As foretold, the run lies directly below the hatchery deadline. Joe points to a sign above us, another on a tree on the far bank. Good water passes right below our feet, a deep slot pouring between boulders, the slot dark and promising as old, bottled wine.
“Good a spot as any.”
“Go for it,” says Joe.
I free my flies and leader knot. I’ve got a pinch of lead dangling from the tag end of a blood knot between a pair of egg patterns, about as simple as this game gets. The second cast I feel the splitshot touch bottom, the weight just right.
The next drift I’m tight to a heavy fish.
We slug it out in close quarters. No aerobatics or blistering runs, a fish that’s probably been in the river since early summer, happy, moments ago, to have the salmon around, their eggs in the water.
This isn’t rocket science.
Still, a few moments of tension while we figure out a landing strategy. I’m on the bank but penned between boulders up to my waist. Joe says he’s got room where he’s standing. I hate to give anyone else responsibility for landing my fish, but it’s that or risk breaking a rod.
Joe does the job. A wild hen, she cleans up nicely, her colors and long graceful body a fine match to the cold and clear water and our hopes for the winter ahead.
She swims away as if vanishing from a dream.
Still, crossing the bridge, on the way home, I sort of pooh-pooh the idea that we were even fly fishing.
“What do you mean?” says Joe. “You matched the hatch.”
I recount, aloud, a recent moment, overseas, when, after failing several times to hook anything out of several blow-ups of pelagic fish, I tossed a fly into another flurry of diving birds and somehow came tight to a tern, now flying overhead, my line wrapped around its neck. After Brad Morris, my guide, freed the bird, he discovered a tiny baitfish, less than an inch long, that had fallen from the bird’s mouth. We immediately switched to a much smaller fly.
“Match the hatch,” said Brad, while I leaned into another feisty jack.
Joe glances my way.
“I’m just trying to figure out how you lassoed that tern,” he says.
The way things stand today, Gray’s angling editor Scott Sadil wonders after every steelhead he catches if it might be his last.
