One

Rick Tamerlin, the guide, had three days to kill.

Jane was away. There was nothing on the calendar, and Rick’s list of projects to catch up on contained nothing pressing, unless you counted the article on reels he was to deliver in a week but hadn’t started. By now he should have completed a first draft. But he had not. But (he reasoned) if he started thinking about it he might worry, and if he started to worry he might freeze up and never get started, so the best thing to do was to go fishing.

He was getting his gear together, not unhappily, a pallid-complected redhead, slight of stature, middling of coordination, sensitive of slim hands and sandy speculative stare, whose central problem, when he analyzed it, was the inability to form a simple thought.

The phone rang.

It was a friend, another guide with a potential client, a Fortune 500 executive in town with a raft of lawyers and opponents and sycophants and crunchers. They were hammering out an agreement—negotiations hugely stalled in a billable broil of intellectual plumage display, and Mr. Boldt decides to get out. Get the hell out, leave the inmates alone, let the gladiators go at it without him. He’s an avid fisherman. He’ll need gear; he wasn’t expecting to fish. Mr. Boldt will pay triple the fee of whoever guides him. Rick’s friend can’t do it . . . might Rick be interested?

Rick was interested for several reasons. First, he would do it to help his friend. Second, CEOs can be interesting. Third, triple his fee approximated what he stood to get for the article on reels that he hadn’t started, and this, in the cogwheels of his conscience, might relax him long enough to allow him to write the damn thing. There was a fourth reason.

Hurrying out the door the following morning he lowered his eyes when he passed the mirror. He was concentrating. Tackle he had. He had checked and doublechecked everything. Lunch he had time to get. He was supposed to collect Mr. Boldt at Mr. Boldt’s hotel. He had time to buy lunch stuff and get it all ready before picking Boldt up. He must go. He must go now and not get to thinking. It was either do this—guide the guy—or else go out by himself for two days’ solitary joy in the high hills he loved. Two days and a night alone in the secret mountain places where he felt eternal. But if he did that, if he passed on Boldt and went alone, he would likely do it again. And if he did it again he would do it the time after that, until, if he should continue thus irresponsibly indulging himself, he would get to feeling guilty. He would get to feeling so guilty that he would recoil from such selfish behavior and boomerang and carom right back into a world so opposite to his beloved hills and streams, a world so dreaded, so difficult, so challenging, so different from the lonely, lovely peaks and rills, that Rick could not bring himself to name that world in his mind, though it was a world he knew well. This was his fourth reason for going.

“How long a drive?”

“About an hour.”

Rick turned the wheel just slightly, testing to see if the pickup would respond. It did not. They left the plain where the city lay. The mountains devoured the six-lane highway like a frog lapping flies.

“Will we catch fish?”

“Well,” Rick said, “if we can get the things we can control right, and if the things we can’t control decide to behave themselves, maybe we will.”

“I had to get out of there. Absent the final authority from the fray.” Mr. Boldt clapped once. “The shit was in place,” he said, “so I decided to remove the fan.” The steep rock faces were so high they blocked the sun, allowing the turning highway through. Boldt was five-seven, but no one, Rick was sure, had ever made the mistake of thinking Sean Boldt small. He had a musclebound upper body. His short black hair lay one way. His mouth was a letterslot. A mean energy played around him. None of him moved extraneously. He vigorously scoured his hands together. When he stopped, no part of him moved. Except the eyes. The eyes moved. “Climbers,” he said. “Is that a popular face?”

Rick said, “Usually. Boy, there are a lot of them up there today.”

“Like little bugs all over the rock.”

“It might be a celebration.”

“It takes about an hour you say?”

“About. Not much on the road on a weekday.”

“What sorts of activity will we be seeing? There’s a Trico hatch I would imagine.”

Rick looked at his wristwatch with a tilt of the head and a small lift and axial turn of his wrist on the side away from his passenger, instead of checking the old clock on the dash, which will read 5:48 forever. He gave an inner sigh. “Well,” he said, “yes, there’s a morning hatch. Sometimes.”

