.  I let my  hand
dangle to tickle her head when it came close.

Back at the truck, I made a cup of tea and pulled my camp chair next to
the water.  It was a pretty night, although cold.  I put off reading 
about Greyfriar's Bobby and gobbled down a few pages of Marquand 
instead.  Reading him made me want a martini.  I found a bottle of 
scotch and poured out a few fingers worth.  I read and drank and 
fiddled with Nellie.  For the first time since I had left, I thought 
seriously about going home.  I thought about being in my house, beside 
a fire, a comfortable bed waiting.  And I thought of breakfast the next
morning at the Trolley Car, the local restaurant in my New Hampshire 
town, how the eggs would be scrambled, the home fries cut with onions 
and peppers.  I thought about going to the grocery store and picking up
the paper, maybe sitting in the park in the sun and reading it.  And I
thought with longing of the wooden floor in the local hardware store, 
how it would crackle a little with the new cold air, how the seed and 
garden supplies would have surrendered to andirons and starter logs.

I had heard a radio program the day before about home sickness at 
summer camps.

One of the camp directors said that term, home sickness, connoted 
something dysfunctional, and that the better term, used now in the 
camping industry, was home missing.  So I settled for that definition. 
Sitting beside the water, I was home missing.  The cold, though,
didn't let me dwell for  long on the subject.  I took Nellie on last
rounds, then told her I was  going to read her a story about dogs. 
When she heard the word dog, she  looked around for Gusty, her old
playmate.

Later, I climbed into the back of the truck, set Nellie up on her cedar
bed, then pushed deep into my sleeping bag.  The thermometer on my 
jacket said it had broken into the low thirties.  The next morning, 
when I woke, my water bottle had a neck of ice.

It was an old feeling to read a dog book by flashlight.  The True Story
of Greyfriar's Bobby by Henry T. Button was not a book at all but 
something closer to an abstract.  The leaves smelled old and musty, and
when I wet my finger to turn a page, I tasted libraries.  I remembered
the taste from the old Hardy Boy books I had read as a kid;
remembered,  actually the books I had read on the screen porch all
those years  before the summer my mother had taken me to Mindowaskin
Pond.  I've  included Bobby's text here.  The language is
old-fashioned, the  punctuation inconsistent, but that adds to the
account's charm.  The  possessive 's in Greyfriar's seems to jump back
and forth.  I've transcribed the abstract exactly as I received it.
The Memorial Fountain bears the following inscription

GREY FRIAR BOBBY

FROM THE LIFE, JUST BEFORE HIS DEATH

A TRIBUTE

TO THE AFFECTIONATE FIDELITY OF GREY FRIAR BOBBY

In 1858 this faithful dog followed the remains of his master to Grey 
friar's Churchyard, and lingered near the spot until his death in 
1872

WITH PERMISSION ERECTED BY THE BARONESS BURDETTCOUTTS 1872

In the pages of "Dog Stories" from the Spectator published in 1896, 
there appeared a brief and passing reference to the subject of this 
sketch, a faithful Skye terrier, known from the romance of his life as 
"Greyfriars' Bobby."  The characteristic fidelity which marked the 
career of this notable dog has found recognition in the form of a
memorial fountain placed near George IV.  Bridge, one of the  leading
thoroughfares of old Edinburgh, close to the gate of  Greyfriar's
Church.

GREY FRIARS BOBBY

During the "fifties" there lived in Midlothian a farmer named Gray. 
This man, like others of his calling, was generally to be found in 
Edinburgh every Wednesday, attending the market, accompanied always by 
his shaggy terrier "Bobby."  It was Gray's custom, as the time-gun 
announced the hour of one from the Castle heights, to repair to a small
restaurant in the neighborhood of Greyfriars' Churchyard, known by the
name of Train's Dining-rooms.  Here Bobby and his master had their 
midday meal, which in the case of the doggie consisted regularly of a 
bun, probably followed by a canine bonne bouche in the way of a bone.

In 1858 Gray died, and was laid to rest in the historic churchyard of
Grayfriars, aptly named by Sir Walter Scot "the Westminster of 
Scotland."  On the third day following the funeral, and just as the 
echoes of the time-gun were dying away, the occupants of Train's rooms 
were surprised to see a dog, the picture of woe and hunger, enter the 
doorway and approach the proprietor, upon whom he gazed with a most 
beseeching expression.

Train immediately recognised in this visitor the once happy and 
well-cared-for Bobby.  Stirred with compassion, he gave a bun to the 
silent pleader, who then, without waiting to eat it, ran out of the 
shop, carrying his newly-found meal in his mouth.  Next day, at the 
same hour, Bobby again appeared, and a repetition of events followed; 
but on the third day, Train, whose curiosity and interest were now
thoroughly aroused, determined to follow the  dog, and thus discover
his destination.  This was soon reached, for  Bobby, bun in mouth, made
straight for Greyfriars' Churchyard, where,  approaching the grave of
his master, he lay down and began to eat his  scanty meal.  It was now
evident that a chief, if not only mourner of  the kind-hearted farmer,
had been his four footed friend Bobby, who,  after following his late
master's funeral, had then refused to leave  the newly formed mound
which marked his grave, until forced to do so by  the pangs of hunger. 
Bobby's plight, and the locality of his new  domicile, having come to
the knowledge of the occupants of his former  home, he was brought
back, it is said, three times.  However, all  efforts to make him
relinquish his chosen post proved unavailing, and  each attempt was
followed by a speedy return to the same spot in  Greyfriars.

It is on record that James Brown, the old ground keeper and 
superintendent at Greyfriars viewed, with mingled kindness and 
perplexity, what, in face of the gateway notice "Dogs not admitted," 
constituted an unallowable intrusion.

Hitherto old James had put forth his best efforts to enforce this rule;
Bobby, however, was now made the exception, and, from having been an 
unconscious violator of sanctuary, such then did Greyfriars become to 
him and remained so till the end of his life.  Here, at or near his 
master's grave, Bobby continued to spend both days and nights, taking 
refuge only in rough weather under a tombstone hard by, and stoutly 
resisting all friendly advances made by compassionate strangers 
desirous of providing a home for him.  Confirmation as to Bobby's 
night-time habitat is shown in the letter of a Heriot "Old Boy" written
years ago, in which--alluding to various nocturnal escapades of his
school-days--he  wrote "... we used to climb over the wall of
Greyfriars' Churchyard and  skip across, but you didn't go very far
before Bobby was at your heels  and a proper yelping he set up and he
never stopped till we were over  the Hospital wall."  In course of time
a shelter was erected for  Bobby's protection near his master's grave.
He continued his daily  visits to the restaurant, arriving punctually
at the same hour, and  never failing to receive his bun from the
kind-hearted proprietor.

This went on for nine years, when, owing to a more rigorous enforcement
of the seven shillings yearly dog licence, Bobby was arrested as a 
"vagrant," and appeared in Court, accompanied by his humane sympathiser
and defender, the restaurant keeper, who was accused of "harboring"
the  dog.  They were tried before three magistrates, who, after hearing
the  story, tempered the law with mercy, and forgave him for not paying
his  rates, thus saving Bobby from an untimely end.

The then Lord Provost, William Chambers, happening to enter the Court 
and having heard the story, said he would be responsible for the 
payment of the licence and, moreover, further practically extended his 
interest by having a collar made for Bobby with the inscription on a 
brass plate as follows: "Greyfriars' Bobby from The Lord Provost, 1867,
Licensed."  The actual collar, as here illustrated, was, after Bobby's
death, deposited in the City Museum, where it can now be seen.  This 
kind-hearted Lord Provost--who, with his brother Robert Chambers, 
remains eminent in the annals both of literature and those of
Edinburgh-continued, true to his word, to effect the annual renewal of 
the licence the remaining years of Bobby's life. It may be of interest
to mention here that a baronetcy was offered to  and accepted by Lord
Provost Chambers; but he died before the  distinction was conferred.

But to return to Bobby.  This remarkable dog who, by an irony of fate, 
had great length of days granted to him, lived until 1872, and then, 
like his master, was buried in Greyfriars's Churchyard, where his not 
far distant grave, in a flower bed near the main entrance, is often 
pointed out to visitors.

It is worthy of note that, within a very few yards from this spot, 
perpetuating as it does the devotion of a so called "lower being" to 
his earthly master, is located the memorable group of graves here 
illustrated and where, it is reputed, upon whose now time-worn slabs, 
did those stalwarts of Scottish religious history--the precursors of 
hundreds who, many years later, were kept for months rigorously and 
harshly imprisoned in a roofless enclosure near-by in the 
graveyard--sign, on the 1st of March 1638, many of them with blood 
drawn from their own veins, the great National Covenant, thus 
testifying to their unbreakable faith in Him, the Almighty Master of 
all.

A short time before Bobby's death the Baroness Burdett-Coutts visited
Greyfriars, and the sight of the Highland mourner so interested her, 
that when his demise occurred, she obtained permission to erect at the 
street corner, near the Churchyard gate, a granite fountain with an 
effigy of the inconsolable dog sitting on guard, as depicted in the 
frontispiece.

In addition to being thus memorialised in bronze, Bobby also had the
distinction of being the subject for the brush of various artists, one 
of them being the late Mr.  John McLeod who, in 1868, exhibited at the
Royal Scottish Academy  a pictured entitled "Greyfriars' Bob (No. 
705--the property of Thos.  Cowan, Esq.) A pleasing sketch in oils, of
Bobby, by the same artist,  will be found inside the Session House
within Old Greyfriars' Church.  Another portrayer of Bobby was the late
Mr.  Gourlay Steell.

Bobby had many friends, amongst them being Sergeant Scott of the Royal
Engineers, by whom a weekly treat of steaks was long allowed to him in 
addition to his daily kind bounty from Mr.  Train.

Thus did a kind Humanity--in recognition of mute but eloquent
faithfulness--accord to Bobby tribute quite unique.

I have come now to the end of my simple narrative.  Perhaps it may 
remind the reader, as it did the writer, of the affectionate dog and 
his master, who, in the words of the poet: But thinks, admitted to that
 equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company.

Finishing Hutton's abstract, I turned off my flashlight and thought of 
Porky, a beagle mix, the dog of my childhood.  My brother John brought 
her home, claiming, as family legend still has it, that he had found 
her along the road and could not outrun her.  He could not outrun her 
litter mate, either, a brown and white beagle named Bess.  It was years
later, when I learned a little about music, that I realized we had 
named the dogs after the folk opera, Porgy & Bess.  It had been a 
popular show at the time, but as a child I had unknowingly converted
the name to Porky.  Bess died in a tragic accident.  My second oldest
brother, Chuck, went  up for a rebound in a backyard basketball game
and came down on Bess  when she was just a puppy.  He broke the dog's
back or neck.  Bess  scent to sleep, I was told.

Porky survived in a family of seven children.  Porky was black and 
white with two brown spots above her eyes, and a wide plump body that 
was woefully out of shape.  I thought of Porky after reading about 
Greyfriar's Bobby because Porky, as my childhood dog, was the dog of my
 wishes.

One Saturday morning my father had been raking and when he turned a 
turtle over he called me to examine it.  I must have been five or six. 
The yellow spots on the turtle, the wide carapace, the decided weight 
of the turtle as it dangled in the grappling hooks of my childish 
fingers, fascinated me.  Immediately I wanted it for a pet.  I asked my
dad what a turtle likely ate, and he told me lettuce, maybe celery.  I
knew we had a cardboard box in the garage; I knew where to get food. 
I  put the turtle down, asked my dad to watch it, then ran inside.  It 
probably took me some time, but when I returned I expected the turtle 
to be where I had left it.  It was gone, of course.  I yelled at my
father, suspecting that he had moved it.  He told me no, he had simply 
returned to raking.  He helped me look but eventually shrugged that it 
was gone.  He did not admonish me for yelling at him, as he normally 
would have, and I have always taken that as proof of his guilt.

Determined to find the turtle, I turned to Porky.  Whether I had the 
notion from TV--"Rin Tin Tin" was a popular show around that time--or 
from books, I believed Porky could find the turtle.  I called her to me
and got on my knees in front of her.  Turtle, I said over and over to 
her.  Find the turtle.  I'm certain

I

was crying.  She patiently sat, thus performing her one trick and 
expected to receive a biscuit.  No, no, no, I said.  Find the turtle. 
I  dragged her to the spot where the turtle had been and made her smell
the area, figuring, in my TV-addled mind, that she would understand 
what I needed.  Passionately I implored her to find it.  Please, Porky,
 please please please.

She didn't understand a thing, naturally.  She wandered in circles, 
sniffed a little, then kept sitting in front of me, begging for 
biscuits.  I sank my face in her fur, whispered to her, pleaded with 
her to do this one thing.  My heart hurt.  I eventually sobbed into her
fur, clinging to her neck, repeating over and over my request.  Why
did  I want the turtle so much?  I have no idea.  But I wanted,
equally, the  understanding from Porky, the communication, the hope she
brought.  All  the dog stories in the world are about Porky finding the
turtle.

The great luxury of fishing in the West is that one can start much 
later in the morning, at ten or eleven, and still have a successful 
day.  The morning after reading the accounts of Greyfriar's Bobby, a 
Saturday, I woke feeling lazy and peaceful.  I was also hungry.  I made
a quick trip into the Ashcon Bescway, purchased the local newspaper, 
eggs, and bacon, then spent an hour or two poking around my Coleman 
stove, cooking.  Nellie watched me cook with an attentive eye, ready to
scrounge around my feet if I dropped any crumbs.  When I finished, I 
gave her an egg sandwich.  She ate it in three or four good bites, then
curled up and went to sleep, her tail in the sun, her nose neatly 
capped by a leaf.

On my second cup of coffee, Dale stopped by.  He refused my offer of
coffee.  He was on his way to cut some grass.  I told him  about the
golden trout--feeling slightly foolish as I did so--but he  simply
shrugged and said he guessed it was possible.  Then I asked  where the
best place might be to watch a football game on television,  Tennessee
vs.  Florida State, and he recommended one of the two bars in  downtown
Ashton.  As he left, I felt like a rich man.  After a  wonderful,
leisurely breakfast, I could fish for a few hours, then  totter to town
and drink a few beers while watching what promised to be an excellent
football game.  Moreover, I felt I could use the company.  Since Bob
and Tom's departure in Dubois, I had been traveling alone.  Although I
agreed with Thoreau, who said, "I never found the companion  that was
so companionable as solitude," the notion of a bar and a few  peanuts
held a strong appeal.  It also occurred to me that I might find  out a
little about the Henry's Fork and come up with other places to  fish
the following day.

By eleven I was on the water, this time properly outfitted in waders 
and warm clothes.  After she explored the river a half mile in either 
direction, Nellie stood beside me, chin pressed against my knee.  Shade
covered the water.  Fish rose as adamantly as they had the previous 
night.  Because of my calm morning, I fished patiently and with 
extremely small terminal tackle.  I cast upstream, letting a gold 
caddis nymph tick along the bottom.  Almost immediately I began picking
up fish.  They were all about eight inches.  Each fought with frantic
energy, tailing across pools, running at me as often as running away. 
Nellie examined each fish when I brought it to hand.  Not one was 
golden.

After a while I began to feel I was an expert fisherman.  It's a 
well-known liability among anglers, an affliction to which I am 
particularly susceptible.

One night on the Deerfield River in Massachusetts I happened to be 
present when a wonderful hatch of March browns occurred.  The flies
were big, grumpy looking  things that replicated three or four ugly
Wulfs I had tied myself and  had with me in my fly book.  The trout, to
my delight, rose about forty  or fifty feet away.  Most fishing occurs
within a short cast from an  angler's feet.  But on the Deerfield that
night I was able to crank it  up, to cast a large fly to the limit of
my fly rod, then let the fly  flutter onto the surface to be met by a
cooperative fourteen-inch  rainbow.  In the time it took to hook three
fish, I became a pro.

