The next morning was Friday. I was headed back to the other side of the Divide when my water pump went out at Bonner, on the Blackfoot River, ten miles east of Missoula. I had my truck towed to a garage in town and was told by the mechanic that he would not have the repairs done until Monday at noon. So I had to mark off two days that I could sorely afford to lose.

The air was cool and smelled of woodsmoke when I woke Monday morning, and the sun was bright on the lip of Hellgate Canyon and the valley was filled with blue shadows. I made cush-cush for Alafair and me, walked her to school in the spreading sunlight, then sat on the front porch in a long-sleeved flannel shirt and drank another cup of coffee and read the paper. A few minutes later a Landrover with a fly rod case in the gun rack pulled to a stop in front. Dan Nygurski got out, dressed in a pair of belt less jeans, an army sweater, and a floppy hat covered with trout flies.

"I've got a day off. Take a drive with me up the Blackfoot," he said.

"I have to pick up my truck in the shop later."

"I'll take you there. Come on. You got a fishing rod?"

His seamed, coarse face smiled at me. He looked like he could bench three hundred pounds or break a baseball bat across his knee. I invited him in and gave him a cup of coffee in the kitchen while I got my Fenwick rod out of the closet and tied on my tennis shoes.

"What have you got in the way of flies?" he asked.

"Nothing really, popping bugs."

"I've got what you need, brother. A number-fourteen renegade. It drives them crazy."

"What's this about?"

His mouth twitched, and the muscles in the side of his face and throat jumped.

"I thought I'd pick up some tips from you on how to handle Sally Dee," he said.

"I think you've got a first there. I don't believe anybody's ever cleaned Sal's clock before."

"How'd you hear about it?"

"The sheriff's office reports to us whenever Sal comes to their attention. A deputy told me you tried to use Sal's face to repaint the side of his van. I always knew he had some worthwhile potential."

"He's got skag and coke in that house."

"How do you know?"

"A friend told me."

"Purcel?"

"No."

"Ah, the Indian girl."

"What do you know about her?"

"Nothing. She's just some gal Purcel picked up. They come and go at Sally Dee's. What's your point about the coke and the skag?"

"Get a warrant and bust the place."

"When I put Sal away, it's going to be for the rest of his worthless life, not on a chickenshit possessions charge. He'd have one of those lamebrain beach boys doing his time, anyway."

"I spent some time up at the Flathead courthouse. Why's he buying and leasing up property around the lake?"

Nygurski set his cup in the saucer and looked out the window at the backyard. The grass was wet and green in the shade, and the sunlight was bright on the tops of the trees across the alley.

"He thinks casino gambling's going through the legislature," he said.

"The time's right for it. People are out of work, they've used up all their compo, agriculture's in the toilet. Casino gambling could turn Flathead Lake into another Tahoe. Sal would be in on the ground floor."

"It's that simple?"

"Yeah, more or less. I don't think it's going to happen, though. People here don't like outsiders, anyway. Particularly greasers and Californians."

"What did you come over here to tell me?"

"Don't worry about it. Come on, I've got an appointment with an eighteen-inch rainbow."

We drove up through the Blackfoot River canyon, which was still dark and cool with shadows and smelled of woodsmoke blowing up from the mill at Bonner. Then we broke out into meadowland and ranch country and sunshine again, turned off the highway and crossed the river on a planked log bridge, and began climbing on a dirt road through hills and lodgepole pine and scrub brush, where white-tailed deer sprang in a flick of the eye back into the dense cover of the woods. Then we came back into the canyon again, into the most beautiful stretch of river that I had ever seen. The rock cliffs were red and sheer and rose straight up three hundred feet. The crests were thick with ponderosa, and the water, blue and green, turned in deep pools where the current had eaten under the cliffs. The rocks along the shore were bone white and etched with dried insects, and out beyond the canyon's shadows, the great boulders in the middle of the river were steaming in the sun and flies were hatching out in a gray mist above the riffle.

I tied a renegade fly on the tippet of my nylon leader and followed Nygurski into the shallows. The water was so cold inside my tennis shoes and khakis that my bones felt as though they had been beaten with an ice mallet. I false-cast in a figure eight above my head, laid out the line upstream on the riffle, and watched the fly swirl through the eddies and around the boulders toward me. I picked it up, false-cast again, drying it in the air with a whistling sound inches from my ear, and dropped it just beyond a barkless, sun-bleached cottonwood that beavers had toppled into the stream. The riffle made a lip of dirty foam around the end of the log, and just as my leader swung around it and coursed across the top of a deep pool, I saw a rainbow rise from the bottom like an iridescent bubble released from the pebble-and-silt bed and snap my renegade down in a spray of silvery light.

I raised my rod high and stripped off-line with my left hand and let him run. He headed out into the current, into deep water, and my Fenwick arched and vibrated in my palm, drops of water glistening and trembling on the line. Then he broke the surface, and the sun struck the red and pink and green band on his side. I had to go deeper into the current with him, up to my chest now, and strip off my line to keep from breaking the tippet. I kept walking with him downstream while he pumped against the rod and tried to wrap the line around a submerged boulder, until I was back in the deep shade of the canyon, with the wind cold on my neck and the air heavy with the smell of ferns and wet stone.

Then I was around a bend, up into shallow water again, the gravel firm under my tennis shoes. It was all over for him. I worked him up into a small lagoon, watched him gin impotently over the clouded bottom with his dorsal fin out of the water; then I wet my hand and knelt in the shallows and picked him up under the stomach. He felt cold and thick in my hand, and his mouth and gills pumped hard for oxygen. I slipped the fly loose from the corner of his mouth and placed him back in the water. He hovered momentarily over the gravel, his tail moving for balance in the light current, before he dropped away over a ledge and was gone in the current.

While Nygurski fished farther upstream, I kicked together a pile of driftwood out in the sunlight, started a fire on the stones, and fixed a pot of cowboy coffee from his rucksack. It was warm in the sun. I sat on a dead cottonwood and drank the coffee black from one of his tin cups and watched him fish. There was a ranch farther upstream, and curious Angus wandered out of the unfenced pasture and nosed through the willows and clattered across the stones on the beach into the shallows. I saw Nygurski break his leader on a snag, then look back at me in frustration. I pointed to my watch.

He walked up the beach with his fly rod over his shoulder. His jeans were wet up to his thighs. He slipped his straw creel off his shoulder, slit open the stomachs of three rainbow, scooped out the guts and threw them back into the willows. Then he stooped by the edge of the stream and dug the blood and membrane out of the vertebrae with his thumbnail.

"I saw you turn that big one loose," he said.

"I don't keep them much anymore. I don't have a Montana license, anyway."