The picture also brought to mind the summer when Greg Keeler and I pulled them out of Grayling Lake up Hell Roaring Creek off the Gallatin, where I realized how right Quammen was. While grayling are always a hoot, you catch them for different expectations and rewards. As Quammen wrote, “You catch them to visit them: to hold one carefully in the water, hook freed, dorsal flaring, and gape at the colors, and then watch as it dashes away.”

The ones Greg and I gaped at that day on Grayling Lake seemed more like they were being tickled than being caught, wafting up to the bank like they might prefer the land to water, greeting us from the deep with dorsal folded like a palm across the forehead, but obliged to squirm here and there because, well, they were after all fish. With the entire lake to ourselves, we made the most of it. Each time either of us had one on, our best Monte Python falsettos echoed across the alpine cirque, "Oh, woes me!  WOES ME! I've been kissed on the lips by a deceptive wire… AGAIN!  Please, please, won’t you pet my extravagant dorsal."

It wasn’t until I opened the box of giants there on the love seat that I relived the fortuitous moment I last had with them on the Gallatin last summer. As I stood in warm waders mulling over which pattern to tie on next, I remembered, a perfect live salmon fly lit right in middle of the opened box. That’ll do, I said to myself slapping the box shut. I went with whatever was already tied on, thinking the trapped live one would be some kind of amulet, like a rabbit’s foot or a horse shoe or both.     

When I showed the dead specimen to Dr. Cyndi, she snuggled up close and asked how I made it look so real and life-like. Tempted to lead her on about how the wings were imported from Portugal, the legs parts of an old bra, and the thorax a Tunisian cow nose, I decided to come clean. I told her the truth about the dinosaur: that rather than dying like all his other relatives in the hungry jaws of brawny browns beneath overhung weedy banks, he gave up the ghost right there next to my other giants, as if to say Help! I don’t want to die a cliché.

We both sat amazed at how intact the specimen remained, its tiny legs folded beneath its orange and black abdomen like a puppy getting a tummy rub. The good doctor informed me how—unlike the economy—my luck had doubled since last summer. Often, she said, a fungus known as entomophthora helps decompose dead insects. When the fungus is done building up enough spores, it shoots them out like shot guns loaded for doves. That’s how we all get tiny black dots on windows just above dead flies on the sills. The catapulted spores are meant to help decompose them, she said.  So I counted my blessings. If the specimen had any entomophthora on it when it landed in the box of giants, the fungus didn’t survive the long winter in the garage. The entire box looked spotless. No spores, no decomposition. Now, how to get the corpse on a hook?

Please

You’re embarrassing yourself.

Liquid to vapor to solid,

back to liquid and vapor?

Round and round you go,

drought after drought, flood after flood,

your cyclical magic ad nauseum.

Please. 

And for what?

Don’t you think we ever get tired of it? 

And why, in February, 2010,

along the Salmon between

Riggins and French Creek

did you distract Russ Henderson

from doing important road work,

making him snap that shameless

phone picture like he was sexting

your seductive curves

all across the globe?

Are you kidding me?

A perfectly round ice clock

measuring 100 feet in diameter,

casually ticking away in a swirling eddy?

Just so you know,

right there on the ridge,

he forwarded it to everyone he knew,

you pathetic peep show. 

And by the way, Ms. Drama Queen?

Please.

Must you always wear your emotions

on those wafer-thin sleeves,

sprawled out in the channel like a nude in art class?

We get it.  We know you don’t mean it,

that it’s only for the moment,

and your sweet vortex will soon again bend you around,

freeing your frozen fertility to prey downstream.

But, please. 

We have important road work to do.

Get over yourself.

Why hasn’t the day’s peril

yet soaked the bank’s gravel

for pupa, larva, nymph, and prey?

Maybe it has and I just can’t tell.

All I know is the brown still mines

my mimic here, much like before,

a panner after pretty plugs,

coyoting wagon wheels

without a surface sign.

But like the forty-niner,

this brown long jumped my claim.

What once held only whities

soon followed drifts off veins,

crevicing sinkers between colors,

pulling bonanza from borrasca,

a shindy in the gangue.

Now I am grubsteak

wading the brown’s gumbo,

a sourdough with a shutter

smelling of dreams with fur and hair,

stampmilling it here between moss and rod,

the river a breath and sight for two.

Who’s fishing who?

Maybe a horse throws it to the wind,

but soon we‘re both back to the lode

high grading placers,

the Stillwater our sluice,

a memory of things to come.