Instantly, all the evenings I had struggled, all the days I had been 
skunked, became the anomalies.  That night, I concluded, was the true 
measure of my fishing.  But the next evening I returned to the same 
spot, often a mistake, and, after enormous effort, caught a few lousy 
trout in the tail waters long after my fly had sunk in the swirls at 
the end of the run.  As quickly as that, I was mortal again.

The same inflation I experienced on the Deerfield began to occur on the
Falls River, a mile above my campground.  I was the trout master.  How
easy to read water!  How simple to seduce trout!  After the fourth or 
fifth fish, I decided catching them with a small nymph was not good 
enough.  I sat on the bank and tied on an Adams, a brown-gray fly 
nearly twice the size of the nymph.  Nellie sat beside me, her fur wet 
and smelly.  She was not impressed with my success and she kept her 
eyes moving over the far side of the river, watching the day move 
across the hillside.  When I waded back into the stream I fished not 
with anticipation, but with the satisfaction of a man waiting on a good
payday.  The work of studying the river and figuring out the
essentials  was already accomplished.  I cast the Adams, lifting the
rod tip at the  end of each probe just a little so that the fly landed
first.  I  crouched a bit so my silhouette would not spook the trout. 
I fished  beautifully, I thought, but absolutely without result. It
didn't matter.  A minor setback.  I changed to a small mosquito and 
repeated the process.  I even allowed the fly to dip under the water 
surface--a tactic that is not considered good form because it 
supposedly makes the fly nearly irresistible to the fish--and felt my 
mortality returning to me at a gallop.

Naturally I fished less well now that my confidence had diminished. 
The  trout that had been so cooperative fifteen minutes before suddenly
seemed otherwise engaged.  After striking out with the mosquito, I 
humbly returned to the small golden caddis I had been successful with 
earlier in the morning.  I cast it out and let it drift the same way as
before.  This time, if anything, I demonstrated more care in its 
presentation.  The trout ignored it.  Not only did they ignore it, but 
they began rising around it, as if escorting it to the end of the run.
I couldn't help feeling they weren't taking me seriously.  There was no
good reason they would refuse the same fly they had eagerly taken 
thirty minutes before.  I promised myself I would catch one more, then 
I would knock off to watch the football game.

It took close to two hours to get the last fish.  I changed flies four 
more times, went back to the original caddis nymph, used the fly I had 
succeeded with (he night before, came back to the caddis nymph, tried 
bright, gaudy, ridiculous flies, streamers, ants, then finally hooked a
ten-inch cutthroat on a wooly bugger beneath a log that lay 
half-submerged in the water.  I played that fish as carefully as I had 
ever played a fish, because I knew, intuitively, that my perverse 
nature in these matters would force me to catch another fish before I 
left the stream unless I brought this one to hand.  I played the fish 
like a man carrying hot soup.  When I finally released it, I reeled in 
and tied off the line.  The trout had not ceased rising. Nellie led me
back to camp.  I took a few minutes to wash, splashing  in the stream
until I felt at least marginally better.  Whenever my  attention
wavered from the immediate task at hand, images of rising  trout
spooked me.  I had to shake them out of my head.  Vainglorious, I  told
myself.  That's what I had been.

That was why they continued to taunt me.

I stored everything in the tent, then climbed into the truck and headed
into town.  Nellie sat beside me, happy to go for a ride.  Her ears 
rode the wind passing through the truck.

I'm not sure how the conversation about leg wrestling began, but I 
think it was a standing joke that I fell into without knowing what I 
was doing.  Ashton, Idaho, is a small town, a very small town.  It 
consists of a few businesses along Route 20--the Bestway, a couple 
convenience stores--and a main street. The main street forms a T 
against Route 20, with a stop sign that effectually eliminates the 
chance that someone would accidentally drive through the town without 
stopping.  A large potato processing plant takes up one side of the
downtown area.

I am not sure what I had been expecting--maybe a bright, oak wood bar 
with a lively crowd, some funny drinks named after regular customers, a
nacho special for the football game--but the prospects for watching
the  game dulled considerably when I found the two bars to which Dale
had  directed me.  The sports type bar that Dale felt was my best bet
was  closed.  It didn't appear to have been opened in the last twenty
years.  The door was boarded.  Someone had soaped the windows.

The other bar, located across the street, was the kind of place that 
was dark at noon and bright at midnight.  It was the kind of place
where you put cigarettes out on the floor, then walked  across the
butts later, feeling as though you were crushing thick  beetles.  It
had five draft pulls, all serving Bud or Miller.  It had a  sign that
said no drinking until after five, and all the numbers on the  clock
were five.

I walked in and sat at the end of the bar, directly beneath the 
television.  I was not the only customer.  Two silent men sat at the 
other end of the bar, both of them wearing cowboy hats, both of them 
with Skoal cans bulging in their rear pockets.

Sharon ran the place.  A short, dark-haired woman in her early forties,
she sat beneath the TV smoking and reading magazines.  She had a swarm
of magazines.  She told me customers brought in magazines from home
and  left them at the bar for her.  Skimming pages, cutting things out,
she  fanned through Readers Digest, Glamour, Redbook, Good
Housekeeping,  Home Beautiful, YM, rarely concentrating on one article
but zooming  through the pages, synthesizing new window treatments,
eyebrow design,  the latest on Oprah.  When I asked if she preferred
one magazine to  another, she said no, although she liked ones based on
home life.  Decorating, she said, was her special interest, but she
would read anything as long as it wasn't sports.  She cut out recipes
mostly, she  told me, but had only made two or three dishes straight
out of the  magazines.

"I know what my girlfriends like to cook, so I give them the 
recipes."

When I had a Bud in front of me, I asked in sotto voce if anyone would 
mind if I checked to see if the football game was on.  No one minded. 
Sharon handed me the remote control.  I flicked through the stations 
and found the game.  It didn't seem as interesting now that I sat in 
the bar.  The sunlight outside seemed cordial and I missed it. 
Besides,  it is always hard to know how many beers to drink in the
middle of the  day.  Drink too few and you find yourself groggy and
ready to sleep at four in the afternoon.  Drink too many and you are
headed into a long evening.

After my third beer, Sharon started asking me questions.  She wondered 
where I was from, what I was doing in Ashton, what I did back home. 
From New Hampshire, she marveled.  She told me it had always been her 
impression that people from back East worked harder than people in the 
West.  As a rule, she said.

Industrious.  While she talked to me, she continued to flip pages.  She
seldom looked up.  Now and then she stood and went to the rear of the 
bar where a series of doors apparently connected to her living 
quarters.  Standing in the doorway, she had conversations with a male. 
Then she turned around and returned to the bar.

"His ex is coming," she told me after one of her conversations with the
 voice, "and she's a first-class bitch."

"Whose ex?"  I asked.

"His," she said and wagged her head to indicate the back of the bar.

"Guy's.  I live with Guy."

"And his ex is coming here?"

She nodded and lit a cigarette.  It turned out that the local boys' 
football team had won an important game somewhere to the south.  Tough 
little bastards, Sharon said about the team.  Not talented, but tough. 
Guy's son played on the team.

Guy's ex was bringing the boy back from the game and Sharon said it was
 likely that she, the ex, would stay and have a few drinks.

"Which I wouldn't mind," Sharon concluded, "if she wasn't such a bitch.
 Wait until Kathy sees her."

"Who is Kathy?"  I asked, trying to keep it straight.

"She's the nighttime bartender.  She's wild.  She's the leg wrestling 
champion of these parts."

"Leg wrestling?" "You know, when you lay down and hook legs.  She'll
beat anyone."

Actually, I believed I was pretty good at leg wrestling.  It had always
been one of my covert talents.  Growing up in a family of seven, leg 
wrestling had been one of many contests in our heathen childhood.  Legs
snapping like alligator jaws, we had laid on the living room floor 
through rainy afternoons, brother versus sister, sister versus sister, 
delighting when we could flip our opponent.

Listening to Sharon go on about Kathy's leg wrestling ability, I 
felt--to use a western phrase-that I had the drop on the unsuspecting 
Kathy.  Challenged to a leg wrestling contest, what would she see?  A 
gentlemanly middle-aged guy, a fly fisherman, a vacationer.  I didn't 
doubt she would take someone from New Hampshire less seriously than she
would take a Texan or a Wyoming cowboy.  I felt that the manhood of
New  England had been challenged.

At the same time, I wondered if I should anticipate gunplay when Guy's 
nameless ex returned to her ancestral watering hole.  Meanwhile I 
watched the football game.  At halftime I started out to walk Nellie, 
informing Sharon I would return.

I took Nellie for a walk to a tired potato field.  The crop was already
in, the ground turned for winter.  I walked her along the patchy grass
at the side of the road.  When she finished her business, I let her
off  her lead for a while. It only took her a moment to find the first 
potato.  She dug it up in a long furrow at the center of the field.  I 
knew she was delighted.  She lifted the potato in her mouth, an earthy 
tennis ball, and began prancing the way she does when something pleases
her.  She lifted her legs high and eyed me from sideways glances, her 
posture telling me she wasn't sure what I would think.  Then, suddenly,
she spotted another potato.  They were leftover potatoes, ones too
pulpy to harvest.  She was shocked to find such abundance.  She  can
mouth three tennis balls, but this was a different story.  Instead  of
three or four, there were a hundred such potatoes scattered about.  She
spread her front legs and got another potato off the ground.  Then  she
dropped one, picked another up, and so on.  I could tell it drove  her
crazy.  I told her to get them, to bring them to me, which only  drove
her nuttier.  Her tail wagged in white arcs, wagged as it does  only
when she is completely involved in things.  She finally managed to 
cram three potatoes in her mouth, but she couldn't make it back to 
where I was before dropping them.  Her muzzle became coated with dirt. 
Her cheeks bulged with the potatoes, and her paws grew brown socks of 
earth and loose soil.

"Come on, girl," I called at last.

She came, but not before trying one last time to grab the potatoes 
again.  They wouldn't cooperate.  Unlike tennis balls, the potatoes 
simply grew more slick the more she mouthed them.  She became less 
successful with each new try. Finally I had to walk into the field and 
put her on lead.  I knew she would not willingly fail to retrieve. 
Retrieving was at the core of her nature.  She would have remained in 
the field most of the night trying to bring potatoes to me.

I consoled her on the walk back to the truck, telling her we all have 
such days, then fed and watered her.  I told her to lay down on her dog
bed and she did.  One of the benefits of traveling with a dog in
autumn  is that you don't have to worry about the truck getting too
hot.  She  was as comfortable in the back of the truck as she would be
in my  living room at home.  As I left her she was busy licking her
paws, her  mouth muddy with potato muck.

Kathy stood behind the bar when I returned.  I'm not sure what I 
expected--maybe Calamity Jane or Annie Oakley--but Kathy resembled a
hairdresser from New Jersey.  She wore an inch of  makeup and her hair
crept down her neck like black ivy.  She smoked  constantly, often with
two going at the same time on either end of the  bar.  The cigarettes
had turned her voice into something lovely, a  hollow, gravelly sound
like a garden hose spilling into an aluminum  watering can.  And she
had a great laugh.  It was a loud, raucous  thing, a bark to start and
a tapering semi-truck air brake at the end.  She ran a lively bar.

I was prepared to be coaxed into the leg wrestling match, but not to be
assaulted as soon as I returned to the bar.  Apparently Sharon had told
Kathy about me, letting her know that I was skeptical of Kathy's
fabled  ability.

Kathy, to use western lingo, was spoiling for a fight.  Sizing her up, 
I thought my chances were pretty good.  I had five inches on her at 
least and unquestionably a good fifty pounds.  Barring some trick that 
I didn't know about, I thought I'd beat her.  Additionally, I was 
mindful of the comparative emptiness of the bar.  I didn't relish the 
idea of laying down and wrestling with Kathy in front of an audience. 
It would be humiliating enough to simply lose; to lose in front of a 
group of braying men that would assemble later, to be flipped over like
a hedgehog and regard the world' through my legs, was more insult than
 I cared to contemplate.

Kathy came around the bar.

"Come on then," she said.

"Don't say you weren't warned."

I mumbled something about not really wanting to wrestle, but she 
stretched out on the cigarette butts and told me she was ready. 
Shrugging, I laid down next to her.  Guy, currently Sharon's boyfriend,
 came out of the back room to officiate.

Sharon watched from a bar stool, shaking her head at me.  Kathy hooked 
my arm along hers.  I wondered again if there wasn't some trick I had
already missed.  Before I could get settled, Guy  started counting.

On three Kathy's leg tucked in against mine.  Vital, with the 
peristaltic strength of a constrictor, she began to fold me backwards. 
I kept expecting some gimmick to appear, but instead it was merely the 
unconquerable strength of the woman.  Her ability, I guessed as she 
rocked me slowly backwards, came from years of sitting on a horse, her 
legs clamped like calipers around the hay-filled guts of a bay mare.

I don't think she won, but I'm certain I didn't.  We slid a bit to the
side--maybe I pushed--and the war ended.  Kathy stood immediately and 
declared herself the champion, which was fine by me.  Guy decided he 
should buy me a beer and Sharon went back to her magazines.  I sat 
beneath the TV and watched the rest of the game, but I had already 
decided it was time to move on.  Something about the afternoon had 
changed my blood.  As I sat at the bar, I started to feel lonely and 
began to think of home again.  I couldn't put a finger on why it
happened.  That evening when I stepped outside the air felt crisper, 
winter closer.  I told Nellie it was last walk and gave her a biscuit 
when she finished her work.  Then we climbed in the truck and headed 
back to the campground.  She stretched out on the truck seat and put 
her head in my lap.  Her chin stayed on my thigh, but her eyebrows 
danced at any sound I made.  I tickled her paws and rubbed her back.  I
wondered if she was home missing too. 7on my way to the sun river,
Montana, I stopped to fish for the  afternoon at Wade Lake.  I had
heard about Wade Lake because the record  for Montana trout came out of
Wade Lake.  The easterner who had told me  couldn't remember whether it
was rainbow or cutthroat or brookie, but  driving up through the sage
hills, with pronghorn antelopes as common  as cows, it didn't seem to
matter much.  I knew the fish were likely to  be large.  My fear was
that at this time of year they might stay down,  their blood slowing to
a turtle life just above the' mud

I have always been partial to lakes and ponds.  While fly fishing is 
perhaps best suited to moving water, I have an abiding affection for 
late summer evenings and rising trout on still water.  For me nothing 
quite matches the pleasure of fishing to circles, the telltale marks of
feeding trout.  I love casting to a rise, watching the fly settle,
then  feeling the quick, greedy take of a large brookie.

Wade Lake is set in a bowl of mountains to the north and west of 
Yellowstone, not far off Route 287.  It is located in the Hidden Lake
chain of lakes in the BeaverheadDeerlodge National Forest.  The
surrounding land is serviceable cattle country and I passed six or 
seven livestock grates as I made my way up and over the surrounding 
hills.  The lake seemed to be in hiding, thus the name Hidden Lakes, 
because the land leading to it revealed little promise of water.  In 
fact, I stopped once or twice to reconnoiter, wondering if I had taken 
a wrong turn.  But then the road deepened, became more established, and
a wooden sign said Wade Lake with an arrow pointing the way I had 
thought it should point.

