The Alder Fork -   a fishing idyl, continued. (for the beginning of this essay, see June 2007).  

But this, we now remembered,  was a stream of parts. High up near the Headwaters we had once seen a fork, narrow, deep, and fed by cold springs that gurgled out under its close-hemmed walls of alder. What would a self-respecting trout do in such weather? Just what we did: go up.

In the fresh of the morning, when a hundred whitethroats had forgotten it would ever again be anything but sweet and cool, I climbed down the dewy bank and stepped into the Alder Fork. A trout was rising just upstream. I paid out some line ----  wishing it would always stay thus soft and dry----  and, measuring the distance with a false cast or two, laid down a spent gnat exactly a foot above his last swirl. Forgotten now were the hot miles, the mosquitoes, the ignominious chub. He took it with one great gulp, and shortly I could hear him kicking in the bed of wet alder leaves at the bottom of the creel.

Another, albeit larger, fish had meanwhile risen in the next pool, which lay at the very "head of navigation", for at its upper end the alders closed in solid phalanx. One bush, with its brown stem laved in the middle current, shook with a perpetual silent laughter, as if to mock at any fly the gods or men might cast one inch beyond its outermost leaf.

excerpts are from "A Sand County Almanac, with essays on conservation from Round River", by Aldo Leopold and published by Oxford University Press (1966). For more information about Aldo Leopold, see: www.aldoleopold.org An inexpensive paperback version of Sand County Almanac published by Ballantine Books is widely available at book stores or on-line.