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“you’re about the most patient fisherman I ever saw. Nobody won’t ever accuse you of not giving a trout a chance. If I was him, I’d have had about three separate heart attacks.”
    Tired of the fish’s uncooperative squirming, Wussy took out his knife and brained my trout with the handle. The fish shuddered and was still.
    “There,” Wussy said to the trout. “Now you won’t have no more heart attacks.”
    It took him a few minutes, but he finally got his hook back. Then he handed me the jar of salmon eggs, reminding me to be careful of the barb when I baited up. He slipped my fish onto his stringer next to a larger trout already dangling from it. “We got us
our
breakfast, anyhow. I guess we should catch one for the rockhead if we can.”
    He watched me while I baited my hook and released the line into the current the way he’d taught me. “You’re a fisherman,” Wussy said. “A good, patient fisherman.”
    We fished until the sun was directly overhead. I didn’t have any more luck, for which I was grateful, but Wussy’s fat worms located two more trout, and then we headed back downstream to the cabin. My father was standing in the doorway, scratching his groin. “Where’s the bacon and eggs?” he wanted to know.
    “Back in Mohawk,” Wussy said. “Your kid caught a fish.”
    “That’s good,” my father said, studying the stringer as if mine might be recognizable. “I could eat about three.”
    “So happens I got some for sale,” Wussy said. “What’s three into eighty-five?”
    “Your ass.” Then he studied me. “What’re you scratching about?”
    “Itch,” I said. I’d been scratching most of the morning, first onespot and then another. For some reason one scratch just wasn’t enough, no matter how hard. After a minute or so, the itching would be even worse.
    “You could go wash that pan in the river,” Wussy said to my father, “and keep from being
completely
worthless.”
    “I had
my
fish on the line last night,” my father said. “Cleaned him too.” But he grabbed the pan and headed for the river. I followed him.
    “Well?” he said, squatting at the water’s edge.
    I shrugged. It was his favorite question, and I never knew what he meant by it.
    “Caught a fish, huh?”
    “Wussy taught me how,” I said, suddenly full of pride about the fish, my throat full, as if there was a hook in it.
    “Wussy’s all right,” he said. “I’m the only one calls him that though. You better call him Norm.”
    I said I thought Norm was a better name anyhow.
    When the pan was clean, or clean enough so the flies weren’t interested in it anymore, we returned to the cabin. Wussy was cleaning the last of the fish, tossing its string of insides off into the bushes. My father found some oil in the cabin and before long the four fish were sputtering in the big skillet. Then we ate them right down to their tiny bones and drank from the icy river. Even my father had stopped complaining.
    We fished some more that afternoon. Wussy was good at it. Between pulling them in, baiting up, stringing the catch, and tending to me, he was pretty busy. My father could have used some help too, but Wussy ignored him and my father, who claimed to know how to fish, refused to ask. They were always needling each other anyway, and my father didn’t want to ask the kind of stupid question about his equipment that Wussy could turn to advantage. Every time we looked at my father, he was either tying on a new hook, or rebaiting it, or trying to figure out why there was a big nest of monofilament line jamming his reel. After a while my father took his act up around the bend in the river where he could fight his gear in private. “With most fishermen,” Wussy remarked, “the contest is between the man and the fish. With the rockhead, it’s between him and his reel.”
    I caught two more trout during the afternoon and would havebeen among the world’s truly happy boys if I could have just stopped itching. In