What Things Are Made Of

Handling a Trophy Trout

79 Handling a Trophy Trout When she’s too tired to reach the mossy rocks where, slurping blue-winged olives, she took mine, I lift her head out of the water, kneel, and, rod-tip high to mute the thrashing, slide her across the varnished table of the stream. Behind, layers of sediment lift into cliffs— rust-brown, aqua-blue, dry-grass-green: a stack of pages millions of years old, sawed through one by one, grain after grain, by the ice water into which I plunge my hand, and with numb fingers, pinch the fly. It’s stuck, so I grip the slippery-smooth fishflesh , and flip her. Belly up, she lies still as if hypnotized. Above the canyon walls, a river of blue sky eddies with clouds. Cat-paws of wind smack the real river into chop. Admiring the olive body peppered with black dots, the crimson stripe down silver sides, I free the hook, then, as the river laps my knees, slide the fish in. She doesn’t swim, so I move her back and forth, forcing water through her gills. Downstream, where Bighorn Canyon Road crawls from the river, I see faces in the rock: owls, demons, Indian gods. How many generations stand behind me! How many deaths my ancestors, human and not, endured to pass life on to me! I feel it rise in the fish as she slips free from my hand, picking up speed, gliding 80 over algaed rock toward where the current calls. I watch her melt into the river: her home, as the air is mine that fills my lungs and stings my eyes as I stand, dripping: re-baptized: reborn. ...