I tried desperately to remember how it had once felt to share a trout here with him.

“The Falls Hole is
the defining run in this stream
that had defined our lives for so many years,
and Dad had learned its every nuance
in decades now long passed.”

Snow and rain tracked nearly horizontal, and tiny shards of ice bit into our faces when we turned into the wind as we stood overlooking the falls, a hundred feet below us on this Christmas Eve afternoon.

“This is a good thing,” my brother declared. And so it was. Christmas Eve had always been a good thing for us, no matter the lateness of the hour or severity of the weather, especially when there was a grouse or a dog or a trout involved.

Or Dad.

“You and I and Dad will catch a trout today.”

I don’t recall which of us said it, but I knew it was true, even though we had no real reason to believe it. We didn’t even know if the trout were here. But still, we knew it was true.

We had caught them here before on Christmas Eve, Dad and I, back when the stream was in its prime and my brother was still too little to come with us. Just a few months after the dam was completed, the high mountain lake had filled and covered the low valley streams. Four years later the giant rainbows had appeared in this one high remnant spring creek, reversions to their ancient urges to retire upstream and make more trout.

Summers spent fattening on shad in the lake had made them large—larger than their stream-bound ancestors had ever dared imagine. Dad had been one of the first to find them, and for the few blissful years before the state decided it could manage this unique strain of trout better than God could, the fishing had been a good thing for those few who knew about it and tried to keep it secret.

But slowly and surely word had gotten out, and the wild rainbows had been depleted, replaced by hatchery trout barely deserving the title, aggressive and able to displace the more delicate native strain.

Dad’s last wild rainbow had been caught here and released many years earlier, and we had wondered since if there might be any of the old, original strain left. Nearly all the trout my brother and I had caught in the last few months had carried clipped fins, though occasionally a small rainbow deserving of the name would show up with colors that matched the sunrise and whose fins were white-tipped, translucent and pristine.

They made us wonder.

But today we would know.

Today we would catch a trout.

The snow had now changed to cold misty rain, and I put on Dad’s old wide-brimmed hat to try and keep my glasses dry. The steep climb down the sodden dirt slope to the falls was treacherous, and twice I had to sit down to keep from falling. When we reached the bottom of the trail, my brother moved upstream a few yards to the large rock that overhangs the Falls Hole while I crossed the bottom of the run and worked my way back up the far side, until we were nearly even with each other.

If the wind was only slightly less severe down here, at least it now came from just one direction. Our practiced drifts repeatedly followed one another downstream, alternating in the cloudy current, testing differing depths and varying speeds. Thigh-deep in the icy water, I was better positioned than my brother to fish this run as I felt my way along the rocky underside of the current.

The Falls Hole is the defining run in this stream that had defined our lives for so many years, and Dad had learned its every nuance in decades now long passed. The overhanging rock on which my brother was perched was severely undercut, and the swift hydraulic that spun four feet beneath him required the ultimate line control to fish well. Once when I was a kid I had tried to fish it from there, but I could not manage the proper angle.

I smiled as I recalled that day so long ago when Dad had been standing where I now stood in the far outer edge of the current, and how he had patiently tried to coach me as I sat up there opposite him on the hanging rock. But I was young and impatient, and when I had finally proven my incompetence beyond any reasonable doubt, Dad had fished the run properly, hooking and bringing to net a fat, four-and-a-quarter pound rainbow.

Now I reached across time and the narrow current with the old rod, just as I had once watched Dad reach. I allowed no slack line on the surface, barely brushing the rod tip on the underside of the hanging rock just an inch or so above the swirling water. And as I tried to emulate what he had once done, I heard his calm voice behind me above the whispering roar of the Falls.

“You have to get your rod tip beyond the current there, back beneath the cut where the water eddies and the big trout lie. Remember, they’re here to spawn, not feed, and this is where they like to lay up and rest before they leap the Falls.”

Dad’s instructions were easy to understand, but at the very edges of my ability to execute properly.

“What do I do when the current catches my line?” I asked. “Do I lift or do I fish it out? Are there other good lies below us in the drift?”

It occurred to me that I had never fished this run from this exact position, back when we were certain the big trout were here. I didn’t have waders back then, and the spawning runs always began just before Christmas when the weather was too cold to wet-wade.

“HIT HIM!”

Dad’s command was sudden and firm. It had come nearly before I even felt the abrupt pulse at the end of my line, and I obeyed without question and struck on command. 

“All right!” My brother’s voice rang sweet above us.

The big trout swirled deep, and for an instant I saw color I had not seen in years.

“Keep your line tight…rod tip up.”

Dad’s calming instructions were firm and familiar and very reassuring. It was nearly as though he were playing the trout instead of me.

“Don’t let him get too far upstream; remember the rock where we always got tangled up.”

Indeed, I remembered it well but had forgotten it, and his reminder was comforting. I was glad I didn’t have to play this fish alone. Everything would be okay with him here. Together, he and I and my brother would catch this trout.

One of us had said so.

“Take your time; don’t horse him. He’s a good one.”

I moved out and slightly downstream to improve the angle on the fish sulking deep above me. Slowly he began to turn, and I felt him shake his mighty head as he tried to move across the current to regain the depths beneath the hanging rock.

“Give him just a little pressure…there, that’s good…he’s turning.”

I thought of the net strung over my shoulder and asked, “Should we try to net him here or work him down into the shallower water?”

“I think you’d do better to just beach him here.”

Dad had a good point. My tippet was awfully light for such a large fish, and it would likely not forgive a mistake on my part with the net. Besides, the angle was right and the tailing edge of the run led straight out onto lightly sloping sand and gravel. So as the big trout slowly lost his bearings, I very gently pressured him out onto the sand just beyond the water’s edge.

Quickly I laid the fly rod down beside him and lifted him back into the water, rinsing his sides clear and then gently slipping the tiny hook from inside his upper jaw. I looked deep into his side glowing softly there in the cold driving rain, and for an instant I think I may have seen our reflection.

My bare hands, though dripping from the icy water, were surprisingly warm even in the biting wind, and for a moment I tried to comprehend how I actually felt.

I cradled the great fish in both hands and carefully yet quickly lifted him ever so slightly from the stream for my brother to see. He nodded, and I knew he understood.

Still kneeling in the icy flow, I eased the rainbow back into the water and held him facing upstream, moving him gently side to side in the edge of the current until he’d regained himself and was ready to leave.

I stood for a moment, then turned and walked downstream alone for a few yards, Dad’s old rod still resting in the gravel where I had left it. Looking up into the looming blue laurel and the low-hanging mist, I tried desperately to remember how it had once felt to share a trout here with him.

But he’d been gone for so long.