It took thirty minutes to descend, and in that time the landscape 
changed to what one would expect to find near a mountain lake.  Pines 
marched up from the water to meet me.  The grasses ripened.  Starlings 
and swifts banked near the shoreline.  Little by little I made my way 
to a campground near the center of the lakeshore and found a boat 
launching ramp.  The campground appeared nearly empty and as I climbed 
into my gear I saw that snow topped the highest peaks. Trout season, 
at least in the higher elevations, was nearly finished.

Before climbing into my float tube I walked Nellie next to the lake. 
She waded in and out of the water, happy to drink her fill, happy to 
inspect the shoreline.  We walked a half mile under the pines.  She 
moved beautifully, her coat fully restored, her stride excellent.  She 
nosed the pinecones and scouted for scents leading to the water.  I 
followed her, letting her go where she liked.

In the time we have known each other, she has never run away, never 
gone off in an unpredictable manner.  I liked following her.  She took 
her time and smelled everything.  When she determined there were no new
smells to discover, she began wading in the lake, looking for sticks
to  fetch.  I threw a section of a pine branch as far as my arm could 
launch it and she swam after it.  She fetched it seven or eight times.
Though I had never  taught her to give first, then shake off, she
performed properly for a  retriever.  Hunters prefer the duck to be
handed to them before the dog  shakes, a trait Nellie had learned or
received by luck or heritage.  When we finished she carried the large
stick back to the truck, the tip  of one end nearly dragging on the
ground.

I combed her out on the tailgate of the truck, gave her a biscuit or 
two, then locked her in the truck.  I promised that I would not be 
long.  She curled up on her dog bed and went to sleep.

As I backed into the water, the float tube suspended at my waist, I 
suddenly realized I didn't care about fishing that day.  The same thing
had happened once or twice before, but I still had no explanation for 
it.  If I hadn't driven so far to get to Wade Lake, I would have 
marched out of the water and called it a day.  The water seemed foreign
to me; I had no clue where to begin, or how to start fishing.  I saw
no  rises.  The lake seemed vast and the prospects of catching a trout
or  two so dim as to be nearly unthinkable.  A wind began blowing, too,
taking the tops of waves and rinsing them white.  The wind pushed my 
first few casts sideways, turning the large loops of my sinking line 
into quick roller coasters that tried to snap at the end.  Nonetheless,
 I kept on.

I knew I had to get into a quiet cove, someplace sheltered, but 
propelling myself against the wind proved difficult.  I kept casting, 
although it was merely throwing the line into the water and tugging it 
back.  Chuck and chance. I felt no rhythm or cadence to anything I 
did.  The large Matuka streamer on the end of my line caught the wind 
and fluttered like a luffing sail.

I would have felt more hopeful if I had seen someone else catch a 
trout, but the lake was empty as far as I could see.  I told myself I
would fish for five minutes more.  Then three.  I was ready  to give up
when I looked down and saw a huge trout following my  retrieve, its
nose inches from the retreating streamer.

I tried to keep the retrieve steady, luring the fish closer, but at the
same time I was running out of line.  To compensate I held the rod tip
high and spun slowly, leading the trout like a show pony in a circle 
around me.  I increased the speed of the fly, slowed it, then increased
it again.  Often slowing a retrieve, then hurrying it, will induce a 
trout to strike, but this one seemed happy to follow the Matuka in a 
circle with me absurdly performing pirouettes in the middle of a 
Montana lake.

I made four turns with the trout following.  On the last one I stopped 
the streamer altogether.  The fish sank below and I thought I had lost 
him.  But as soon as I began to circle again, the trout fell into 
position behind the fly.

Apparently it had no concern for my legs or swirling flippers.  I began
to find the situation wonderfully goofy.  I hoped that a second trout,
seeing the first one closing in on a minnow, might swoop in and steal 
the bacon, but after another turn or two that possibility faded.

It was a splendid predicament.  Did it make sense to let the fish 
continue to follow?  Or should I yank the streamer away and cast to 
unseen fish?  To complicate matters, the trout appeared to be enormous.
It's hard to judge the size of a fish underwater, but I was confident 
this one went over twenty inches.

Finally the trout made the decision for me.  It did not swim away, but 
seemed to sink, sliding through the water in a crocodile glide that 
draped the darker currents over its back.  I jigged with the streamer, 
reduced to party boat maneuvers, but the fish had disappeared.

I had never experienced anything like it.  I didn't move for a minute 
or so, trying to figure out if I could have done anything differently.
The fish was going to haunt me.  I considered ways that  I might cast
to bring the fish back, to make it bite, to close the  exchange we had
between us, but there was nothing I could think to  do.

For a while longer, I cast blindly, hoping for another trout, but gave 
up eventually.  With the wind blowing more and more steadily, the water
became an opaque disk.  It occurred to me that a fish might be 
following my streamer on any cast, that strange chase taking place in 
the dark depths of the lake, but whatever had brought the trout to me 
seemed gone.  After another hour, I kicked for shore.

To get my blood pumping again, I walked Nellie to an open field I had 
seen as I entered the campground and threw the Frisbee for her.  She is
a good Frisbee player and can leave the ground, leaping and twisting
in  one fluid motion to snap a Frisbee from the air.  I threw ten
times.  It  was an old game for us.  I had kept a standing record of 
best-out-of-ten throws, the all-time top mark being eight.  On this 
evening we came away with six, which wasn't bad given the uneven 
terrain.  When we finished, I pretended to ignore her and walked away
with the Frisbee dangling at my side.  It was a game we had worked out 
years ago.  Nellie snuck up and grabbed the Frisbee and it was my job 
to tell her she was a terrible girl, a bad dog, all the while playing 
tug of war with her.  She growled and made a big deal of trying to get 
the Frisbee.  When I let her win, she tried to push the Frisbee back in
 my hand to continue the war.

We drove back over the same road.  Dust rooster-tailed behind us. 
Nellie pressed her nose to the windshield a hundred times.  In Ennis, a
town located in the heart of fly-fishing country, we stopped for food.
I ordered us each a turkey sandwich.  We ate it on the tailgate of my 
truck, overlooking the Madison River.  Once I had fished the Madison
in the middle of the salmon fly  hatch, a hatch which brings enormous
insects onto the stream, each one  as large as a chrysanthemum.  The
salmon fly hatch is a famous event in  Montana--like the cherry
blossoms in Washington or the wash of autumn  colors in New
Hampshire--and people come from around the world to fish  it.  The
hatch occurs in a brief period, three or four days to a week,  and no
one can predict exactly when it will happen.  I had blundered  into it
and had a wonderful time fishing with large, ropy flies, the  trout
glutted on such abundance.

That's what I thought about as we ate.  When we finished, we drove in 
the twilight, Nellie's chin resting on my lap.  I kept my hand on her 
and gave her a long rub.  We listened to country music and left the 
windows down and the heat blasting.  We headed north to the Sun 
River.

During the fall a few years ago I came close to being attacked by a 
black bear in New Hampshire.  It was somewhat ironic, too, because I 
had returned from an Alaskan fishing trip a few weeks before and had 
happily related bear stories to anyone who wanted to hear them. 
Grabbing a listener, I informed her or him that it was astonishing how 
quickly one became accustomed to the presence of a bear.

I explained how, on the salmon runs in Alaska, one couldn't escape 
contact with a bear.  To prove my point, I related the story of a 
fly-in trip I had taken across the Cook Inlet.  I had been dropped at 
the mouth of a salmon river and had cast merrily for coho through most 
of the morning.  It had been a gray, rainy day, but the fish jumped 
madly, huge salmon the length of shotgun barrels crashing into the
water.  I used a Korean plastic streamer and was having marvelous  luck
when a guide in a skiff about thirty yards away whistled to me, 
pointed over my shoulder, then mouthed the word, Bear.

Up until that point, I had never seen a bear in the wild, never stood 
on the ground where a bear could easily grab me.  My first impression 
on seeing the brown--a huge, adolescent male--was incredulity.  The 
bear did not appear genuine.  It resembled, instead, a George Lucas 
invention, a Wookiee or Ewok sprung mechanically to life.  It came down
a narrow waterfall, picking its way slowly, disturbed but not unnerved
by my presence.  It wanted the salmon, obviously, and it shook its
wide  head--its incredibly wide head--and grunted its displeasure.  It
wanted  me out of its way.  Unfortunately, Alaskan rivers are typically
glacial, which means the bottom is often silted with several feet of
muck.  Moving quickly in them is out of the question, because you peg 
hold with each step.  To oblige the bear, I began crab-walking to one 
side, leaving the bear easy access to the spot I had maintained for 
most of the morning.  The bear lumbered down and patrolled the 
shoreline, eventually settling on the entrails offish that had been 
cleaned earlier in the day.  It pulled the entrails apart like gutty 
spaghetti, its head snapping up as the flesh gave way.

Amazingly, the bear became part of the landscape exactly as people had
predicted.  The guide boat had picked me up, but later I asked to be 
put ashore.

I began fishing again, happy to be back on my feet, not particularly 
nervous when the bear went up the waterfall behind my back or 
disappeared for a moment on the white rocks that mounted in a cliff to 
my left.  I kept fishing.  Other fishermen joined me and we laughed 
anxiously when the bear came closer, shouting that we hoped the bear 
liked his meat well peppered, because the spray at our belts was going
to be the  only seasoning available.

Eventually the adolescent male left, only to be replaced by a female 
and a cub.

Immediately the fishing guides in the skiffs told us to board.  I 
understood the difference.  The male had an aspect of tomfoolery, but 
the female was all business.  She came down the waterfall in a quick, 
precise cadence, her single cub trailing her.  Without a word from the 
guides, we hustled to be in the boats.

I was the last one aboard.  The female came into the water after me, 
not charging, but merely sealing the beach off so that there would be 
no dispute.

She came into the water to her chest, then went up on her rear legs to
scrutinize us.  Her claws, I remember, resembled white bananas.

Later on that same trip, I watched a grizzly feed on a moose carcass in
Denali, but again it was a comfortable situation.  She saw me; I saw 
her.  The grizzly remained on the carcass, indolent, bored, the moose 
hide spread beneath it like a rug.  A ranger told me afterward that the
bear had been on the carcass for a week.  What I had witnessed was a 
well-fed bear a month or two free of hibernation.

With such experiences fresh in mind, I should have been prepared when I
encountered the black bear.  It was autumn in New Hampshire, the best 
season for walking.  I had driven up to the town hall in Bridgewater, a
splendid white building placed on a dirt road not far from the top of
a  mountain.  Nellie hopped out in front of me.  I also had a black Lab
with me, a young female named Devil Dog, who belonged to an 
eight-year-old friend of mine.  Both dogs took off down the dirt path, 
happy to be out on a beautiful fall afternoon.  The sugar maples had 
already turned yellow and red newts dotted the dirt road as we walked 
into the woods.  The temperature held in the forties. The mosquitoes
were finished for another year.  It was the kind of day  that makes
life in New England get into your blood-- a pumpkin forest  on a black
cat day.

We walked for thirty minutes before we came to bear scat-at least I 
thought it was bear scat.  I called the dogs closer.  Devil Dog is a 
timid, shy girl, a smallish black Lab who flunked out of the Guiding 
Eyes program because loud noises make her run for the hills.  She came 
close at once, docile and obedient.

Nellie, on the other hand, grudgingly swung by, then continued scouting
the path on either side.  She particularly liked the old stone walls 
where the chipmunks chattered at her from safety.  I raised my voice a 
little and told her to be serious.

We continued on, but I was alert.  After another fifty yards I heard a 
grunt and saw the wands of a berry patch rattling.  I spoke to Nellie 
sharply and got her to come to me just as the bear broke free of the 
berry patch.  Devil Dog cowered at my feet, but Nellie saw the bear at 
the same time as I did and strained to get at it.  Luckily I had 
grabbed her collar in time.  The bear--so black as to be nearly 
indistinguishable from the earth around it--charged directly at us.

"Hey," I yelled but the bear continued coming.  A second bear shot out 
from behind the first, going uphill and directly away from us.  It was 
a cub, I realized.  Then a third bear followed it, a second cub, while 
the mother bear kept coming at us.  I suspected, watching it, that the 
female thought Devil Dog was one of its cubs.  I also debated, in that 
intense moment, whether I would let the dogs go at it if it came down 
to them or me.  Nellie, at least, would distract the bear while I made 
a getaway.  It was a terrible, cowardly thought, but I also realized I 
couldn't defend Nellie anyway, and that Devil Dog was ready to join the
Foreign Legion. The female came within ten feet of us, made a sharp
turn to the left,  then crashed up the hill after the two cubs.  Nellie
choked against the  collar.  Devil Dog began barking at last, wandering
within a three feet  circle of me and making phony woof sounds,
occasionally digging up the  ground with her back paws.

Although it sounds like a cliche, the hair on my neck had raised.  I 
had always thought that was a convention of weak horror novels, but it 
turned out to be true.  The bear, I estimated, had weighed about three 
hundred pounds.  I heard it crashing up the hill for minutes afterward,
 its wide feet stirring the autumn leaves.

I thought of that black bear--and of bears in general--on the Sun River
in Augusta, Montana, a day after I left Idaho and Wade Lake.  On the 
first day of fishing the Sun River, I heard a cough in the bushes to 
the left of the river and suspected it was a bear.  Anglers lie if they
say they don't often worry about bears, but perhaps my antenna was 
pricked because the motel keeper in Augusta, where I had taken a room, 
had said the Sun provided prime berry forage for bears.  I was up to my
knees in water when I heard the cough.  Fortunately Nellie was beside 
me and not scouting the bushes as she often does.  We had only been 
fishing an hour.  I had already landed three or four fair sized 
cutthroat, all taking a Royal Coachman.  As soon as I heard the cough I
grabbed Nellie.  I tried to listen, but it was difficult to
distinguish  sounds from the center of the stream.  In a second or two
I had  persuaded myself that the noise might have been my imagination. 
It  might also have been a steer foundered in the bushes.

Either way, I waded downstream and away, fishing the pockets, pleased
with the nimble tumble of trout from behind  rocks.  I told Nellie to
heel and she did.  We fished the rest of the  morning without hearing
more bear coughs.

The Sun River is nothing special, which is exactly why I like it.  It 
is not a blue-ribbon stream.  It is not a place where one is likely to 
run into five or six men in waders yelling about hatches.  It's a river
that spatters knee-deep for miles, has several wonderful runs where 
trout always hide, and has a million basketball-sized stones where 
trout linger and dodge out for passing flies.  It connects the Rockies 
to the Missouri River in an easterly run.  On this day in early 
October, I had the river to myself.  I decided to believe that I hadn't
 heard a bear.

At lunch Nellie and I sat on the tailgate of my truck and did nothing 
for a time except bake in the bright October light.  The night before I
had taken out maps and calendars and gauged where we could go in the 
time left for the trip. We had another week, ten days at the most, if 
I drove back quickly.  I wanted to make these final days on the road 
with Nellie count.

After I ate, I stretched out in the cricket grass of an open meadow and
got Nellie to lay next to me.  She was wet, but warm, and she rested 
beside me, her fur taking on heat, her body blocking the wind.  When I 
had things arranged to my liking, I opened up A River Runs Through It 
by Norman Maclean.  I did it cautiously, as I always do.  It has been 
twenty years, almost exactly, since the book was first published.  By a
lucky set of circumstances, I had read it then, when I was twenty-two.
I was enormously hungry for books at the time, gobbling up bestsellers
as well as classics.  At that young age, I loved books that
represented  writers at an equally young age--Hemingway's The Sun Also
Rises or Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise.  In the same year that A
River Runs  Through It was published, I headed to Paris, then to
Africa, two years away from the publication of my own  first novel.