“I assume you have plenty of whatever we might need.”

“We should be fine.”

“Good. Now for instance,” Boldt relished, “will we be fishing 20s? Something in that range?”

“That’s about it.”

“Parachute hackles, paraduns.”

“Exactly,” Rick confirmed, thinking if under the right circumstances. If not, then perhaps not so exactly. Exactitude can be tricky, Rick Tamerlin had learned.

Boldt squirmed getting comfortable in the truck’s mangy seat, happy to be talking and thinking about such stuff. “Size,” he decreed, “in my estimation matters less than presentation. As long as you’re in the ballpark. With all those spinners blanketing the water getting your cast to the exact spot matters more than size . . . and you wanna be working on eliminating hidden drag insteada pratting all around with oh gosh do I use a 22, do I try a 24, do I want my wings up or do I want them spent or how far do I want the hackle from the eye or how close do I want the dubbing to the eye and blah blah blah.”

“Exactly.”

They got onto the subject of Boldt’s first million. “I was a one-man shop.” A fond, faraway look coming on in the finless eyes. “I’d call a guy up and we’d strike a deal and I’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll send a messenger; I’ll send a boy over with the documentation.’ Messenger hell. I didn’t even have a secretary. I didn’t have anybody. I’d bang the phone down and jump up and get my coat on and grab the papers and beat it across town. In those days nobody knew who I was.”

They were swinging south through valleys of grasses. The hillsides were candescent yellow, veiny red, fiery orange—luminescent and flaming where the sun shone in the turned leaves—and in places still a minty light green where things had yet to turn. These swatches of varying color were couched in seas of one darker color: verdant pine, the darker evergreen flowing in the speeding windows.

“Is there someone you should call?”

“Call?”

“Get information from,” Boldt snapped. “Somebody who might know something. About where we’re going. Check the water conditions.”

“Well,” Rick said, “yes, I suppose there is.”

Of course there was.

He had not bothered to call Ray at the shop in Minton because he knew what Ray would say: rate and volume unvarying. They hadn’t been releasing because there was no reason to release. Temperature and clarity fine . . . and what would people be using? Rosemont “worms” and BWOs. Rick had checked the day’s weather prediction twice. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t bad.

Still, he might have called Ray. Perhaps he should have.

“What’d he say?”

“I didn’t call him.”

This brought on an emphatic silence. They drove. Boldt was looking out his window.

“The aspen,” Boldt decided, “are indescribable.”

“You mean they’re beautiful?”

Boldt’s grunt might have been of assent. It was like a bullfrog croak, smothered.

“Different groupings are different in color,” Rick explained, “because it’s the same tree basically, but they’re different communities. Say that one’s yellow. Well, right next door there might be a different strain. Like gold.”

Nothing further was said for twenty-seven miles.

Boldt took out a communications device.

Wafer-thin. Nasty-looking. Glancing over at it, Rick hesitated to categorize it as mere phone.

“This baby’s DOD-grade. It can reach anyone anywhere. What’s his number?”

“Whose?”

Boldt frowned and waited, dialing finger poised.

“Oh,” Rick said, “you mean—uh, yeah, uh, I don’t know it by memory. I’m afraid I don’t have it.”

“That’s all right. What’s his name and address?”

Between low hills of sagebrush and scrub the flat meadows flew by, a hawk coasting over the grassy fields in the sunshine, its wings set, turning its head. They flowed along. It seemed to Rick that his venerable valves and cylinders were positively symphonic. Boldt, supplied with the needed data, worked his stealth-smooth device and got through, identified himself, interrogated, listened, gave a grunt.

“He says the flow’s normal—temperature, clarity, ditto. They’re catching ’em on Rosemont ‘worms,’ whatever the hell that is, and BWOs—I’m sure you have plenty of those.”

“Yes.”

