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middle,” he observed without looking at me, and I was suddenly sure he’d seen me out there, though he wasn’t going to say anything.
    At the water’s edge, he attached the spinning reels to the rods and ran line through the eyelets all the way to the tips. I watched, full of interest. “Ever fish before?”
    I shook my head.
    “It’s about the best thing there is until you’re older and can do some other stuff, and it’s better than most of the other stuff too.”
    I watched him tie on the hooks, and he did it slowly so I could see. He pointed to the little wing on each hook. “Called a barb,” he said. “So the fish can’t slip off once he’s on. Works the same way on your finger if you aren’t careful.”
    We walked upriver about a hundred yards so that when myfather woke up there’d be nobody around. “Serve him right,” Wussy said, without explaining what for.
    When we got to a spot that looked lucky to Wussy, where there was a good safe rock for me to sit on, he handed me a rod. Then he opened up a can that looked like it was full of dirt, but when he fished around with his brown index finger I could see the bottom was alive and writhing. He pulled out an astonishingly long worm and hooked him three times until he oozed yellow and twisted angrily. I must have looked a little yellow myself, because Wussy baited my hook with two bright pink salmon eggs. Then he taught me how to release the bail and let the current carry the bait downstream, and how to reel in. “How will I know when there’s a fish?” I said when he started out toward the middle.
    He said not to worry about it, I’d know, though that didn’t strike me as a satisfactory explanation. Then I was by myself with only the sound of the running water for company. The sun was high and warm and when I saw Wussy had taken off his shirt I did the same. I watched Wussy for a while, then studied the reflected sun on the water near the drooping tip of my rod.
    I couldn’t have been asleep more than a few minutes when I felt the excited tugging. For some reason it was not what I had expected. The jerks came in short bursts, like a coded message to a sleepy boy: “Stay—Alert—There—Are—Fish—in—the—River.” Thirty yards downstream a fish jumped, but I didn’t immediately associate this phenomenon with my now frantic rod tip. Wussy had waded further upstream and did not hear when I shouted “Agh!” in his general direction.
    I was not at all certain I wanted to reel in the fish. Every time I tried to, he seemed to resent it and tugged even harder. When he did this, I stopped and waited apologetically for the tugging to stop. I only reeled in when I felt the line go slack. When the fish jumped, or rather flopped onto the surface, a second time, he was much closer, and my already considerable misgivings grew. I was thinking I might just let him stay where he was until Wussy came back, whenever that might be. But then I got my courage up and reeled in a little more, all the time watching the spot on the surface where my line disappeared into the stream, beads of rainbow water dancing off it with the tension.
    Then I saw the fish himself off to the side in a spot far from where I had imagined him to be. He was no longer tugging so frantically, but he darted first left, then right in the large pool ofrelatively calm water beneath my rock. Then he must have got a gander at me sitting there, because he was in full flight again. I stopped reeling and just watched his colors in the clear water. After a while he stopped trying to get away and just stayed even with the current, his tail waving gently, like a flag in the breeze. Then I looked up and Wussy was there and he had my fish out of the water and flopping in the green netting, cold water spraying on my knees. I examined the fish without pride as Wussy extracted him from the net and probed his gullet for the hook he’d practically digested.
    “Well, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy said,