Norman Maclean was not a young writer.  He wrote the book shortly after
retirement.  It was as if his entire life had been distilled and 
dropped, page by page, into this one exquisite book.  When the movie 
came out, complete with Brad Pitt in woolen trousers, I could not bring
myself to see it.  I still have not seen it, although as happens in 
modern America, enough of the movie soaked through promos and clips so 
that I feel as though I have.  The novel is only marginally about 
fly-fishing; it is really about love and truth, about our inability to 
save what is near to us, about our obligations to our brothers.  In the
 novel fishing is a means of transcendence.

I have never read the book straight through a second time.  I have been
too afraid to attempt it for fear it would disappoint me, but I 
frequently read and reread my favorite passages as I did that afternoon
 beside the Sun River.

Ted Taigen, my friend of thirty years, had first recommended A River 
Runs Through It to me.  Ted and I had been friends since little league 
baseball when we both played for the Red Legs in Westfield, New Jersey.
We had our first beer together when we were fourteen.  When we were 
fifteen, we lied to our parents about where we were going and 
hitchhiked to the Jersey shore, where we slept under an old wooden 
rowboat, cold, damp, and feeling alive.  We remained close friends into
 high school until his family moved to Colorado.

After my freshman year at college, I borrowed one hundred dollars from 
my father, told him I'd be back for school in the fall, and stuck out 
my thumb on Route 22 going west.  If an eighteen-year-old came to me 
today and asked to do the same thing, I'd tell him he was crazy.  But 
the early seventies were different times, and I was the kind of kid
who wanted to go, to go  anywhere, to get out of town.  There was only
one other person I could  count on to share that feeling and I went
that summer to visit him.

It was Ted who introduced me to fly-fishing.  Tall and thin, with 
bright blue eyes and a remarkably retentive mind, Ted spent his summers
hiking in the Rockies, visiting beaver ponds with his dog Patches, and
learning to cast to bright-colored cutthroats and rainbows.  After my 
experience on Mindowaskin Pond as a boy, I had not fished for fifteen 
years.  When I arrived in Fort Collins, Colorado, Ted, who was a good 
student--and who would go on to become a professor of environmental 
studies at the University of Connecticut--hadn't finished his classes 
at Colorado State University.  I was Huck Finn calling him away, but he
had the good sense to lend me a tent, a fishing pole, and to send me 
off to the Poudre River, where I could camp for a while and wait for 
him to get free.  I set up his old canvas tent next to the Poudre, ate 
beans and franks until they nearly killed me, and settled down with 
books at night.  I climbed a mountain in sneakers and saw eagles and 
western pines for the first time, and in the early morning of the 
second day stabbed a salmon egg on a hook and let it swing through the 
riffles of the Poudre.  The first fish I caught in my life was a trout 
in the Poudre River of Colorado, the fish hooking me as surely as I
hooked it.

In memory I have linked that river to A River Runs Through It.  All the
conversations Ted and I have had, beginning when we were curious, 
adventurous, and young, were caught in the river along with the words 
of Norman Maclean.  Ted and I still go fishing today.  Each spring we 
visit the Rangeley Lake area of Maine and fish a river we know there. 
Our gear is better now and our wallets more full, but the river is
still tied up in it  somehow.  We are younger when we stand next to the
river.

In the motel room that night I made Nellie stand on the bed while I 
maneuvered a gooseneck lamp into position to examine her.  I started by
giving her a beauty shop, combing the feathers at the tops of her legs
and gradually working the fur clean of burrs and sticks.  She grunted 
in satisfaction at the brush strokes.

When I finished, I made her down-stay on the bed and then rolled her 
onto her back.  She lay for awhile with her paws flexed and droopy, 
prepared not for an inspection, but for a belly rub.

I didn't find much.  The three or four bumps I came across might have 
been anything.  She didn't react when I felt them to establish their 
dimensions.  She lay upside down looking at me, her mouth in the funny 
curl dogs get when viewed from above.  I couldn't help thinking she 
found the entire process humorous.

Again, there was little to be done.  I rubbed her belly for awhile, 
considered my options, then resolved to worry less.  Before I let her 
go, I asked her if she was having a good time.  She sneezed and got to 
her feet.  I gave her a long last walk.

The next day we hit the water at ten.  By midday the sun lay smeared on
the water and each rivulet brightened the stones beneath it.  I fished
exclusively with dry flies, my baseline the Royal Coachman I had 
employed the day before, but also switching to a Dark Hendrickson and a
hair-bodied Irresistible.  Each of the flies proved effective.  I 
fished well, which is to say, I fished patiently.  The Sun is wide and 
friendly and I back cast with no fear of hanging up in the bushes, then
feathered the fly down near various boulders, expectant and not often
disappointed.  Nellie stayed beside me, moving when I moved, her chin 
often against my knee.  Each time I hooked a fish she inched forward, 
partially afraid, it seemed, partially stimulated to retrieve.  Near 
lunch she began to tremble from the cold, so I called her and we 
repeated the process of the day before, resting in the bright sun until
 our bones felt heated again.

After lunch I rigged up my cane fly rod, the first fly rod I owned.  I 
got it at a yard sale in Providence, Rhode Island, finding it amid a 
jumble of jigsaw puzzles and ashtrays.  When I removed the rod from the
cloth sack that it came in, the young woman running the sale came over
and said the fly rod had been her father's.  She said she had offered 
it to all the men in the family, but no one was a fisherman.  She said 
she didn't necessarily want to sell it, but if I promised to use it, 
and to care for it, she would give it to me.  I didn't quite know how 
to take her offer at first.  Give it to me?  I asked.  She said yes. 
She said she wouldn't feel right selling it, because it meant a great 
deal to her father.  But she said she would give it away to someone who
 would value it, which I found a marvelous distinction to draw.

I promised to care for the rod and I meant it.  She must have seen the 
glimmer in my eye, because she gave me the rod.  I bought a set of 
plastic ice trays out of a sense of obligation, then carried the fly 
rod home.  I assembled the rod on the kitchen table, struck by how 
beautifully it fit together.  The silver ferrules glided together 
smoothly.  It was a three-piece rod, complete with a spare tip.

When I flexed it, the entire rod shivered.

It was this rod that I assembled on the banks of the Sun River.  I had 
long known that the rod was not worth a great deal.  Several sporting 
goods dealers had reminded me that before the advent of fiberglass and 
graphite, cane fly rods were as common as Chevrolets.  My fly rod 
possessed no brand name that anyone could identify, though one dealer
guessed that it might have been a  Fenwick.  A Chevy was all right with
me.

I strung it with a five-weight line, then carried it back to the water.
It was a creaky old thing.  The action, when I back cast, felt much 
stiffer than my graphite L.L. Bean rod.  The cane rod probably could 
have carried an eight- or nine-weight line, but the cane had dried and 
I worried it might snap if I pushed it too hard.  I fished carefully, 
enjoying the old-fashioned whip of the cane.

Trout still rose to the flies.  Nellie still followed.  It wasn't the 
newest and best rod, but it felt comforting, like driving an old car on
 a country road.

During the course of the day I caught a few fish and spooked many more.
They flashed from their hiding places near the rocks and ghosted
across  the water, amazingly rapid in their disappearance.  Rainbow
trout are  not as fast as the common goldfish.  One researcher posited
that trout  swim at a maximum speed of 440 centimeters a second, which
can be  translated to about 8.22 miles per hour.

Salmon move faster, a fact to which I can attest.

On the Russian River in Alaska, I had hiked into a waterfall in the 
strange twilight of the equinox.  I had never experienced daylight for 
a solid twenty-four hours and when I reached the falls, the moon was up
and the sun still gave enough light for me to assemble my fly rod and 
to string a large streamer onto a thick tippet.  On my first cast I 
hooked into a huge salmon (every cast brought a salmon, most of them 
foul hooked because they were so thick across the streambed) and it 
broke me off immediately.  On the next cast I was ready.  The salmon 
took off downstream in an incredible burst, its red body shooting out 
of the water like a fire hydrant, and I could do little except run
after it.  From MR.  Montgomery's book, The Way of the Trout, I have 
since learned that salmon swim approximately twice as fast as trout,
reaching speeds of 800 centimeters a second or eighteen miles  an
hour.

That is roughly the speed maintained by a wellconditioned sprinter in a
440-yard dash on a flat track.  I scrambled after the red salmon on the
Russian River in Alaska.  It escorted me down to a second pool, then 
broke me off again, this time the line snapping back in a slingshot 
toward me.  I never did land a red salmon, admitting finally that they 
could outrun me.

I took Nellie on a last walk before we went to bed.  We walked down the
paved road that fronted the motel, then I let her go to investigate a 
patch of grass.

She was lazy and docile, tired from a day wading in the water.  A few 
snowflakes began to fall.  When she came back to me, I put her on the 
leash again and waited awhile in the darkness.  You could see a long 
way.  Snowflakes pulled each other down out of the sky like white 
spiders dipping softly onto grass.

We walked back to the motel.  The front desk had already closed.  There
would be no more customers that day.  As I passed down the hall to my 
room, I heard one TV after another, each with a different voice yet all
oddly the same.  When I unhooked Nellie's leash inside the room, she 
put her nose on the edge of the bed, asking permission to get up.  I 
told her to go ahead, but not to hog the whole thing.  She curled at 
the foot of the bed, tail to nose.  I sat beside her and gave her a 
rub.  In a little while she began to snore.  I read for awhile, then 
turned out the light. I reached THE bighorn river on this, my second
visit to the Crow  Reservation, on October tenth, a day known as Dog
Whipping Day in  certain parts of ancient England.  The day has an
interesting  derivation.  When monasteries flourished in England, the
monks gave  food and clothing to the poor at a fair on October
eleventh.  One year  a dog stole a large piece of beef, and from that
day any dog seen near  the monastery on the eve of the fair received a
whipping.  The dog-whipper wore a special costume--pink velvet knee
breeches, a blue  coat with silver buttons, a cocked hat and white silk
stockings.  He  carried a huge club and lazy tongs.  The custom has
long ago faded to  obscurity, but as a dog fancier I cannot let the day
go by without  remembering its origins.

The Bighorn is as famous for rattlers as it is for trout and I kept an 
ear and eye cocked for snakes as I walked the shoreline.  I am not a 
great fan of snakes.

I have been forced to kill cobras-spitting and king cobras--and Gabon 
vipers while living in West Africa, but I never liked the worry one 
experiences in snake country when lifting bricks or lumber or stepping
across a dried streambed.  Unlike cobras or Gabon vipers, rattlers at
least have the  good manners to let you know they are nearby.  Wearing
waders as I made  my way along the rocky shore of the Bighorn River, I
worried more for  Nellie than for myself.

She had confronted rattlers before, and had shown good sense by backing
away, but often she entered brush that seemed prime snake habitat.  I 
tried to keep her close, but was only moderately successful. 
Fortunately it was fairly late in the season, I reasoned, and the 
snakes, if we came across any, might tend to be sluggish.  Ideally I 
might have had a jacket similar to the ones made for bird dogs to slip 
onto Nellie.  I would have settled for an orange blaze jacket, the type
she wears during hunting season when we walk the woods behind my
house,  but I had forgotten even that protection.  To fortify us both,
I made  as much noise as possible walking beside the river.

I had a specific spot in mind.  Several miles downstream from 
Yellowtail Dam the water turned into a white frothy mix.  I had largely
ignored the rapids the first time I had fished the Bighorn, but two 
young fellows from Montana later told me that huge fish lay in the 
faster water.  They happened to have their rigs in the back of their 
pickups and they spent a few minutes showing me how to set up the 
terminal tackle.  It was a classic jig system, with a minuscule shrimp 
at the end of the line and a steel weight, fair sized, approximately
two feet up the leader.  With the tackle ready, you simply dabbed the 
fly different places in the white water, occasionally ferreting out a 
trout not more than a few feet from your legs.  It did not make for 
particularly dignified fishing, but the white water had stayed in my 
mind for several years, titillating me with images of large fish 
waiting on a food line.  On the first visit I had several
extraordinary tugs, but had never actually landed a fish.  Contrary to
popular thought, nothing ensures an angler's return to the same water 
as a near miss.  A lucky day can easily pass from memory, but a fish 
suggested, though not landed, is the finest bait to lure anglers.

Nellie became nervous when I prepared to enter the white water.  She 
doesn't like me wading in deeper water, because then she can't 
accompany me.  I told her to be still, to take a rest, and gave her a 
biscuit as a bribe.  She chomped the biscuit readily enough, but wasn't
satisfied with the arrangement.  She waded with me until I reached my 
knees.  I tried to sound stern when I told her to wait on shore, but 
she knew me too well to buy it.

Almost immediately I became absorbed in plunking the jig around the 
white water, although it was not easy wading.  Water cut at my knees 
and rocked me this way and that.  Each movement had to be calculated; 
each foothold felt borrowed.  When I cast, or swung the jig out, it 
plunked into the water, then rattled along the bottom, hitting stones 
and various currents, reporting to my fingers the topography of the 
river bottom.  Noise rose from the water and everything became liquid. 
Whatever it is that separates us from water began to dissolve.

Five minutes into the rapids I had my first strike, a short, violent 
tug that made me wonder if it had not simply been the shrimp snagging a
boulder.  I cast in the same spot and this time stood ready.  The
trout  hit in rhythm, taking the shrimp in the exact position as it had
the  first time.  The rod dipped like the hazel branch of a water
dowser.

It was a large fish.  I knew that immediately.  It lunged downstream 
and picked up the weight of the rushing water, then it jumped free of 
everything and dangled for a moment in the October light.  When it
fell back in the water it gathered the force  of the rapids and surged
away and cross stream, sawing my leader  against rocks and white Vs of
surface turbulence.  I waded carefully to  slower water and invited the
fish to swing down and out of the rougher  patches.  It obliged me,
though it made two runs back to the wilder  water before I brought it
to shore.

The span of one hand is almost exactly ten inches and this rainbow was 
not quite two spans.  Nellie came close and nosed it.  I let it go 
underwater and watched it gain its balance, then shoot off into the 
white water again.  I tried to imagine what it must be like to live in 
such active water, how a trout can pick out a tiny shrimp in the 
turbulence, anticipate it, then maneuver to eat it.  I wondered if it 
is a mistaken notion to think of the fish as separate from the water 
any more than protozoa floating in a turbidity current might be said to
be separate from the hydrogen and oxygen atoms surrounding it.  A
trout  may not live in water as we live in air.  Perhaps the trout is
closer  to it, is involved in it, in ways we fail to comprehend. 
Perhaps a  shrimp enters a trout as much as the trout consumes the
shrimp.  It is  merely our perception of things that assumes a shrimp
does not seek out  the trout.

I fished for a good hour, dunking the weighted tackle here and there. 
It was more prospecting than fishing, but two more trout took, each 
almost precisely the size of the first.  At noon I broke for lunch and 
sat on the bank with Nellie.  I did not much like the land around the 
Bighorn.  Cottonwood trees lined the banks, but they seemed 
untrustworthy trees.  The river ran too bright and wet for the dry 
countryside around it.  It is hard to fish the Bighorn, I realized, 
without being reminded that it was created by a dam.  The river wanted
to be a stream. The Yellowtail Dam, constructed in 1965, turned an
otherwise average  river into one of the premier trout habitats in the
world.  Anglers  debate over how many fish the Bighorn holds--with
estimates rising as  high as a million fish per mile--but there is no
debate that it is a  river rich with fish.  The cold water released
from the bottom of the  dam, combined with the silt and vegetable
matter on the streambed,  makes for nearly perfect trout water.  The
Bighorn is a river, in  short, that a trout might imagine for itself.

