Free Lines on the Water by David Adams Richards

and there were rocks everywhere. At any given second he might snap his leader on a rock.
    The fish was showing its back as it dug deep into its reserve and made its way out to the middle of the river, swirling the water away from it.
    And then it began to run a little and turn on its stomach. So he knew it was spent. Once its nose was turned into shore, he backed right up against the side of the bushes and brought it in on a small landing.
    He was exhausted. He was soaking and his arms ached. The fish was a male close to fifteen pounds. He had hooked in on a small bug at the lower end of the pool in about two and a half feet of water. There was still sea lice on it, and it had probably just come into the pool before he did. Perhaps as he had started his two-hour long trek down from Clearwater to Island Pool, it was making its way up past those rocks where he had played the life from it.
    The day was starting to cloud, the water looked darker, and there was still a long way to go. The trees on either side of the river were silent, and thrust out to the sky in that self-absorbed way trees always have. He made his way, with his fish, downriver towards some place called White Birch he had not been to before. He carried the fish in one hand, the rod in the other, and tried to navigate the slippery stones, or along the paths that were overgrown with grass and alders.
    He came to White Birch in the evening. The no-see-ums were at his hands and face, and every time he stopped mosquitoes flitted above him. But the pool, with its rock in the middle and its fine flow of dark water on the far side, was too inviting. He had to give it a try. Besides, he could easily cast and beach a fish here he decided.
    He made a bed for his fish and walked up to the top of the pool and looked it over. It was an exceptionally fine pool.
    Here you cast out to the far side letting your fly move towards the boulder that sits in the middle. The fish will lie behind that boulder, or just in front, but they will also lie between the boulder and the far cliff, nearer the top of the pool where the water enters the pool in a darkish-brown run.
    It was prime time for fishing now and on the third cast he hooked a large grilse, just on the outside of the rock. The grilse swallowed the bug and jumped three times in succession, tired, and he landed it after a fifteen-minute fight. Then, with two fish, a rod, and no place to put them, he started up the hill, trying to find the path.
    He looked here and there and began to cut up the side of the hill, and realized that though it may still be off-white on the late-evening water, it was already dark in the deep Sevogle wood.
    It is a steep hill, the south branch of the Sevogle is a hard river to reach at any time, and as he kept going he felt he had missed the path, but he was also confident that he would find it again. Carrying two fish and a rod, and trying to get over windfalls as high as his waist or chest, with soaking wet jeans and slippery sneakers, was a hard enough venture. But he kept faith that off to his upper right was the old logging road that would walk him back to his car.
    At certain points along the rise of the hill, it plateaus out for a few feet just to rise again. Here all kinds of small animals,insects and plant life live out their lives in the warm summer air; squirrels and partridge, chipmunks and chickadees, constantly going about their business without ever caring or bothering about ours, and never understanding why we with chainsaws or oil and gas would bother them.
    Trying to get up and down these hills is hard enough, but it’s always worse when you don’t have a bag to store your fish—and have no hands to keep the branches from your face. Your face can get torn up fairly badly if you aren’t careful.
    At one of these plateaus he stopped and looked about. It was boggy off to his right, but he felt the road had to be in that direction. Only the sky held a shaft of fading light. The wood