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Show Go Love/204 dinner, when I wanted to talk to Renee and the only phone was down at the put in. A bend in the road looks out on the corridor where the Green snakes, afternoon steam just starting to rise Cutthroat rise, about to snap eight-pound test and lay permanent bends into flyrod tips Dories drift float dryflies down the wide hole's mouth, silver lines lopping over the cross current, hopper, midge, scarab-backed cicada swirled by surface mischief into eddies on front and backside of boulders where trout lay and rise. Big shouldered guides, the men and woman are sons and daughters of the crews that built the gorge dam, row the fourteen foot dories. I park and walk south, away from Little Hole, wilderness quickening in my veins. The river smells of algae and fish. Ducks quack down the corridor as I dodge rocks, pick my way up the path with the sun on my back. This is the hard way, no trail to speak of over the boulder fields My casts reach the other side easily. A sinking rapalla-golden-falls just short of the far bank, taken by current and jigged, the way a crippled fish swims These browns-Jesus Christ-carnivores and cannibals, teeth like knife points, they'll cut treble hooks in half See the plug dart and scutter, a flash explodes upward, the twisting big-bellied brown, twenty inches maybe, six pounds, leaps, shakes its head, its gold eyes full on me and the silver line sings. The sun on my back like some portal into the flames of a nether world-as if a door between, this shining almost invisible river that separates me from the other side, the way West. Netted, the German Brown is lively, even after the fight it looks me straight in the eye, they always do, furious and fearful. Nights under the full frost moon, in snow storms and thunder and full sun days, I've seen the feeding frenzy triggered, watched these creatures leap, drag down full grown mallards and chase otter, crash up under the cliffside overhang to knock fledgling |