I had caught the largest trout of my career last time I was on the 
Bighorn, which was why I had included it when I drew up an itinerary 
for this trip.  On that first trip, I had been fishing for several 
hours with pretty good results, but I hadn't tied into a large fish. 
To  catch a number of fish is no miracle on the Bighorn.  I caught the 
large trout a few minutes before rain covered the river.  Storm clouds 
had threatened most of the day, but I had such good luck that I ignored
the approaching storm and concentrated on the excellent dry-fly
fishing.  The fish volunteered for a red hackled fly of my design, an 
ugly thing that somehow matched what the trout favored that day. 
Nevertheless, I was conscious that the fish I caught tended to be ten 
to eleven inches.  They were good fish, no doubt, but I had caught 
plenty of twelve-inch trout in the East. I felt eager to tie into 
something larger and felt somewhat cheated by trout that did not live 
up to their western reputations.

When I finally did hook a large fish, the moment was absurdly mythic. 
The entire sequence would have served Hollywood, because the threat of 
rain had long ago chased other anglers from the river.  I stood alone
in America's richest trout  water, the clouds ridiculously portent. 
The first rises of the large  fish mixed with the splatters of the
storm's beginning.  The only thing  that did not lend itself to a movie
event was the fact that the trout  did not rise in the center of the
stream.  It rose directly downstream  from me in water no deeper than
my knees.

Casting to it required nothing showy.  I simply plunked the fly in the 
water and let it swing down to an imaginary bib floating in front of 
the trout.  The trout rolled and took the fly.  I lifted my rod tip and
 waited.

Large trout are silent when they are hooked.  Small fish dance 
immediately and though there is pleasure in the quickness of their 
responses, the silence before a big trout surges is ultimately more 
rewarding.  When the trout at last began to move, my fingers were 
ready.  The fish shot into the middle of the river, yanking line out 
and making my reel hum.  At the same time the rain intensified and 
several distant drums of thunder clunked in the valley.  The fish 
pulled.  I scrambled down the shoreline and followed it.  Rain 
splattered on the rocks and lifted the smell of sage and root dirt from
nearby bushes.  I played the fish lightly, letting it run whenever it 
liked.  At times the fish jumped on the tail of a peal of thunder. 
Lightning wicked across the valley and the light became haunted.

I landed the trout in the shallows, kneeling next to it and letting it 
rest in the hammock of my fingers.  I estimated it to be about 
twenty-six inches.  It was a fat thing.  When I released it, it knocked
gravel aside as it squirted back into the stream.  I can still hold my
fingers apart, accurately I believe, to the exact dimension of the 
trout's passage against my hand.

I had caught that fish during the first visit I made to the Bighorn 
River several years before when I had volunteered for a childhood
literacy program at Crow Agency, Montana, the tribal seat  of the Crow
Reservation.  It had been an exceedingly difficult summer.  The program
for which I had volunteered suffered all the usual  hardships.  It had
been underfunded, poorly organized, and viewed with  suspicion by the
Crow.  I had lived in a tent behind a local minister's  house, escaping
during the free hours to fish the Bighorn.  In time I  had learned that
the Bighorn Mountains are sacred to the Crow, that  Yellowtail Dam, the
large federal project that had transformed the  river into a world
class fishery, had the aura of a curse to the people  who live beside
the water.

The Crow had arrived only fifty or sixty years before Lewis and dark. 
To put it in perspective, the Crow and Northern Cheyenne took the 
plains from the gens des serpents, their spear carrying predecessors 
now known as the Snake Indians, after Columbus discovered Cuba.  In an 
historically brief period, they drove the Snake Indians to the desert 
of the Great Basin and assumed the fertile grounds watered by the 
Bighorns.  The horse culture relied on grass and it is not surprising 
that the Crow named their settlements accordingly: Lodge Grass, Rotten 
Grass.  Even the Battle of the Little Bighorn is known to the Lakota 
and Cheyenne as the Battle of Greasy Grass.

The United States Government had once granted the Crow a reservation 
covering most of Wyoming and Montana, including all of Yellowstone, 
only to reclaim the land when western migration surged.  The Crow also 
had, I believe, longstanding guilt at being one of the few nations 
never to have raised arms against the expanding European forces.  In 
fact, the legacy of White-Man-Runs-Him, a famous Crow guide for Custer,
 is viewed with a mixture of admiration and embarrassment.

The Lakota, who fought against the Crow relentlessly, view them as
traitors as a result of the Crows' compact with white settlers.  It is
a thorny issue, one that brushes any person of European ancestry
coming  to the reservation.

The summer I worked on the reservation some Crow children stoned 
Nellie.  A pack of twelve-year-old boys cornered her in a vacant lot 
and began pelting her with stones.  She appeared stunned when I found 
her, astonished that people, from whom she expected kindness, could 
harm her.  She had not turned vicious or even angry, but had actually 
leaped to catch some of the stones, thinking that surely they were 
tennis balls.  Fortunately the boys had not done any serious injury.  I
yelled at them to leave her alone and they disappeared without
protest.  Nellie came to me with her tail down, as if she had done
something wrong.  I knelt next to her and pet her a long time.  I never
left her  out of my sight again on the reservation.

Walking back to my truck at mid-afternoon, Nellie surprised a coyote. 
It happened so suddenly it caught me unawares.  I had been thinking 
about snakes, naturally, but when Nellie dove into a thicket and a thin
dog jumped out the other side, I was momentarily confused.  I looked 
around for another angler-thinking he or she had brought a dog 
along--but then I heard Nellie's deep-throated growl, the one I had 
only heard two or three times in her life.  A second later I 
understood.  The coyote shot off perpendicular to the river and Nellie 
followed her for twenty yards.  I shouted her name and luckily got her
attention.  The coyote disappeared, leaving only a wagging batch of 
river grass marking her retreat.  Nellie came back to me, growling and 
bristled, the world safe for democracy once again. Good girl, I told
her.  I told her that she was a fierce old thing.  I  told her I hoped
I would be as fierce when I reached her age.  She  didn't stay quiet
under my hand.  She continued circling in front of  me, coyote scent
lingering in her nostrils.  She sneezed and kept  circling long past
any reasonable period.  After a while I told her to  stop and to follow
me back.

We slept that night at a small campground not far from the Fort Smith 
Ranger Station, although to call it a campground might be overstating 
the case.  It was a ledge of dirt overlooking Montana 313.  Someone had
put a few fire rings to mark parking spaces, but those were the only 
amenities.  Setting up for the night I was keenly aware of the trout 
trade: float boats rattled back and forth and large, four-wheel-drive 
vehicles with electric roll-down windows fluttered up and down the 
road, the interiors jammed with guys in neoprene.  Most of this
occurred at cocktail hour and I was conscious of how out of proportion 
the wealth of these anglers was compared to the host tribe members.

I cooked tomato soup for dinner and drank a beer while watching the sun
set.  A layer of dust clung to Nellie and I brushed her coat when the 
evening started to grow cooler.  Afterward we sat on the tailgate and 
shared some crackers.  I held the crackers and made her bite them in 
half, then again, then again, until the remaining piece was 
microscopic.  Her mouth remained amazingly gentle.  Each time she 
halved the half, her teeth worked to find a safe purchase.  We ate five
or six crackers that way.

Later that night, near two in the morning.  Crow kids woke me.  They 
circled my truck on four-wheelers, roaring around and having a hell of 
a time.  Nellie growled each time a kid buzzed close.  I knew, from my 
summer on the reservation, that parents seldom directly discipline 
their children, thinking instead that uncles and aunts should provide
guidance while parents give only love.  That system, like many things
on the reservation, had broken down over  the years and often now the
kids went unchecked.  Laying in the truck,  attempting to ignore the
racket, I tried to think of a reason kids  should be up four-wheeling
on a weekday night at two in the morning.  I  couldn't come up with
one.  Then I tried to arrange the few words of  Crow I had in my
vocabulary into a sentence, hopefully one that would  tell them I
needed to sleep and they needed to go home.

All I could recall with any certainty was the word showdagi, a general 
greeting spoken by biting off the last syllable.  I thought perhaps 
that might work to make them realize I knew a little about the 
reservation, but then I simply decided to wait it out.

They left around four.  Apparently I had camped next to a good ramp or 
jump.  The next morning I found tire tracks everywhere around the 
truck, most of them leading to a track above the campground.  The 
treads left diagonal gouges in the dirt.  At the top of the rise, where
the trail connected to a second trail, the kids had apparently jumped 
repeatedly.  The tread marks stopped and then started again after a 
span of six or seven feet.  I looked to see a village or settlement 
along the second path, but the trail simply vanished in white, dusty
land.  It was a long way to travel, I thought, for a six-foot jump.

Once a summer, generally near the Fourth of July, my dad rented a party
boat and took everyone from his New York office blue fishing off the 
New Jersey coast.  As a boy I remember it as an important and exciting 
day.  During the week leading up to the fishing trip, my mother cleaned
the house and we made some effort to put the backyard in shape.  A
birch grove covered the  rear half of our acre, and here we arranged a
picnic table, a grill, a  metal washbasin filled with ice for beer and
soft drinks, and six or  seven shaky lawn chairs. Under my father's
eye, we raked the gardens  that had suffered seven children running
wild from one summer to the  next.

My parents did not entertain well or easily.  Entertaining takes the 
time neither of them possessed to perfect and accomplish with grace. 
As  a result, the day of the blue fishing party carried with it a large
but  slightly uncomfortable air.

I was the youngest, not yet ten by the time this summer tradition had 
ceased, and therefore never got the chance to go fishing.  The party 
boat--even the name thrilled me--existed as a mythical place.  In bed 
the morning of the expedition, I heard the thunk of doors and cabinets,
the early morning hush as my father and brothers stole out of the 
house.  Most of the day was a long, hot wait for them to return, the 
boat, in my imagination, drifting on a sea filled with glimmering 
fish.

Finally the men returned.  I recall nearly climbing out of my skin with
excitement as I heard the cars and doors slam, the shouts, the 
masculine booms.

Porky, still alive, went to greet them and bark, while I made my way to
the front yard.  There, yanking burlap bags of bluefish from the
trunks  of the car, the men clustered and laughed, continuing jokes
that had  started early that morning.  I listened to hear who had been
seasick,  who had "high hook," who had the richest sunburn.  The men
talked a  great deal about the boat pool, which I learned in time meant
the  wager, a dollar a head, paid as a jackpot for the largest fish.

I felt pleasure at seeing my father surrounded by men, happy, the host,
carefree in a way he could not be around us.  Standing beside the open 
car trunks, a sodden bag of bluefish in either hand, his office skin
glowed red for a change.  My mother and  sisters and I were a new
audience, and as we made our way to the  backyard, one of the bags
invariably ended up in my hands.  The bag  glittered with weight and
water and it smelled, in every breeze that  found it, of the sea and
boats and distance.

My job, given partly to include me, consisted of dumping the fish on 
the green grass and hosing them down.  Tilting the bag, letting the 
fish slide like coins onto the grass, the ring of adults around me, I 
reveled in my importance.  I sprayed them the way my father had shown 
me: my thumb cocked in the open mouth of the hose, my wrist milking 
water from our house, the bluefish staring in open wonder at a world 
foreign to them.  Porky nosed the fish, edging between the men's legs, 
while this or that person stepped forward and said he had caught this 
one, that one, the one over there.

Then it was time for drinks, more drinks, because the men had already 
begun on the boat, some of them getting loopy with sun and fresh air. 
I  remember the men as being kind to me, wanting to include me because
I  had been left out of the more serious business.  I carried beers
around  and later, when the sun went down, caught fireflies and cooked 
marshmallows on the grill.  I handed a marshmallow to my dad at the end
of one long boat day.  His attention, fixed on something another man 
said, canted away from me.  Mechanically his fingers squeezed the 
marshmallow from the stick in my hand, then he lifted the marshmallow 
toward his mouth.  Something stopped him, though, and his eyes finally 
met mine.  Thank you, he said, mouthing the word so as not to interrupt
the other man.  His hand lifted and rested on my shoulder, the smell of
bluefish riding his skin. I fished the Bighorn again directly beneath
the dam, casting to rising  fish with a small Adams and having pretty
good luck.  Nellie watched.  It was a gray day and cold; had I been
home in New Hampshire, I would  have been satisfied to sit by a fire
and read.  But this was the  Bighorn and one only has so many days
beside a river like that in a  lifetime.  I had lately been flirting
with the idea of including one  last stop on my itinerary, but equally
compelling was the idea of  heading home.  I had decided, sometime in
the night, to let fate show me a sign, which is another way to say that
if the fishing was good I  would visit one more spot, the North Platte
in Wyoming.  I had never  been to the Platte, but several people had
told me that the fishing was  superb.  Still, I wasn't certain if I
wanted to make the effort.

I had just released my fourth fish when I was joined by another angler,
a bluff, rotund fellow who greeted Nellie as joyfully as she greeted 
him, then asked me if I knew the origin of Golden Retrievers.  When I 
said I didn't think such things were exactly knowable, he recited a 
story that has been repeated so often it has gained the varnish of 
truth.  He claimed to have had three Goldens in his day and had made it
 his business to look up their history.

The Golden Retriever, he contended, sprang from a cross between one of 
Lord Tweedmouth's sporting dogs, probably a spaniel named Belle, and a 
blonde retriever brought from a cobbler who named his dog Nous, meaning
 Wisdom.

Tweedmouth, he supposed, was a potty Britisher, one of those 
mid-nineteenth century eccentrics who had too much house and too much 
time on hand.  He said that Tweedmouth cleverly bred the dog to other
spaniels and curly coated retrievers, eliciting qualities for  which
Goldens are now justly famed--a soft mouth, curly hair with a 
waterproof undercoat, and an exceedingly gentle disposition. 
Retrievers  made excellent upland dogs--bird dogs, essentially--and of
course  wonderful water dogs.  He said Tweedmouth bred the dog to sit
beside a  hunter all day in a boat, quiet and peaceful, only springing
to action  after the kill.  At that point the dog was programmed, by
instinct, to  leap into frigid water not for a joy of swimming, but out
of love for  the hunter.

While the man remained petting Nellie, I told him the simple version of
the origin I'd read and often repeated.  Goldens were the product of
an  English spaniel and a cross made haphazardly when a pack of large
white  Russian circus dogs mated with the spaniel.  The Russian imprint
increased the spaniels' size and strength, nudging the breed to modern
standards.  I said I liked this history better.  It left the 
Retrievers' origins as a matter of happenstance.  I could tell, 
watching the angler, that he didn't appreciate my story.  He had his
version of things and was happy with it.  He thanked me, gave Nellie 
one last rub, then headed off downstream.  I had brought a thermos of 
coffee with me and I decided to take a break and watch the river.  At 
times I am an impatient fisherman, choosing to enter the water before I
have really studied the current and insect life.  I have gotten better
as I have gotten older--which means I have become more patient--and
now  take nearly as much pleasure in sitting beside a river as in
fishing.  I  propped my rod against a sapling, then unscrewed the
thermos cap and  poured a cup.  The heat was welcome.  The air
temperature was in the  mid-forties, with clouds moving quickly across
the sky. Nellie came to  sit beside me.  I dug a biscuit out of my
pocket and gave her a treat.  For a time we didn't do much but sit
together. I have determined two ways to watch a river.  The first is
performed  with a conscious state of mind, the scientific approach that
trout  books and fishing diagrams champion.  I have known any number of
anglers who speak with pride of this or that fishing companion who
does  not cast until he has turned over stones, netted a few flies,
dipped a  thermometer into the water.  When I first began fishing, I
relied  primarily on that method.  I saw a river as a detective story,
one  that, if studied assiduously enough, could be unraveled.  The
reward, naturally, would be a large payoff in fish.  The keener the
detective,  the luckier the angler.