“Good . . . he says the Tricos are on.”

Rick said nothing. The implied question was Will we get there in time? No, was the answer, we will not. It was beginning to annoy Rick that Boldt should so swiftly have come to distrust him, so Rick made an attempt to prevent himself from becoming angry by going, in his mind, up into the true, faroff high country as they drove.

The sky, so far, said fair weather. Maybe a latish shower but that was all, and that would be usual. The white puffs sailing eastward over the hills with tons of blue between them would, densening, if there were to be a shower, show less and less blue between them and then, as they moved in around the faroff peaks, no blue at all and it would be raining. In not too many more days it might be snow, but for this morning the sky looked harmless to Rick—like me, he thought.

Boldt’s device’s “ring” was unlike any two-way warble Rick had heard, a wussy shrill peeeeeeeeee. It was unnerving, with a wave of soundless force in addition to the audible tone, a wave of force like what emanates from a big system with all its power up and the gain way high but nothing playing. It didn’t bother Boldt. But it bothered Rick. Boldt bothered Rick. Did Rick bother Boldt? Rick wondered if he did, as Boldt conferred with an underling.

“No,” Boldt said. “Yeah, but no. Normally sure, but this ain’t normally. Look, I can afford to have this thing crater, can you?”

Sign-off was peep.

“He needs that,” Boldt said. “It’s good for him.” Boldt’s tone was the same as he had just used with his underling. He slipped the svelt thing in a pocket and rode looking out the window. “I’m not as tough as I sound. For him I’m that way. For him I’m tough. For someone else maybe I’m different. I’m how I have to be. Everyone has his assigned frequency.”

In the far distance a famous American peak lifted into view. It lifted above the straight highway oncoming and the nearby hills flying by to either side.

Boldt cleared his throat: “Ever run into Gregory Unterline?”

“Sure.”

“Ever fish with him? I fished with him last year up on that stream he’s always yakking about. Writing about.”

“Greg’s an outstanding fisherman.”

“The second evening I caught thirty-four fish. Thirty-four in an hour, right at sunset. The salmon flies were on and I released thirty-four trout in one hour, right at sunset.”

“That’s the time of day they dance.”

“Or morning.”

Rick looked at his gas. He let the empty road come at him. Gas looked okay, but he couldn’t remember, and you could never tell with this particular gauge, but he thought he was okay, so he let the road come at him. There was no one to pass or be passed by. The famous peak, brownish and rounded, showed nothing of its actual height this far away. Rick was strangely aware of the physical presence of his watch on his wrist.

Boldt folded his arms.

“I’ve never been skunked,” he announced.

Rick said nothing, but no fisherman has never been skunked. He speculated on what Boldt might be counting, or not counting, but he decided not to ask because he could imagine no answer that would interest him.

They reached the canyon soon enough. You could see the swinging, brawny river in glimpses down through the trees, a run of prime lies, backeddies where the big rocks break the surface, smooth swirls where they do not, wakes, waves, interweaving currents—three anglers in the water were fishing . . . then blur of forest. Then the forest opened again and far below was a stretch of sparkling rifflewater pivoting around the fulcrum of a broad pool-like still. Two anglers stood on the gravel. They were casting . . . forest-blur. They rounded a high bend. The forest opened again and the river was wide, below. There were more fishermen. Looking down on it was like looking at an illustration in a how-to guide, all the different currents, speeds, surfaces. Part of a tire left the paving. It was the feeling Rick always got when he got here, and he hoped Boldt, who was looking out over it, was moved similarly. At least Boldt had not seemed to notice when Rick had almost run them off the cliff.

They passed that stretch, driving downstream, and the road pitched downhill, the water no longer visible, the trees they passed no longer forest, just tan slope and scraggly mixed evergreen in the side windows. It was the run into town. Boldt asked: “This is it?”

“Yep,” Rick said proudly.

“Where do we go?”

“We go up. We drive about three miles upstream to park. Then we walk in. We can walk to any number of places.”

