Without fly fishing I would never have gotten to know the dipper, a chubby gray bird of the West that is surely the cheeriest friend a fisherman could hope for. The dipper, or water ouzel, has puzzled many visitors; a ranger I know was once approached by a concerned visitor who reported seeing "a little gray bird commit suicide by walking right into a creek." The dipper, song-bird-shaped and a totally unaquatic-looking creature, lives on aquatic insects and small fish, chasing them down in the water without the benefit of webbed feet. Dippers build nests on low overhanging banks, right at the water, and spend their days splashing around in the shallows, frequently in very fast water (I've also seen them in lakes, where they may "fly" along right under the surface for several yards in pursuit of insects). They get their name not from their habit of taking an occasional "dip" in the water but from an enchanting mannerism. As they jump from rock to rock, or sit surveying a likely current from shore, they do little bobbing knee-bends, one after another. At first it seems like a nervous twitch — something you hope they'll get over — but soon you get used to it and the dipper's little dance and shuffle become a special part of the day. Usually there is no more than one in sight, or maybe just a quick twittering warble as one flies by, but one winter when most of the river was rimmed with ice I saw half a dozen at one time, each inspecting a different icy shelf along successive pools, a veritable platoon of bobbing, dipping, "fly" fishers, attracted to the warm open water of the lower river. I suppose they compete with the trout for food, as they compete with me for trout, but it makes no sense to me to worry about such congenial competition. They and the trout have been living together for a long time, and I don't interfere all that much. Fishing depends a lot on such things as dippers, anyway.

But it depends as well on occasional success at catching fish. Success depends on many things, including skill, but especially luck. However, after you practice a lot you learn that more is involved than mere mechanical proficiency or good fortune, and that at times you expect to catch fish just because, well, you feel that you will.

For example, there are days when I feel especially in touch with the end of the line, when I feel every lift of the current, every tick of the hook on gravel, every tug of vagrant weed. Such a day was an evening in July, the most productive (of fish, anyway) I ever had on the Gardner.

I'd just read a book about "soft-hackle" flies, simple little wet flies without tails or wings: just slim bodies of fur or floss with a turn of partridge feather near the head. The partridge feather was marked with fine black lines that gave each individual barbule of fiber a segmented look; the barbules, in the water, responded to every wisp of current as the fly drifted along below the surface. Together, they flexed and wiggled like the legs on a struggling insect. Or so the author suggested: I don't know what the trout took them for, only that they took them. As more than one naturalist has pointed out, trout, having no hands, must examine curious objects with their mouths, whether they think they are food or are just amusing themselves to pass the time.

According to my stream log the water this day was "gorgeous and low," and the angler was described as "a trifle low himself," though I don't recall why; the reason is probably better forgotten and surely was while fishing on this golden evening. As the shadow of Terrace Mountain climbed the slope of Everts in front of me, the trout greeted the flies with embarrassing abandon. Each pool yielded its fish hastily; no sooner would I make my cast and begin to probe the suspected pockets and recesses of the opposite bank with the quivering fly when another rainbow would yank it, and me, from our thoughtful investigations.

By the time I reached the pool I most wanted to fish, I'd already released eight or ten small trout, up to ten inches, and was planning to throw away all my flies and replace them with hundreds of these magical soft hackles. This pool, a larger, broader version of most on the river, was about 60 feet across, and from where it was formed by a fast, bouncy riffle to where it broadened and fanned into an ankle-deep tail it was perhaps 150 feet long. Along the east bank it was three to four feet deep, and the bank itself was undercut. It was one of the few pools on the river with that ominous darkness that says "big fish." Five years earlier I'd caught a fifteen-inch brown here on a grasshopper imitation, the first respectable brown I'd ever caught.

I squeezed a couple of small split-shot onto the leader about a foot above the fly (this practice is not recommended in the book I'd been reading, and many fly fishers are offended by such a tactic as crass and unsporting, but I needed to work the fly deeply through this run, and I am generally unhampered by delicate sensitivities at such times) and waded into the shallows at the head of the pool. Remembering a lesson from another book, I pitched the fly slightly upstream of the pool, letting it sink as it washed from the riffle into the deep quiet water. I waited until it was moving slowly through the deep water, then, with a quick upward motion of the rod, I dragged it back to the surface. This, I'd read, imitated the upward motion of an emerging caddisfly. The fish must have thought so, and in an hour I doubled my total take, keeping a thirteen-and-a-half-inch brown for a late dinner. Unlike most pools on the river, this one occasionally yielded several fish from the same spot. Never before had it yielded fifteen as it did this night, but as long as they kept coming I felt no urge to move on. Toward dark I set the hook in a less yielding mouth, and was met with firm resistance followed by a quick run that peeled a few yards of line from my reel. The fish didn't jump, but had the quickness of a rainbow (I have an unscientific approach to this; it felt like a rainbow). After a few minutes of short zigs and zags, parrying with the fish as I moved down to the shallow flat at the tail of the pool, I was able to pull it near enough to see. It was a big rainbow, fifteen or sixteen inches, and still quite strong. My leader was too light to simply horse the fish ashore, and I was in for several more minutes of fight when the fish turned into the current and fled downstream toward the next riffle, one of the few up here that I was honestly afraid of — a vicious little roller coaster of jagged rocks and slippery footings, nowhere more than three feet deep but a guaranteed soaking for a clumsy wader. I held tight to the line as the fish swung below me and gained weight and speed in the quickening pull of the current. As soon as the line tightened directly downstream of me he broke off, taking the fly with him into the little rapid. I retrieved an empty line, with no regrets for once, pleased to have made the acquaintance, for the first time in five years, of the king of the pool.

These good-looking pools are usually not so generous. Another one, far downstream along the road to the North Entrance, frustrated me for a year or two. It was formed where a flat riffle broke over a bank and dropped into a hole the river had dug against the road embankment. I couldn't see the bottom of this one, and so I privately christened it the "salmon hole" because several huge fish could have hidden safely in the dark shadows under its broken surface.

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