Over the years, however, my approach has begun to change as a result of
observations concerning my fishing performance, ones that do not fit 
precisely the scientific approach.  For instance, I have often known 
when fish were about to hit not because I happened to tie on the 
correct fly, but because I understood somehow they were going to take. 
For lack of a better word, I have felt glimmers of harmony, splendid 
moments when the fishing became not an uncertainty but a fixed, 
knowable outcome.  Of course one mentions such things at one's peril, 
opening oneself up to jokes about Zen and karma and myriad cracks about
consciousness, but most of us have felt such moments without having to
name them.  We hit a baseball with a clean, solid swipe that seemed
nearly predestined.  When it occurs, the bat does not so much resonate 
as confirm the knowledge in our arms and legs and blood.  Basketball 
players know a shot was going in the moment it left their fingers.  So 
it can be with fishing.

The implication of this knowledge, at least for me, is that my second 
approach to a river is to open myself to it.  It is the reverse of the 
scientific approach.  Instead of separating the river into parts, which
is the inevitable outcome of the scientific approach, I try to see
the river as a whole.  Usually this method  demands that I stop trying
to distinguish, to pick apart, instead  allowing my vision to soften
and blur so that the river may volunteer  parts of itself to be
studied.

I tried it that day on the Bighorn with Nellie beside me.  I had 
difficulty tuning out the empirical part of my mind that continued to 
ask what kind of flies hatched, what nymph matched what potential stone
fly, what tippet I needed to clip back to.  Little by little I had to 
let that nervous, demanding part of my intellect relax.  It did so in 
stages, surging back to take command as quickly as I suppressed it. 
Gradually the periods where I could simply observe grew longer.  My 
vision began to blur.  I became conscious of the river running over 
rocks.

I did not become the river or approximate any of the silly jokes 
commonly floating around American pop culture.  But I did become 
calmer.  After a while, when I waded in and began fishing again, I 
caught a cutthroat on a cast that I felt certain would bring results. 
But I also had feathered the fly down nicely on the water, which may 
have been the reason the fish responded.  Either way, the fish did not 
surprise me.

In my last hour on the Bighorn I caught three fish.  The middle one was
the largest.  Nellie came into the shallows to inspect it.  I knelt 
beside it and let it rest for a second in my fingers.  Its gills beat 
with the lapping water.  The sky reflected in the water around it. 
When  it skittered back to the center of the river, it looked to pass
among  the clouds. TONGUE riVER west OF burgess junction, halfway
between Cody and  Sheridan, Wyoming, we stopped at the Tongue River. 
The Tongue is an  easy river that meanders beside Alternate Route 14 in
the Bighorn  Mountains.  I liked the river for Nellie because it runs
at great  elevation in a welcoming valley, a nickering line between
cresting  mountains.  We had no worry about bears, or about snakes, or
about  severe drop-offs.  Visibility ranged up to twenty miles in a
spacious  bowl, so that I could watch Nellie roam no matter how far
away she  cared to go.  At the topmost peaks bighorn sheep and mountain
goats  picked their ways among the rocks.  They were a rare sight,
worth  stopping to look for. Free-range cattle sometimes used the land,
and  occasionally elk herds grazed in the lee of an outcropping.

I knew, from an earlier trip, that the Tongue was a modest, kindly 
river, producing unlimited numbers of six-to-eight inch cutthroats.  In
many ways the North Tongue was a classic western stream, with trout 
living suspicious lives in the shadows of willow bogs.  The river was 
too high for beaver, or at least I had never discovered any beaver
activity, and so the river flowed as  directed by gravity, the water
glacial, the course always downhill.

I listened carefully to weather reports as we approached, and when the 
forecast called for a clear night, I decided to take Nellie on a short 
hike.  We needed to get away from the truck.  It was our last chance to
sleep out at significant elevation--the Tongue River ran above ten 
thousand feet--and I reasoned the stars would be as close as they were 
likely to get.

We left the truck at three.  Nellie wore her backpack containing food 
and mittens and I carried a lightweight pack with the bare necessities.
She had the serious demeanor she always has when she wears a pack and 
knows she is carrying something important.  We followed the Tongue 
River as it veered slightly from the road, heading north.  I kept my 
fly rod strung and when we came to promising water, I cast a Pale 
Evening Dun to dark places.  At the second hole, a wide washboard 
riffle that emptied into the skillet of black water, I caught ten fish 
in as many casts.  The fish were small and aggressive, as lively as
crickets.

Nellie watched for awhile, then scouted ahead.  The tinkle of her bear 
bells came over the sound of the water.

Three miles upriver, near a creek named Dry Gul, we established camp. 
I  had brought the tent, knowing it would be cold, but I hadn't
bothered  with a camp stove.  I set up the tent on a small rise,
mountains  everywhere around us.  After we ate two peanut butter and
jelly  sandwiches each, Nellie patiently chewing when the peanut butter
stuck  to the roof of her mouth, we fished a productive hole directly
below  our camp.  The trout fought to take the fly, though none was
more than  six inches.  The fish continued to hit the fly even after it
had been reduced to a few pale hackle feathers and a gnawed tinsel
body.  At that elevation, in such brisk water, the fish could  not risk
being selective.

Later, wind seemed to push the light away as the sun fell behind the
mountaintops.  Up to her shoulders in the river, Nellie felt the 
change, too. Her fur ruffled in the breeze and she looked to me 
several times when the wind blew the strongest.  It was autumn now and 
fast becoming winter.  We both felt it.

I put my fly rod up and found a comfortable spot to watch the stars 
come out.

Nellie came to sit beside me.  I scooted around and put my head on her 
back, using her for a headrest, but she didn't seem to mind.  Cold air 
swept above us, yet near the ground it did not feel too bad.  We 
watched the planets appear, then the stars.  The sky grew darker until 
each star stood out, white against black against the gray of the 
mountaintops.  Nellie remained stationary, only her nose sniffing into 
the wind.  She did not budge for an hour, and by that time the stars 
had eaten into the blackness, shuddering white in a cold sky.

We went to bed early.  I knew it was no use to try to keep her out of 
the sleeping bag, so I spread it and let her come underneath.  Her heat
 was welcome.

I read for awhile, then turned off the light and listened to the wind 
jiggle the tent.  Nellie snored deep in the bag.  The wind grew wilder 
until I fell asleep and stopped listening.  I imagined it lifting us 
like a small orange kite, lofting us into the wind streams above the 
valley.

I woke several times during the night and woke for good before 
daylight.  Nellie came out of the tent with me and drank from the 
stream in the rinsed darkness.

The wind had subsided and I felt the pleasure of morning.  The moon, a 
morning moon, stood in a crescent near the Cloud Peak Wilderness.  I 
climbed up fifty yards above the tent and watched the sunlight come 
over the eastern edge of the Bighorns.  Nellie found me and came to
sit beside me.  We didn't see any mountain goats or bighorn  sheep, but
we stayed where we were until light reached us.  Fog puffed  from the
water currents and it was possible, looking closely, to  believe the
river breathed. We watched it until the sun cut into the  mist and
pushed the white webs down into the streambed, then we  packed.

I fished the same pools going back.  The trout cooperated again.  At 
one bend in the river I hooked into a twelve-inch cutthroat, its size 
surprising me when it hit.  It hurried to return to the cut bank where 
it had been hiding, but I guided it downstream until it let me release 
it.  It disappeared before my fingers had completely uncurled. 
Watching  it go, I told myself to remember the readiness of the trout
at this  elevation.  I also told myself that too much of this success
would  spoil me for eastern fishing, where it was common to spend an
entire  day frothing the water for one fish.  Still, I could not resist
casting  to such greedy trout.  They destroyed two flies with their
hungry mouths.  Sometimes they hit the leader when it caught the light
and  glinted.

Near the last pool, I stretched out on my belly and stared at the 
water.  Nellie crept up beside me, uncertain of what I was doing.  I 
saw both our reflections in the water.  We made a funny picture, man 
and dog staring intently at ourselves, our reflections stretched and 
bent according to the shimmer of stream water.

I looked for trout.  I had read years before that one could catch trout
with his hand if he was patient enough.  I had also read that trout, 
hiding from predators, will stick their heads in the gravel bottom and 
linger in the current, tail up, ready to be grabbed.  I could not 
easily imagine catching such quick, elusive creatures by hand, but it 
was worth a try.  My polarized sun162 glasses permitted me to see the
bottom of the stream, and in time the  trout became visible, gray
commas with speckled backs.

I knew trout were particularly wary of things approaching from 
above--birds being one of their primary predators--so I sank my hand 
and let it drift as loosely as possible, a phony clump of tissue moving
quietly toward the trout.  I did not manage to get close before the 
fish scattered, their bodies disappearing before I could say for 
certain I had seen them move.  I decided, after such an obvious 
failure, simply to watch the trout instead.  That plan worked better. 
My eyes peeking over the bank, I watched as the tiny cutthroat
clustered at the head of the pool.  They moved so quickly that it was 
difficult to see them unless they swam together, as they often did, 
when some new food source entered the water.  They had only a moment 
before a larger cutthroat, one perhaps five inches long, zoomed in and 
took whatever escaped the little fish. It was impossible to see what 
they aimed to eat.  Mostly they squirted from side to side, picking up 
dots of freshwater shrimp or stone flies.  The smaller fish, according 
to the theory I developed, had the advantage of going first due to
their body size.

They could swim in shallow water, thereby getting the drop on whatever 
came into the pool.  The larger fish had to wait.  Sometimes the small 
trout moved not as animals, but seemingly as vegetation anchored to the
bottom of the stream. As I stared, the fish became weeds and had to be
 transformed back to trout by conscious effort.

The larger fish, sometimes as long as six or seven inches, lingered at 
the back of the pool.  They moved only for bigger meals.  I knew, from 
experience, that they lived on a biological equation that matched the 
energy spent to retrieve a meal against the energy gained by consuming 
the meal.  They could not work at a negative balance for long, 
obviously, which was why, in the spring, larger trout were
particularly fond of minnows.  The minnows,  or dace, provided more
calories, more sustenance, than stone flies or  nymphs could possibly
provide.  Spring fishing with streamers that  replicated minnows or
smelt constituted an old tradition in Maine's  cold lakes.

As I continued to stare at the water, I became aware of the life, and 
the suggestion of life, at the level of the banks and stream.  Water 
striders flickered back and forth, and late insects, mostly mosquitoes,
buzzed near the tired grasses.  A weary bee landed on a log and 
lingered in the sun, its back leg sacks heavy with propolis.  If it 
landed on the water, as it might easily do in its fatigue, the fish 
would have it in a blink.  Underneath the stones, when I reached down 
and turned them, I found stone flies and hellgrammites, the
scorpion-shaped insects trout love so much.  Black crickets chiggered 
in the river grass, and above, like a blade moving on a strap, swallows
 and flycatchers came to skim the surface.

Resting so close to the water, I thought of myths about water nymphs, 
the small, magical creatures that come out in the evening and drift in 
the hazy summer air.

It was possible to imagine them here, on the Tongue, drifting slowly as
the water struck away from the mountaintops.  I told Nellie that she 
should find a water sprite, and that made her stand and shake.  She 
went off to scout out something new, and in time I went with her.

The last hole we fished was a large, deep spike of water that had been 
hammered between two towering boulders.  I had missed the pool the 
first time, mistaking it in the dim light for nothing substantial. 
Now,  in full sunlight, I saw that it was the equivalent of a fish
cave, a  dark musky place where larger trout could gather.  It took a
few  moments to get into position to fish it.  I decided to tie on a
grasshopper, a black one, and let the fly  hit the rock before plunking
into the pool.  I wanted the action to  look as natural as possible. 
If I performed it correctly, I imagined  the cricket would land with
its fiddle legs crooked to gather its  senses, its body bunching to hop
free of the water.  Trout could not  resist.  If nothing bit, then I
doubted a fish lived in the hole.

Wobbling on two rocks, I cast in a long, loopy wave and succeeded in 
thudding the cricket into the right-hand boulder.  The cricket stalled 
in flight and I quickly lifted the cigar butt of the rod up, allowing 
the fly to drop, not softly, into the water.  I wanted commotion.  The 
cricket performed beautifully and landed with a tiny plunking sound 
that I thought would summon the fish from below.  Then I waited.  The 
cricket glided across the hole, then darted into the white water below.
 Nothing had taken.

It was okay.  I repeated the process.  And again.  I floated the same 
fly over the water twenty times, then switched to a March Brown.  Then 
a Coachman.  Nellie, beside me, began to get impatient.  She went off 
downstream and began pulling at a stick.  She ground it up and stripped
it of bark.  I told her I would be with her as soon as I had landed
the  fish.

The fish, if it existed, never bit.  But time passed and when I looked 
up it was afternoon.  That single hole, a gap in the rocks no wider 
than a welcome mat, had occupied me for a full hour.  I found the 
entire episode puzzling, because every instinct told me a fish should 
have lived in the pool.  At least one.  But nothing did.

Finally I asked Nellie if she was ready to go.  She looked at me 
expectantly, half-cocked to go in any direction I liked.

"Ready," I asked her.

"You ready?"

Her eyes lifted and filled with attention.  I teased her, asking which
way she wanted to go.  She  grabbed the stick at her feet again and
began to mangle it.  When I  finally pointed in the direction we had to
go, she sprang out of the  stream and headed downhill.  I followed her.
Long ago I had measured  her against the breed characteristics
promoted by the American Kennel  Club.  She was a handsome bitch, I
knew, precisely the preferred  height, twenty-oneanda-half inches at
the withers, and the proper  color: lustrous white gold.  Her
forequarters were muscular and well coordinated, as the breed
requirements stipulated, and her gait, as she  trotted across the
mountain vale, was well coordinated and powerful.  Taken as a whole,
she was a beautiful animal.  I watched her with  pleasure as she led me
down the mountain.

Back at the truck, the packs smelled of fresh air and grass when I 
loaded them inside.  I made Nellie stand on the tailgate while I 
brushed her.  She let me do it for a long time, her grunts of 
satisfaction hearty and regular.  As I finished, a family in a van 
pulled into the gravel slot beside the truck.  Two children sat in the 
back, their heads barely visible above the door panels.  The mom, a 
young, dark-haired woman, stared straight ahead.  From the other side, 
a man stepped out from behind the wheel and took a picture of the 
mountains.  When he finished, he asked about fishing, if I had had good
luck, did I just arrive or was I done for the day.  I told him I had 
slept out upstream the night before and he relayed the information to 
his children.  They looked at me, one raising a hand to point to 
Nellie.

A second later, a large Chesapeake Retriever popped out of the van's 
side door.

I hadn't seen it before.  It was a huge animal, somewhat overfed, with 
a thick chest and an extremely abrupt stop where the snout built to the
skull.  It was also male as it made clear by circling around the lot 
and lifting its leg.  The man who had taken the picture called it
Chunky.  Chunky the Chessie.  The dog's collar clanked, as if its tags
were made from tin license  plates.

