A friend from Iowa, an enthusiastic outdoorsman, visited me one September. Because of an eccentric graduate chairman we had once taught under, we had adopted a formal manner of addressing each other, after our chairman's manner.

"Mr. Palmer, you must learn about fly fishing. This isn't the Big Muddy, you know. We have trout here, not those disgusting mudfish you're so fond of catching."

"Mr. Schullery, if you can suppress your elitism about the Mississippi, I would like to learn about fly fishing."

His first lesson was on the Lamar, near Calfee Creek. The upper Lamar contains many quick, unschooled cutthroat trout, easily caught most of the time. When we walked down to the river in front of the patrol cabin it was late afternoon but the sun was still bright on the water. It would not have looked, to an Iowa angler, like a very promising time to catch a fish.

"You sit down here on this rock, Mr. Palmer. I must find a grasshopper." I kicked through some nearby brush and quickly sorted an inch-long hopper from the leaves.

"Watch this closely, Mr. Palmer. It's important." I tossed the hopper into the stream about six feet from shore. It landed kicking, stirring up little ripples as it was washed along. It had floated only a few feet when it disappeared in a splashy blur of trout mouth, a small explosion of water that left Mr. Palmer wide-eyed. He was hooked. Within a few minutes I had him slapping a few feet of line out over the water, giving these unruly little cutthroats a chance at a bushy dry fly. One after another they poked their noses up under it, inhaled it, mouthed it thoughtfully for a second, then spit it out and sank back to shelter. Each time Mr. Palmer watched the whole rise, take, and rejection with a slack jaw and a slack line, never once trying to hook the fish.

"Mr. Palmer, you have to set the hook when they take the fly. Weren't you paying attention to the lecture?"

"Yes, Mr. Schullery, I understand. I saw you do it." He was earnest in the face of my exasperation.

"Well, then, Mr. Palmer, why didn't you set the damn hook?!"

"I never think of it at the time, Mr. Schullery. It's all so interesting to watch."

A few days later I took him to the upper Gardner. I led him to the bank and rigged up the rod as I continued my instruction.

"Now, Mr. Palmer, you should learn about where trout hold in the current." As I spoke I worked about thirty-five feet of line into the air, keeping it airborne above me, casting back and forth, ready to deliver. This was one of the few stretches of river I know of where what I was about to do was not the worst kind of reckless arrogance.

"They like water at the edges of the current, Mr. Palmer. See that rock there with the little eddy behind it, where the water is sort of still?" He was attentive, if skeptical, as I dropped a small dry fly into the spot, where it was instantly drowned but not eaten by one of the suicidal brook trout that inhabited this precious run. Mr. Palmer choked quietly as I whipped the fly back with a triumphant "Aha!" Then, as I dried it with some false casts, I remarked casually, "Look for calmer breaks in the current, Mr. Palmer, even if you can't see a rock or anything, like this one up here." I laid the fly onto a little slick in midstream, immediately grabbing it back from another splashy rise. This was not instruction; this was performance. Again and again I brought trout up, hooking a couple, missing most, reveling in the show they and I were putting on. And each time I'd raise a fish, Mr. Palmer, his voice a mixture of envy, respect, and disdain, would mumble, "Mr. Schullery, you bastard," or "This can't be..." I don't know how many fish I showed him in fifteen minutes, but it was many more than I'd imagined I would. The Gardner and its trout performed royally in beginning the education of yet another fly fisherman.

A home river is that rarest of friends, the one who frequently surprises you with new elements of personality without ever seeming a stranger. The revelations are gifts, not shocks. Like Mr. Palmer, I seemed always to be discovering new secrets of the river; they weren't really secrets at all, just places waiting for me to become smart enough to notice them. It might be a new trout lie, hidden under a log and invisible from the trail I usually walked; a beaver dam that must be fished this season because it will be silted shallow by next; a deer bed in the willows behind a favorite pool; a deep pocket I never noticed until I walked the bank opposite the trail. What makes this so precious, like so many other meaningful pastimes, is the anticipation of revelations yet to come, or discoveries not fully understood, like the dark pool swarming with diptera that I discovered one day while searching for a drowning victim and never later returned to, off duty. Like the stretches of canyon water I never fished, that pool is a mystery and a promise, probably worth more in anticipation than it will be in actual sport.

Some revelations are bigger. Recently, in an isolated stretch of the upper river, where only brook trout were thought to reside, a pocket of rainbows was found, survivors of some long-forgotten stocking mission of several decades ago. They lived, unknown and unfished, in one short stretch of river, neither expanding their range into better traveled waters nor shrinking into oblivion. Further study may prove them to be of considerable scientific value. Like the other nonnative trouts in Yellowstone — brook, brown, and lake — they were placed here in the early days of fisheries science, before distinct strains of each species were hopelessly crossed and mixed in the great trout factories of modern hatcheries and in countless rivers where thoughtless and well-intentioned fisheries crews dumped new strains of trout on top of existing native populations. Yellowstone has waters, including my home river, that were stocked before that energetic "management" chaos mutilated our western trout taxonomy and were not stocked since; waters that now may give more than sport — they may yield museum-pure strains of trout that we thought we'd lost. It may not be easy for the nonfisherman to comprehend why such knowledge makes the fishing more exciting than it otherwise would be, but it is immensely satisfying to know such a thing. Fishing is a quest for knowledge and wonder as much as a pursuit of fish; it is as much an acquaintance with beavers, dippers, and other fishermen as it is the challenge of catching a trout. My home river does not always give me her fish, but the blessings of her company are always worth the trip.