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tying was an overglamorizedand overemphasized craft, “yet another way for somebody to swipe dimes from your pocket,” Walter had tied a stick to a hook and rose a steelhead four casts later. As if this wasn’t proof enough, he switched to a leaf, caught another. Now, Hank said what Walter was about to: “A bloke can’t make a fly a fish won’t take.”
    â€œThat’s it.”
    â€œBut they take some patterns more than others. Can’t deny that, old man.”
    Walter looked up this time, cold faced. “Is that so?”
    â€œGod’s truth.” Hank dropped the fly on the table. “Read it in an article.”
    Walter whip-finished the fly, pulled it from the vise, and put a file to its point. “Didn’t realize God was writing again.” He tested the point’s sharpness against his thumbnail. “And what’s your two cents?”
    Hank shrugged. “You know me. Fish now, think later.”
    â€œNo,” Walter said. “About Morell. Natural or artificial?”
    Some of the blood had smeared, like he’d dragged something—a hand maybe—through it before going overboard. He could have been looking for fish when the oar hit a rock and clocked him. Stranger things had happened. Hank himself had been struck nearly unconscious by an oar some years back, though he’d been fighting heavy water at the time. Or, it was possible, someone smashed any number of objects—the oar, a rock, a beer bottle—against his head, lifted his feet, and dropped him overboard.
    But this was all overthinking the situation. What mattered was the boy was missing.
    Overthinking was a recipe for getting skunked, Hank knew that much for sure. Fishing had trained him to be a student of precedent more than theory, to trust what had happened before rather than somebody’s eager deductions to reveal what would happen next. “This would be the first murder in Ipsyniho. Well, if we’re not counting Mrs. Forman.” Who had stabbed her prick of a husband in the neck after he, again, took a hand to her. She’d been convicted and locked away for twenty to life. “Self-defense ain’t murder, no matter what the State says.”
    â€œNot true. Well, true enough about self-defense, the State doesn’t know an ass from an ear, but not true about the first murder. You’re forgetting your history there, lad.” Walter was pinning the finished patterns in his box. “Sixty-three I think it was, or sixty-four. The spring after Kennedy got it. Earnest Jackson, shot to death at Altitude Ramp.”
    Hank didn’t know this one.
    â€œLet me see if I can recall.” Walter finished his beer and looked to the ridge, summoning what must have been a nearly forgotten memory. “So Jackson was working the upper river, way high, taking clients to the redds.”
    â€œHe was fishing the tribs?”
    â€œNo, back then we still had the mainstem spawners. Probably about a thousand fish, winter fish, used the gravel around Altitude. They were some of the run’s biggest. Gone now, course. But then, Jackson was taking his clients up there, fishing big bare hooks in the tailouts. Killing a half-dozen a day. I saw him once, posted up on a rock, telling his dude to throw it long. There was a pair of spawners out in the middle, twenty-pounders if they were an ounce. Told the sheriff at the time, Dick ‘Cowboy’ Bullhouser. Did you know him? Bridge’s daddy. Good guy. Anyway, word got around what Jackson was up to. Didn’t take long until there was a fight between him and a few of the old guys, Abbot’s boys. Next thing you know, they find Jackson with a bullet hole in his throat. Assassinated.”
    â€œJesus.”
    â€œJesus didn’t have anything to do with it. That schmuck was exactly the kind of trash we should’ve run off his first season. Could’ve called it. Had photos of a dozen big dead