Nellie is not always friendly toward other dogs for reasons that are 
not clear to me.  She doesn't attack, but she doesn't particularly 
overwhelm them with effusiveness.  She growled as soon as she spotted 
Chunky.  Chunky appeared oblivious, circling merrily and marking his 
turf.  I called over to ask if Chunky was a friendly dog, and the owner
replied that he was, too much so, and that Chunky had never fought
with  another dog.  Nellie didn't agree.  She growled steadily under my
hand  until I told her to quit it.  Then Chunky resolved matters by
coming to  my truck and putting his flappy front paws on the tailgate. 
Nellie  growled once, then shot out from under my hand.  I held my
breath,  figuring I would have to separate them, but they had
communicated something quicker than we could have guessed.  Immediately
they headed  uphill, running shoulder to shoulder, their courtship
apparently well  advanced.  The woman stepped out of the van and a
second later the two  kids, fraternal twins about seven years old,
stepped out too.  For a  while we watched them run without saying
anything.

Then the mom said that Chunky had a friend and it was difficult to deny
that the two dogs had hit it off.  They ran for the holy hell of it up
and down the mountain, wrestling a little, but mostly running in a 
two-dog pack at top speed.

Chunky was faster and larger; Nellie seemed to lead or at least 
establish direction.  They only parted when they came to a bush or a 
tree, and then came back together as soon as they had passed that 
obstacle.  I had never seen Nellie fall so hard for another dog.  She 
had not run quite so freely, or so joyfully, since her puppy romps with
Gusty. We let them go.  The mom, who introduced herself as Marion,
offered me  a brownie from a cake tin.  They had just come from a visit
with her  sister in Cody.  Now they were heading east.  The kids,
seeing the  brownies, politely waited until she offered them one.  They
were great  brownies.  Jeff, the father, came around the van and looked
at my  truck.  He said he had been to New Hampshire years ago, but
hadn't been  east of the Mississippi in at least a decade.  He asked
about the  fishing.  I told him where I had been, what I had been
doing.  Marion  gave me another brownie and the kids split one. 
Unusual for Nellie,  she did not keep an eye out for a potential treat.
She ran a little  more with Chunky, then waded in the water beside
him, seemingly love  struck

Chunky, it turned out, was a working dog.  The family ran a horse farm,
a dude ranch, but Chunky was a gun dog who sometimes accompanied 
clientele on weekends.

The farm had plenty of grouse and Chunky, despite appearances, was an 
excellent upland dog.  He was also a good pet, Jeff told me, and Marion
concurred.  Chunky had gotten a little soft, they said, traveling the 
last few weeks.  But he would get back into shape when they returned to
 their farm.  Chunky had a busy life in Nebraska.

Finally the dogs came back and snaked around us, both of them wagging 
heavy tails.  I was amazed at Nellie's flirtations.  She didn't bother 
about the brownies or the chocolate gunk on the kids' hands, but 
continued circling, happy to be next to Chunky.  I had never seen her 
behave in such a manner.  For his part, Chunky seemed content to have 
her with him.  He was a big dog, his back as wide as a bath towel. 
Nellie fit beside him nicely.

We stayed a little longer.  Nellie didn't resist when I called I her
and told her to get in the truck.  She hopped in, assuming j the 
position she had taken for the last several weeks.  We waved as we 
left.  Chunky, by this time, had already climbed back in the van.  I 
didn't see his head as we pulled out. it's strange how often we can
see something without taking it inside  us.  One Christmas morning my
father sent me downstairs with wrapping  paper and empty boxes three
times before I noticed the new bicycle  parked next to the garbage bin.
He had parked it there the night  before, but I had been so intent on
getting rid of the wrapping  paper--and getting back upstairs to play
with my new toys--that I had  passed over the bike twice before finally
spotting it.

In much the same way, I discovered that Nellie's vision was failing. 
It  became apparent to me as we stood on the banks of the North Platte
deep  in the Medicine Bow range, and once I knew, I realized I'd had
telltale  indications a hundred times before yet failed to note them. 
Now,  standing downstream from me, she turned to look and her head
stopped  one, maybe two compass points from my exact location.  Her
tail wagged  and her attention focused, but she did not see me.  For an
instant I  waited, expecting her eyes to track in their swivel toward
me, her head  to turn more fully.  Instead she seemed intent on the
trees around me, as if she could not truly distinguish me.  She 
recognized my voice, of course, and that brought her closer, but it was
not until she approached me that finally she made me out.  Then she
ran  forward, happy and less perplexed now that I was squarely in her 
vision, her tail waving above the river grass.

I propped my fly rod against a pine tree, then pulled her over and made
her sit next to me.  I kept my voice calm.  From long association, I 
knew it was best to start any examination of her by petting.  I gave 
her legs a rub, then worked my fingers into her chest hair.  She 
grunted in satisfaction.  It was a bright, sunny day and we sat for a 
while watching the water of the North Platte tumble over its rocky bed.
I continued petting her until I was able to maneuver her face so that 
it pointed into the sunlight.  Looking directly at her soft eyes, I saw
nothing unusual, but when I turned her head to profile, two cataracts
covered her corneas like pale blue moons.

Examining the size and dimension of the cataracts, I concluded that she
had been losing her sight for some time.  It had to be so.  The 
cataracts did not look newly formed, whatever that meant exactly, and I
did not think such things could come on suddenly like a rash or a 
swollen limb.  The cataracts appeared firm and well established, clouds
 that had come for the serious business of blinding her.

I studied them for awhile, nudging her chin this way and that.  It was
impossible to determine how much they affected her.  She followed bird 
song and the few sounds squirrels made in the pines around us. 
Perhaps,  though, she reconnoitered with her ears and relied on her
nose, drawing  on long habits of investigation.  I thought of days when
we had played  Frisbee or ball for thirty minutes at a time, and surely
she had seen  those objects.  She could still leap to catch a Frisbee
or snatch a  biscuit in the air if I lobbed it toward her. Still, her
vision had to be impaired.  I wondered how long she had  been following
me by sound and smell and maybe by heart.  She had hiked  with me
eleven miles into the Wind River Range, trusting me enough to  follow
blindly the cadence of my walking, the sound of my voice,  trusting, as
always, that her place was beside me.

I kept petting her and put my lips on her sunny head.  It was a good 
day and her fur had taken on heat.  I tried to recall what little I 
knew about cataracts, wondering at the same time if cataracts on dogs 
progressed the same way as cataracts on humans.  My dad had cataracts, 
but I couldn't quite say how they settled on his eyes or what impact 
they had made in his life.  He had died before they became an issue, 
although I was fairly certain he had consulted a surgeon about having 
them removed.  In the back of my head I seemed to recall people saying 
that cataracts could be easily excised, but, like most medical
procedures, such recipes mean little until you need one.  I also 
remembered a childhood friend, Timmy Brown, whose dog spent his last 
years on a leash in the back yard, dozing in the sun.  We had been 
warned repeatedly not to approach the dog-Chief, or Cricket was its 
name, I don't remember--because the dog had cataracts and might snap 
out of nervousness.  The dog became a backyard dragon, a creature that 
haunted my nightmares.  The sound of his chain evoked dragon scales, 
his bondage, to my over-stimulated imagination, the mythical restraint
of a dark creature.

I petted Nellie for a while longer, then told her we had fish to catch.
I told her she was a great dog, and I told her we had to live our
fates  no matter what.

She waded into the water and splashed around, yanking at sticks as she 
likes to do.  I figured that was as good an answer as she could make. 
I  threw a stick downstream and let her splash up a storm retrieving
it.  She carried  the stick to the bank and tore it up for the holy
hell of it.

I had been casting on the North Platte most of the morning with no 
result, so I doubted her galloping through a few spots would make a 
difference.  I didn't much care in any case.  The North Platte was a 
surpassingly beautiful location, perhaps the best camping spot of any 
place I had visited.  I had followed a long, winding dirt road through 
the Sheep Mountain Game Reserve, then ducked down, combing switchbacks 
against the side of a mountain, arriving finally on the banks of the 
North Platte.  I carefully monitored weather reports throughout the 
trip, because I doubted I could make it out if a stiff snow fell.  The
Dakota only had rear-wheel drive, a stupid nod to economy I had 
regretted as soon as I purchased the truck.  But I had arrived without 
incident and had set up an excellent camp twenty feet from the water so
that I could have the sound of the river throughout the night.  I had 
already gathered wood and set it beside the fire ring.

A clerk at a fly shop in Laramie had told me to fish upstream from the
campground and I had followed his advice, though I suspected I hadn't 
walked far enough.  I cast most of the morning with a bead-headed nymph
to promising pockets, but no luck.  Now, after lunch, I decided to
fish  one last afternoon, then call it a season.

Nellie led me upstream.  She liked this place, I could tell.  The air 
was crisp and small panes of ice had formed between the rocks along the
shoreline.  Now and then her paws shattered the ice and the noise 
carried out onto the river, then disappeared.  We walked a few miles 
upstream, following game paths and the trails made by other anglers. 
When we came to an open meadow that roughly corresponded to the tip 
given me by the clerk in the fly shop, I began to fish.  I decided to
fish as carefully as I  could, figuring that I would carry the memory
of this day, for better  or worse, through the long winter ahead.

The trick was to understand the water, I decided.  Depth is signified 
by color in a river so I fished to black spots, the deeper places where
trout should live.  I used the sinking nymph and let it bump along the
bottom.  It was not particularly satisfying fishing, but after about 
twenty minutes a six-inch cutthroat hooked itself and jumped twice 
before I realized I had connected with it.  Flecks of water splashed 
free from its body.  I felt the fish in my wrists. Nellie nosed it 
when I landed it.

I thought about stopping on a good note.  I considered returning to 
camp, pulling a beer out of the icy water where I had wedged it in the 
rocks beside the fire ring, but it was too early.  Where one fish 
lives, many fish, any fish live, I recited.  It was an old chant taught
to me by an ancient man who used to fish the Wood River in Rhode 
Island.  Before I caught a second fish, though, the sun tucked behind 
the mountains.  When I looked up, I realized the river licked through 
the valley, a white gliding edge; for a moment I imagined the water not
descending, but climbing instead, returning to the snow-topped peaks. 
I pictured the trout rising with the water, arching through pine and 
granite, gliding for a change instead of resisting.  Maybe the trout 
buried themselves deep in the highest snow, their blood slowing until 
spring.  Turtles, I knew, lived at the bottom of lakes, enzymes keeping
their bodies from becoming ice.  I liked thinking of the trout living
a  turtle's life, still, quiet, their gills stopped in mid-breath,
their  chins resting on the earth, waiting for April.  I imagined them 
tumbling into the water in spring, the thaw a surprise, their bodies 
joyous as they rode the runoff back to their home waters. No great
moment marked the end of the season.  I fished for a while  longer and
caught nothing.  The six-inch cutthroat, it turned out, was  my last
trout.

Winter, finally, had arrived.  It came down the sides of the mountains 
and covered the river.  Fog lifted off the stream.  The fog hid Nellie 
as she walked me back to camp, then it took away the river and then the
 mountaintops.

I built a large fire.  I am a fairly conscientious camper and don't 
often allow myself to indulge in large fires, but I had decided I was 
finished.  I wanted a big fire with yellow flames.  I grabbed a beer 
from the river and sat on the ground, my back propped against the float
tube.  The fire built slowly, then it took to the pine logs and
climbed  into the cool air.  Nellie came to sit beside me.  I tried to
see her  cataracts, the blue moons, but instead I received the wolf
glow  back--tapetum lucidum.  I knew that dogs, like many animals, had
a reflecting layer worked into their eyes that increased the acuity of 
vision during their optimum hunting hours at dawn and dusk.  Such 
behavior, known as crepuscular activity as opposed to diurnal or 
nocturnal, was the boreal signature of wolves.  I liked Nellie's wolf 
eyes.  I told her so.

After a time and a few beers, I thought that I should do something to 
celebrate the end of the trip.  I considered dancing around the fire or
maybe dunking into one of the river's pools, or maybe stripping naked 
and running up a hillside, but I have never been one for theatrics.  I 
piled more wood on the fire and watched the sparks go off into the 
night.  I kept Nellie next to me.  I thought of Wendy the woman in my 
life, and her son, Pie.  Wendy and I had begun to talk about throwing 
our hats in together, buying a house and getting on with things.

It had been years since I had even considered living with a woman.

Around eight I stopped feeding the fire and started carrying coffee 
potfuls of water to douse the ashes.  As soon as the fire quit, I
began to shiver.  We climbed into the truck and performed what  was by
then an old routine.  This time, though, I left the tailgate  down and
I pulled the sleeping mat out so that I had an unobstructed  view of
the stars.  I read Dylan Thomas's lines from A Winter's Tale:

And the stars falling cold, And the smell of hay in the snow, and the 
far owl Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold Flocked with the 
sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl In the river wended vales 
where the tale was told.

I extinguished the flashlight and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. 
I  pulled Nellie closer, up under the sleeping bag, and I pet her
slowly.  The river pressed close to the bank and I listened for owls
but didn't  hear one.

I packed in first light while Nellie ate and took care other morning 
chores.  I had traveled enough through the years to know that once you 
turn for home every delay becomes unbearable.  The scenery that had 
seemed novel and interesting a month or two before suddenly turns dull 
and lifeless, becomes an obstacle keeping you from where you want to 
be.  As I loaded the truck, my mind had already gone to details about 
stacking wood and getting the snow blower primed.

I calculated five hundred miles a day, then divided it into the miles 
between me and home.  Three days, I figured, if my luck held.  Four on 
the outside.

Before we finished packing, a cowboy appeared.  He came out of the 
woods on a tall horse, ten or twenty head of cattle scattered before
him.  I put Nellie in a down-stay and told her to  hold steady.

The cowboy raised his hand and guided his horse toward me.  The cattle 
moved slowly, stopping frequently to graze.  Nellie watched, her 
attention fixed on them.  They appeared thinner than the eastern cattle
 I was accustomed to seeing.

They made a lot of noise and smelled like hay.

The cowboy introduced himself as Jim.  He had spent the last two days 
picking up strays, he told me, driving them slowly toward the trailhead
up the road.  The cattle grazed on public lands, he said, but ran in 
front of the snow once it started to settle on the high country.  He 
was to be met by livestock trucks later in the day, then a day off, 
then more riding.

"You from around here?"  I asked.

"Ohio," he said and laughed.

His uncle knew the cattle rancher and had arranged a job for him, Jim, 
as something of a life experience.  Jim had always wanted to try the 
cowboy life. As confidently as he moved on the horse, it surprised me 
when he said he had only ridden a few times previously.  The rancher 
had thrown him on a horse, given him a bedroll, and told him to go find
strays.  It had been one of the best experiences in his life, he said.
He wouldn't trade it for anything, though he was cured of wanting a 
cowboy's existence.

"It's the cold, mostly," he said.

"That's what gets you.  The rest of it is okay but it's so damned 
cold."

"You sleep out?"  I asked.

He nodded, said, "It's okay because I have a good sleeping bag, but you
 wonder what it would have been like before they invented down bags."

He asked if I was elk hunting or fishing and nodded again when I told 
him.  When I said I was heading offcast, he said that he had been out 
my way once, years ago, to look at the fall foliage.  His mom had
taken him.  He remembered it as staying a long  time in a car and
looking out the window.  He wasn't certain he had  visited New
Hampshire, though he thought he had.  He said up around  Lake Erie they
had fall foliage a lot like New England.

I told him he should try a lobster boat for his next job and he 
laughed.  After saying good-bye he turned his horse's head and wandered
back to the cattle, his return enough to get them moving again.  I
kept  Nellie in a down-stay until they disappeared down the road.  Then
it  was time to go.

When we started up the switchbacks, I glanced at Nellie.  As usual she 
sat with her nose an inch from the windshield, dotting her nostril 
print on the glass whenever we stopped or started.  I wondered, as I 
studied her, if she knew we had started for home.  Heading home, I 
whispered to her but she didn't react.  I wondered if she knew where we
 had been, why we had gone, what any of it meant.

