Once some friends and I hiked a long way into a high mountain valley on Colorado's West Slope — on a tip from a biologist — and caught what we were told were pure-strain Colorado River cutthroats. None of the fish were very big, but they were living in the stair-step beaver ponds and connecting channels that meandered down one of the prettiest little high­mountain meadows I've ever seen. There were wildflowers, snow-capped crags, and a stand of ancient, hundred-foot-tall Engelmann spruce trees that had either been missed by the old logging crews or, more likely, left because they'd have been too hard to get out.

I remember there was a black trout in one of the pools. Not just dark, but black as a burnt stump. None of us could catch it.

I have two snapshots from that trip. One is of my old friend A.K. holding a fat, foot-long cutthroat and grinning like it was a hundred-pound tarpon. The other is of Ed, casting to a perfect little beaver pond while standing in a field of wildflowers. I guess it was classic. One of the best things about native fish is that they've often held out in places that are either magnificently wild or at least overlooked.

A few seasons ago I caught some pure Snake River cutthroats from a big reservoir in southern Colorado. That was also a beautiful spot, though in a different way. It was flat, brown, treeless, windblown, and, on that particular trip, cold as hell and downright lonely: the kind of place where one good, drunken country-western tune on the car radio could permanently break your heart.

Once again, I know they were pure-strain fish because a fisheries expert with whom I would never argue told me they were. What struck me was that they were damned big trout, and I noticed that on a real pig of, say, five or six pounds, the normally fine, tightly packed pepper spots sort of spread out, as if they'd been painted on a balloon that had then been blown up.

Just in the last couple of years I've gone several times to a drainage in British Columbia that holds native westslope cutthroats. One of the rivers we fished last summer is glacial in origin, with glass-clear, bluish-green-tinted water and a clean, light gray, bare rock bottom. The cutts there weren't pale exactly, but they were subtly colored, muted, well camouflaged.

But then one of the little tributaries to that river apparently had a completely different kind of water chemistry. The water was still clear, but the bottom was thick with dark aquatic vegetation and so slippery you could lose your footing in an ankle­deep riffle. The fish — still pure westslope cutts from the same drainage — were deep green on the back with greenish pewter sides, jet-black spots and brilliant orange gill covers and cutthroat slashes on their chins. The three of us had split up for a few hours to try out the little creek — even our guide had never fished it — and when we met back at the truck we all said in unison, "God! Did you see those fish?"

I don't think this gut affection for cutthroats is any great mystery. It's just that for some of us who live and fish in the Rockies and who appreciate wildness, these are the trout that actually belong here the way we'd like to belong here: comfortably and thoughtlessly. The same can be said of brook trout in parts of Labrador, Guadalupe bass in parts of Texas, and so on. Native fish look, smell, and taste of a place just as, to a fisherman, that place looks, smells, and tastes of the fish.

Okay, fine, but if the trout at the end of a long uphill hike turn out to be a grade B strain or the wrong race for the drainage, well, I'm a mutt from somewhere else, too, so maybe I shouldn't be too critical. I mean, my hometown hybrid cutts have a kind of romance all their own. Maybe less than a tepee ring, but every bit as much as an old abandoned trapper's cabin. After all, things are seldom perfect and perfection itself may be overrated, but life can still be good.

Cutthroats are just a kick to catch, especially when they turn up unexpectedly, as they still do now and then. Even a cutbow — the cutthroat-rainbow hybrid — can give you hope that there's still a little wild juice left in the old river system. And if the cross happened in a hatchery before the fish were stocked, okay, but I don't want to hear about it. We're talking about symbolism now.

Just about everyone I fish with gets inordinately excited about catching cutthroats, and they'll mention a surprise cutt in detail in the first few sentences of the report on a new stream: "We caught browns and rainbows to about fourteen inches, and one cutthroat. He was eleven inches and had that red belly stripe like a greenback. Took a size sixteen Elk Hair Caddis. "

Sometimes news like that will make you want to go back to the same stream and go higher yet, looking for that secluded meadow stretch or headwater lake past the place where the rainbows or the brookies give out and it's either all cutthroats or no trout at all.

I still do things like that — though not quite as often as I used to — and, although I admire almost any fish that will eat a fly and I have a new favorite after every trip, catching a cutthroat still gives me that mindless don't-confuse-me-with­facts buzz I got as a kid.

It's not a matter of symptomatic relief. Some of my favorite writers who have talked about trout fishing sometimes imply that it saves them from the big-time, high-pressure craziness of their lives — like a good, strong sedative. I sort of know what they mean and, although this ain't exactly the big time, I do know what craziness is. But I have to take one more step back from that. I'd say fishing saves me from needing to be saved — sometimes just barely.

And it's not that I'm out to recapture my past, either. In fact, there are some episodes from those days I wouldn't mind forgetting altogether. And anyway, what was it Tom McGuane said? Something about how it's bad enough for a writer to "visit" something in the first place, let alone to "revisit."

I think the same goes for recapturing. Over the years I've held on to that old simpleminded enthusiasm, knowing that once it's gone, it's a waste of time trying to get it back. I don't know how I know that, I just do.