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been yesterday. It was the only time I ever heard my Dad take the Savior's name in vain.
    What do you promise, Gary? she asked.
    Promise not to go no further than where it forks, ma'am.
    Anyfurther.
    Any.
    She gave me a patient look, saying nothing as her hands went on working in the dough, which now had a smooth, silky look.
    I promise not to go any further than where it forks, ma'am.
    Thank you, Gary, she said. And try to remember that grammar is for the world as well as for school.
    Yes, ma'am.
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    Candy Bill followed me as I did my chores, and sat between my feet as I bolted my lunch, looking up at me with the same attentiveness he had shown my mother while she was kneading her bread, but when I got my new bamboo pole and my old, splintery creel and started out of the dooryard, he stopped and only stood in the dust by an old roll of snowfence, watching. I called him but he wouldn't come. He yapped a time or two, as if telling me to come back, but that was all.
    Stay, then, I said, trying to sound as if I didn't care. I did, though, at least a little. Candy Billalways went fishing with me.
    My mother came to the door and looked out at me with her left hand held up to shade her eyes. I can see her that way still, and it's like looking at a photograph of someone who later became unhappy, or died suddenly. You mind your Dad now, Gary!
    Yes, ma'am, I will.
    She waved. I waved, too. Then I turned my back on her and walked away.
    a
    The sun beat down on my neck, hard and hot, for the first quarter-mile or so, but then I entered the woods, where double shadow fell over the road and it was cool and fir-smelling and you could hear the wind hissing through the deep needled groves. I walked with my pole on my shoulder like boys did back then, holding my creel in my other hand like a valise or a salesman's sample-case. About two miles into the woods along a road which was really nothing but a double rut with a grassy strip growing up the center hump, I began to hear the hurried, eager gossip of Castle Stream. I thought of trout with bright speckled backs and pure white bellies, and my heart went up in my chest.
    The stream flowed under a little wooden bridge, and the banks leading down to the water were steep and brushy. I worked my way down carefully, holding on where I could and digging my heels in. I went down out of summer and back into midspring, or so it felt. The cool rose gently off the water, and a green smell like moss. When I got to the edge of the water I only stood there for a little while, breathing deep of that mossy smell and watching the dragonflies circle and the skitterbugs skate. Then, farther down, I saw a trout leap at a butterfly a good big brookie, maybe fourteen inches long and remembered I hadn't come here just to sightsee.
    I walked along the bank, following the current, and wet my line for the first time with the bridge still in sight upstream. Something jerked the tip of my pole down a time or two and ate half my worm, but he was too sly for my nine-year-old hands or maybe just not hungry enough to be careless so I went on.
    I stopped at two or three other places before I got to the place where Castle Stream forks, going southwest into Castle Rock and southeast into Kashwakamak Township, and at one of them I caught the biggest trout I have ever caught in my life, a beauty that measured nineteen inches from tip to tail on the little ruler I kept in my creel. That was a monster of a brook trout, even for those days.
    If I had accepted this as gift enough for one day and gone back, I would not be writing now (and this is going to turn out longer than I thought it would, I see that already), but I didn't. Instead I saw to my catch right then and there as my father had shown me cleaning it, placing it on dry grass at the bottom of the creel, then laying damp grass on top of it and went on. I did not, at age nine, think that catching a nineteen-inch brook trout was particularly remarkable, although I do remember