For the heck of it, I made her give me her paw in return for a biscuit.
I wanted to see if she was listening so I said, "dog," which got her 
looking left and right, trying to see a potential adversary.  Then I 
had to devote my attention to driving the switchbacks and I let her be.
She watched out the window.  We drove on the dirt road until we
reached  a paved road, then drove the paved road until we reached a
bigger road.  By afternoon we saw the Rockies shrink in the rearview
mirror, and I  realized, things go as they might, that Nellie would
never see them  again. I scheduled AN appointment for Nellie the week
I returned.  The  receptionist asked after the reason for the
appointment, and I told her  that Nellie had undergone surgery in the
spring, and added that her  eyes, from what I could tell, had grown
cataracts.  The receptionist  noted the information and confirmed the
time.  She also checked  Nellie's record and said she could receive a
global booster shot and  give a blood sample for heartworm.  The
appointment would be in three  days.  We spent the interval moving back
into the house, setting up things for winter.  I took the snow blower
to the local hardware store  to have it serviced.  I bought pumpkins
and squash and ordered holiday  pies.  Nellie accompanied me on my
rounds, her position in the truck as  steady as it had been out West. 
The best foliage was already spent.

The night before the appointment we made a fire and sat beside it for 
most of the evening.  I went through mail and burned off envelopes and 
junk.  Nellie stretched out on a braided rug near the hearth and moved 
only to get the heat from a new direction.  When I bent over to pet
her, as I did occasionally,  her fur felt warm and soft.  Each time I
stepped over to add a log to  the fire, I rubbed her with my socked
foot on the return.

She stayed by the fire until long after I had gone to bed, but I heard 
her creep onto the mattress in the darkness.  I reached down to pet her
and her tail thumped a few times on the comforter.  The wind coming 
under the sash did not feel or taste the same as the breezes had in 
April.  I told Nellie winter was coming.  I told her we could have snow
any day.  I tickled her behind the ear, then fell asleep to a late 
storm pattering on the roof.

The next day, I spent the earliest part of the morning cleaning my 
office at school.  It was choked with papers and student essays.  I 
kept Nellie on an L.L Bean bed next to my desk.  She likes coming to my
office because it gives her a chance to be social, and students, I 
find, appreciate the companionship of a dog.  She watched as I carted 
out boxes of papers and memos to the dumpster behind the dorms.  It was
a dark day and we worked with the lights on even at nine in the 
morning.  I spent an hour answering phone messages and writing a long, 
difficult student recommendation.  Near ten a student came in with a
convoluted excuse of why he hadn't registered for a course in the 
spring, and why it was necessary that he get in.  As he told me his 
story Nellie kept her chin on his knee.

We made it to Dr.  Sweet's office at noon.  The office smelled of 
chicken soup. We read copies of Dog Fancier and Field and Stream until 
Dr.  Sweet's assistant called us to the examination room.  Nellie made 
one yank for the door, determined that she wasn't going to escape, then
calmly followed.  Dr.  Sweet entered a moment later, his standard blue
smock clean and bright.  Together we hoisted Nellie onto the 
examination table, a steel shelf protruding from the wall.  It's a
measure of her patience and  trust that she didn't protest.

Dr.  Sweet asked how she was doing.  I said okay.  I said I thought I'd
found lumps once more, but they didn't feel substantial and seemed to 
have gone away. He said I should remain vigilant.  He took an otoscope 
and shined it beneath her floppy ears, then checked her gums.  He felt 
around her legs and in her gut for lumps.  He listened to her heart, 
took her temperature, then patted her rump.

Finally he inspected her eyes.

I had learned more about cataracts since returning from our trip. 
Clouding, or keratitis, is a fairly common occurrence in dogs over ten 
years old, I had read.

Aging produces a gradual clouding of the lens (sclerosis).  Cataracts 
and luxated lenses are only surgically removed when the surgery will 
result in substantially improved vision.  Old dogs get along 
surprisingly well with reduced eyesight.

They rely on other senses and adapt, as we all must, to the limitations
 of age.

Nellie, to be sure, had not slowed substantially.  Except for an 
occasional lapse in her perceptions, she seemed as solid as ever.

"Looks good all around," Dr.  Sweet said when he finished with her 
eyes.

"Is she having any problem seeing?"

"Not that I can tell.  Nothing very dramatic."

"I guess we'll let well enough alone, then," he said.

"There's not much to be done about it."

He asked about her appetite, about her exercise, then grabbed a syringe
and gave her a shot.  He took a blood sample for spring heartworm. 
That  was it.  She was certified healthy for another six months.  We
paid on  the way out.  Nellie was halfway through her twelfth year.

Outside in the truck, I pulled Nellie onto my lap.  I held her against 
my chest and put my lips against her fur.  She smelled like pine and
faintly, very faintly, of the puppy she had been.  Lake  swimmer, I
whispered to her.  Frisbee catcher.  I put my eyes against  her fur and
felt such tenderness toward her that I was afraid to lift  my face from
her shoulder.  I pictured her running across the  mountainside near the
Tongue River, her fur shining, her gait  impeccable, and I squeezed her
harder.  I felt the deep, convulsive  grind toward a sob, but then I
pushed it away.  She was all right. She  would be all right for a while
longer.

At home we took a walk in the woods.  Our routine is to enter the 
forest directly behind my house.  Nellie knows the path and sprints 
ahead.  She is always glad to be out for a walk and she usually runs 
the beginning portion of the trail with her nose to the ground, her 
back legs catapulting her forward.  A half mile along the path we 
struck Clay Brook where Nellie loves to lap up the icy water.  This day
the trees and wind made little noise.  I don't think Nellie noticed. 
She had curled into the boggy area to the south, though she was still
within sight.  I stood next to the stream and watched her run through 
the dark afternoon.  She seemed unconscious of me.  She ran on a game 
trail, a place where we sometimes found deer rubbings and bear scat, 
her impatient body occasionally striking the staghorn sumac and making 
their red heads wag in the quiet.

In February Wendy and I and her eight-year-old son, Pie, put a down 
payment on a converted barn in northern New Hampshire with a view 
overlooking Mt. Moosilauke.

It is a wonderful structure, a post-and-beam barn built around 1840. 
The roof rises four stories tall and contains a nine-foot-wide  chimney
made of gray quarry stone.  On the Fourth of July the town fire 
department shoots off fireworks that land on the open meadow rolling 
out from a wide farmer's porch on the east end of the building.  We 
have already planned a party for the Fourth of July and invited chili 
recipes.  We have spent days going to auctions and flea markets, 
searching for furniture and interesting pieces to use in decorating. 
Both Wendy and I have been accustomed to small homes and apartments, 
and now, suddenly, we have more space than we know what to do with. Pie
talks about hooking a rope up to the top beam of the barn and swinging
like Tarzan down to breakfast.

The barn land connects to an ancient Baltimore & Ohio rail bed, which 
connects, in turn, to the Appalachian Trail.  Since we returned, Nellie
and I now walk with a second dog, Devil Dog, the small black Lab who 
belongs to Pie.  Devil Dog is five and has the springy, short body of a
well-proportioned Lab.  She weighs fifty pounds to Nellie's seventy, 
but she is muscular, with a broad chest and well-defined legs.  She is 
a nearly perfect pet, with a shy, affable way, and a goofy love of 
water.

I was curious to see how Nellie would accept another dog's presence and
was not surprised when she remained aloof at first.  For a month or 
more she pretended Devil Dog did not exist.  But Devil Dog, or D Dog as
we call her, is a determined clown and I think she spotted at once
that  Nellie takes herself very seriously.

D Dog is the annoying, yet necessary, little sister, the type who 
refuses to let Nellie hog the toys and the attention.  She also seeks 
Nellie out at night and curls next to her, forcing Nellie to share her 
dog bed.  I suspect it will keep Nellie lively to have a younger dog in
the house.  On our walks, Nellie is still dominant, still the 
adventurer, while D Dog remains close underfoot, manic only when Nellie
returns. My life has changed.  On my walks now I return to a lighted
house and  a wood stove heating a keeping room.  Better still, I now
have human  company on my walks.  On Sundays we schedule hikes and take
off to new  destinations.  We have discovered a waterfall we believe no
one knows  exists except us, a rock formation we have dubbed Elephant
Rock, and a  swimming hole that is so cold Pie believes the water comes
to us from  the time of the cavemen, which is the highest praise he can
give to  anything.  We have set up a specimen shelf and bring back
fossils,  birds' nests, and pale blue mermaid tears.  Pie carries the
things to  second grade Show & Tell where he delivers wonderfully
garbled accounts  of the origins of such things, mixing fact and fancy
as it strikes him.

Our biggest find to date has been a moose leg.  Nellie found it.  I was
on a walk alone with her when she appeared in the path ahead of me, a 
moose hock in her mouth.  The shin still wore the skin of a moose and 
the massive hoof, curved like the horned calipers of a gigantic beetle,
dangled with an articulated wobble next to Nellie's chest.  The sight 
of Nellie with such a large object stopped me.

It was shocking, but also decidedly fascinating.  I fought the impulse 
to junk it and carried it, by a handhold of leaves, back for Pie to 
inspect.  He put it in his tree fort to decompose, following a stern 
recommendation from his mom. Like a ghoulish imp he checks on it 
regularly and loves to haul it down to show visitors.  When anyone from
out of state mentions the difficulty of seeing a moose, Pie and I wink
and he clambers off like a young Quasimodo to fetch his moose leg.  We
 never fail to think it's funny.

On the fourth Saturday of April, opening day for trout waters, it's my 
habit to strap a float tube to my back and hike into one particular 
pond I know.  I did it this past spring.  The night before, I set out
my equipment, much of it still musty from the  fall.  I have made it a
tradition to start the new season with the last  fly of the old season,
and I found the bead-headed nymph I had last  used on the North
Platte.

It appeared in pretty good shape.  I dabbed oil on my reel sprockets, 
checked my leaders, threw out a few old flies, went through the pockets
of my fly jacket, checked the retractable thingy on my jacket chest 
pocket to make sure I still had clippers and forceps, stuck a new can 
of Deep Woods Off in the back game pouch, and then packed it all in my 
pickup.

I woke at four the next morning and slipped out of the house with 
Nellie beside me.  We drove to the trailhead and arrived as the sun 
cleared the White Mountains.  It was cold, only forty-some degrees, but
I knew the hike would warm me.  We started up Guinea Pond Trail at 
5:30.  Nellie took the lead.  The float tube bobbed against my back and
made it hard, because of its width, to pass between trees.  Before I 
had hiked fifteen minutes my body had heated.  I kept my pace steady, 
glad to be outside.

It was a five-mile hike to Black Mountain Pond.  Nellie flushed a 
grouse on the way.  I heard the first wood thrush of the season.  Its 
call sounded like water seeping through glass.  I love the sound and 
wait for it each year.  When we arrived at the pond, I drank some 
coffee and ate a sandwich I had packed.  I gave Nellie a biscuit and 
told her to stand guard on the bank.  She looked dubious, but contented
herself with sniffing around old fire rings and inspecting the spring 
skunk cabbage.

The trout in Black Mountain Pond are small--five to six inch brookies, 
known locally as square tails.  The pond itself rests at about two 
thousand feet in a bowl of piney hills.  The mountains sometimes
reflect in the water and the clouds, passing  above, glide from peak to
peak.

After breakfast I climbed into my gear and backed into the water. 
Nellie found a rock in the early sun and rested.  I clicked out my line
and began to cast near a row of lily pads.  The bead headed nymph made
a satisfying kerplunk when it hit the water.  After about fifteen or 
twenty casts, a brookie took.  It surged for a moment downward, heading
to the center of the earth, but the line danced him up and to the 
surface and eventually he bur bled in the glassy reflection of the 
pond.  I lifted my rod tip and brought him close.  The red dots along 
his side held the color of sugar maples turning at first frost.

But it was spring and the fish began to rise in the fresh lily pads, 
one after another.  I squinted to see what they might be feeding on, 
but it was hard to tell.  I thought maybe a March Brown.  I thought it 
could be a small dun.  Either way, I doubted the trout would be 
especially choosy.  I cast the nymph to the edge of the lily pads and 
caught another.  The fish ran straight at me and passed close to my 
legs.  I pivoted in the water and let the trout head to the center of 
the pond, then let it turn back to me when it felt the leader.

Nellie came out before I caught a third fish.  I didn't see her leave 
the shore, but she paddled out to the float tube, her head a wedge 
above the water.  She came close and I stuck out a foot to fend her 
off, because I knew she would want to climb up with me.  No, I said, 
grinning.  She circled me for ten minutes, which of course interfered 
with my fishing.  It did no good to tell her to wait on shore.  After a
while I waited until she was on the side away from the lily pads, then
I cast quickly.  I caught two fish that way with Nellie banking around
me, a satellite, a comet.  She seemed happy. It was only ten in the
morning when I climbed out and made a fire.  I  was cold, bone cold,
and my fingers trembled when I held the match to  the cotton ball
swabbed in petroleum jelly I use to start fires in the  woods.  Because
I was one of the first visitors to the pond that  season, I had no
difficulty finding dead wood.  I snapped off small  twigs and built the
fire with dry, splintered pine. It crackled  happily.  I held out my
hands and tried to get feeling back in my toes.

Nellie sat beside me, her fur icy at its tips.

I fished from the shore in the afternoon, but didn't have much luck.  I
caught one nice trout on a Muddler Minnow.  I had seen a few black 
grasshoppers working the early grasses at the side of the pond, and on 
a hunch I had tied on a black Muddler and cast it to imitate the real 
thing.  A large trout took almost immediately.  The fish pulled heavily
and nearly wrapped itself around a partially submerged log.  The trout
shook free when it was inches from me, gone back to the water before I
 understood exactly what had occurred.

It was a fish to end on.  I reeled in and packed up my rod, the float 
tube, my fly jacket.  I gave Nellie a few biscuits and told her to get 
ready.  When I had hoisted everything onto my back, we started down the
mountain.  As always, Nellie led me.  Her tail wagged above her back 
and her gait, swift and clean, looked as strong as it ever had.  I 
thought of a day when she would not be ahead of me on the trail, but 
that was a gloomy thought, not one for today.  She had several more 
seasons in her.  The trees misted green buds from their limbs and water
ran happily through the forest.  It was spring, and trout had
returned, as they promised to every fall, and I had met them again. 
The summer  was ahead, then autumn, and in each season the water
waited.  That was  what counted.  In the late afternoon I knew Wendy
and I would split wood, and Pie would play with the dogs, and we would
sleep with the windows open to catch the wind from the mountains. 
Nellie would sleep still curled at the foot of the bed, able to rest 
after so many days afield because she had retrieved me, brought me home
 at last.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM GRATEFUL TO ALL THOSE WHO READ THE MANUSCRIPT of this particular 
work and generously gave their time and insight.  I am particularly 
indebted to Tim Weed and Wendy Hast for their commentary and 
encouragement.  Thanks to Jay Schaefer, senior editor, and the 
wonderful staff at Chronicle Books for producing this book.  I am 
enormously grateful to Jennifer Hengen, my agent at Sterling-Lord
Literistic, for her many kindnesses to me.  Thanks, too, to Dr.  Dennis
Sweet for his care of Nellie; and to Kelly Bryer, who has groomed 
Nellie for ten years.

And finally, my thanks to Nellie herself, a good companion and a good 
dog all these years.  I hope that I have been the friend to her that 
she has been to me. Joseph Monninger is the author of eight novels, as
well as numerous  stories and articles.  He lives and teaches in New
Hampshire.