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fish, knew he was a wanker from the get-go. If he’d lived, who knows, the run might be extinct by now. Not that I’m saying he should’ve been shot, just that he deserved it.” Walter nodded at the cooler. “Grab that. It’s move-on time. I’m driving.”
    They drove Walter’s ’77 Chevy, which he’d painted sometime in the eighties to look like a Royal Coachman, upriver, all the way past both bridges, above the falls that all the magazine articles and books everwritten about the river said stopped the fish, to a side road that climbed the ridge. They followed that for a quarter mile, until the rig was out of sight, and parked. Walter said, “You’re fishing. I’m sitting.”
    This place had been named Red Gate by the old-timers precisely because it was about as far as you get from the red gate. If a joe or young guide heard them talking about the place, decided to go looking for it, they’d only find the shabby pocket water near river mile 84. Many of the river’s best runs were named in this manner. Upper Bridge was fifteen minutes from any such overpass. Cougar Creek wasn’t near the creek with this moniker; it was near Boone Creek, where Mickie McCune had been chased by a tomcat. Misdirection was an essential strategy on the river.
    They waited until no cars could be heard, then hurried across the road. Once at the shoulder, a steep slope down through a thicket of poison oak, Hank offered the old man a hand—at which Walter swung his wading staff. “Keep your pity.”
    They didn’t speak about where they were going, how they would fish, which fly to use, or any of the things anglers usually discuss on the way to the water. They’d had those conversations decades ago. Now they were talking rods, as they had been most of the forty-minute drive, ever since Walter had surprised Hank by selecting from his vast quiver the seventy-one fifty-three, a fifteen-foot three-inch seven weight.
    â€œSure,” Walter admitted now, “I’ll take the seventy-one thirty-three or the eighty-one thirty-four if I’m looking to cast a line, but Christ Hank , do I look like the kind of man who’s covering miles in a day? When you get to be my age, and god forbid you make it this long, you’ll learn. The bayou bait-chuckers, they got something figured right. Fishing’s best when you post up, flip out your junk, and crack a can. You can’t find a better flippin’ and crackin’ rod than the seventy-one fifty-three. Quote me on that.”
    â€œYou just got to know where to post up.” Hank stepped into the water, about to wade onto the center rock.
    â€œHold up there, eager beaver.” Walter opened the cooler that dangled from his neck like a creel, and passed over a new beer.
    â€œI’ll wait on that,” Hank said, thinking about the deep wade separating him from the midstream boulder that was this run’s established casting point. “Feeling a bit light-headed as it is.”
    â€œShit. Where’d you buy your Subaru, Mr. Joe?”
    Hank took the bottle and tucked it down his waders, to the slot between fly boxes and belt, as was the custom among off-duty guides out fishing the evening light.
    *
    D RIVING BACK HOME, Hank nursed a bottle of water. The lack of sleep and the afternoon buzz had gotten the better of him, and now he made liberal use of the fishing pull-offs to allow the hurried lines of RVs and motorcycles and minivans to pass.
    From the road, he saw anglers in most every run, though he didn’t recognize but a couple of their rigs. It must be a Friday. Fucking weekends.
    For locals, real time—the personal and intimate metering of life— was recorded in large swaths, sprawling intervals that corresponded to specific and essential movements within the river. The New Year began in June, when the last of the winter fish had finished their spawning and were either rotting