“Upstream from here?”

“Right.”

“Then why are we driving downstream?”

“I thought we’d stop in at the shop.”

Boldt folded his arms.

“Say a quick hello,” Rick reasoned. “Pick up some Blue-Winged Olives with a little more Nile in the body than I may have tied, now that I think about it, if Ray’s got some, which I’m certain he does. He obviously does. And fly floatant.”

It was impossible for Rick to explain to anyone including himself the feeling he got when he got here. It was a feeling of freedom, peace, smallness and ambition in blended portions.

They pulled into the village and drew up with a slowing mastication of pebbles before the flimsy front stoop of the shop.

“Morning!”

“Well good morning,” Rick greeted Ray.

“Morning sir.”

“Morning.”

Tight-lipped, Boldt shook hands with Ray Plover as Rick introduced them. “The Tricos still on?”

Ray is an ample man, plump-muscled. He is not in good physical shape. His circular eyes and the O he makes with his lips, as if to say oooooo, are his response to everything. You could tell Ray what his own name is and the eyes would go round in fair surprise and the gallic, full lips signal O like a walleye eye.

“Still on?” he near-whispers in surprise, “why yes, er, probably so, yes. They’re still on I do believe.”

Rick has the superstition that it’s good luck to stop at a tackle shop, if one’s available, before fishing. And you always, always need more BWOs.

Rick was having an unrelated-thought riff. (It was: when in the course of human divine. It passed.)

He has them sometimes.

He hears out Ray’s opinions on water-flow rate, and Ray his. Boldt is darkly browsing the trays. Colossally folded arms. Rick finishes his chat with the ever-amiable Ray and wanders over to Boldt’s side and pretends to be browsing, upon which Boldt carries his folded arms elsewhere. But moments later Rick is delighted to hear Boldt and Ray in conversation. Making the sign of perfection to tweezer, with nail and nail, each miniscule BWO from the compartment tray, Rick is more delighted still to hear the impatience in Boldt’s growl soften as, despite himself, despite his impatience, despite his pique at being here instead of fishing, Boldt becomes interested in what he and Ray are talking about.

Then Rick was looking at a fly and he was thinking something about it that he could not remember, in this loss of time that sometimes happened to him, and by definition could be a second or a minute.

“ . . . stunts,” Ray was nodding with spherical affability, “trick improvements, that’s all they are.”

“Precisely. Precisely what the darned things are.”

“Trick improvements,” Ray sagely nodded, since Boldt seemed to like it. But Ray Plover could’ve taken either side. Ray was here to please. The round eyes and professionally astonished mouth made their circles as Ray invited Boldt to say more.

Boldt: “Did it ever occur to anybody that after decades of change fishing’s at a quiet-down point? I mean if fishing were a business I wouldn’t buy it.”

Ray agreed and adoringly nodded.

Rick wondered if Ray ever disagreed. Maybe he did. Sometimes he must. But he always brightly appeared to agree. Rick wondered if, in always agreeing, Ray always felt like agreeing. Rick was cheerful too but he didn’t always feel cheerful when he was being cheerful. He didn’t dislike himself, but he liked uncertainty better, as best he could tell, and it was in this train of odd thought that he nearly left the road again as they drove to the parking area, which was more like four miles upstream. They had missed the Tricos. An angler coming out of the trees said so. The hatch was over, too bad. Boldt was severely pissed off but controlled it. Contrary to popular belief most anglers are not fools. Boldt’s eyes strained inwardly and his mouth stayed shut like a wine press, but not for long: they’d missed the hatch—so be it.

And even if they had not stopped in at the shop they still would have been rushing and most likely would have screeched to a halt and yanked their rods out and run to the water only to find the hatch practically over, or certainly the best of it. You don’t want to rush. Not to rush your fishing is very important and Rick was happy to see that Boldt, though by no stretch of the imagination pleased, understood this and was ready and looking forward to the next thing.