Free All Fishermen Are Liars by John Gierach

as feminine, but that’s not some kind of left-handed gender politics. It’s just that this kind of graceful and surprising sweetness calls to mind many of the women I know, but none of the men. Of course, strictly speaking, a trout stream is an inanimate object, but no fisherman really believes that.
    I worked up the rest of that bend pool—another twenty yards or so—casting carefully and fully expecting another big cutthroat, but it didn’t happen. Then I walked upstream to leapfrog my partner. He’d already fished the next long pool, worked up fifty yards of cut bank and was starting at the tail of the plunge pool above that. His normal fishing pace is faster than mine, but he’s usually considerate enough not to rush too far ahead and has even been known to stop and wait if I fall too far behind. By way of holding up my end, I try to stifle my tendency to dawdle. We’ve fished together for years. It almost always works out.
    I spent the next few hours in the state of mild surprise that always comes on a new stream—jumping between moments of rapt contentment and the eagerness to see what comes next. There are many more similarities between trout streams than there are differences, but the differences are endlessly novel. A riffle is just a riffle, but the precise place where current speed, depth, bottom structure and drift lines conspire to make a good place for a trout to hold is always unique. The same goes for the cast that will send a fly down that slot without drag, while leaving the caster far enough away to keep from spooking the fish. Each new throw demands a moment of consideration. Hydrology is an open book, but it’s a dense text that you don’t always comprehend on the first reading.
    As the morning warmed up, there were more insects around and the fish became more active. I began to spot the occasional trout suspended in the smooth tails of pools and saw the odd, unhurried rise. I switched out my dry and dropper rig, sticking with the same patterns, but in smaller, more realistic sizes. If a coherent hatch developed, I’d try my best to copy it out of my small stream box, but this didn’t seem like that kind of water. This seemed like the kind that would grind out a sparse mixed bag of insects and where the trout would stay more or less open to a reasonable suggestion.
    I’ve never quite come to terms with precision in fly fishing, whichI suppose is why I’m such an avid small-stream fisherman. A spring creek filled with clockwork hatches, quarter-inch-wide feeding lanes and highly selective trout is like a Swiss watch: a mechanism with such fine tolerances that you can’t find a gap anywhere wide enough to slip in a single extra hackle fiber. A freestone stream seems like a clunkier device with gears that sometimes just barely mesh. A few turns of hackle or a hook size more or less usually won’t matter, and if a trout decides he likes your fly, he’ll swim a foot out of his way to eat it. This is the ideal place for the guy who thinks of himself simply as a fisherman rather than a “fish-catching machine,” which in some circles is the ultimate compliment.
    The fishing that day was never fast and furious, but it never slowed to what you could call a lull. The trout weren’t exactly easy to catch, but for the most part they were right where you’d expect them to be and only a few presented the kind of puzzle that an adequate fly caster who’s on his game couldn’t solve. I never hooked another fish as big as that first one, but a few were in that same over-fifteen-inch class that can seem so big on small water.
    There were no surprises, but somehow everything was a surprise: how the trout fit the water the way birds fit the air and how they’re so hard to spot in the stream, but so ornately beautiful in the hand. I know their coloration is a practical matter of camouflage with a seasonal nod to mating, but there seems to be something else in operation here: something frisky that has