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38 The Con­ cep­ tion The boy could smell the pines be­ fore he saw them. Or he ­ thought he could. ­ Cramped in the back seat ­ between the sweat­ ing ­ thighs of his older broth­ ers, he ­ caught only ­ glimpses of the dark ­ jagged line ris­ ing out of the miles of plain still ahead of them—said noth­ ing of what had­ swelled for min­ utes in his chest. That smell, and what it meant. The Black Hills. Even a year ear­ lier, his first time, the scent had ­ started some­ thing vi­ brat­ ing in­ side him be­ fore he had any idea of its ­ source. When he could no ­ longer con­ tain his ex­ cite­ ment, no one else in the­ packed, over­ heated car under­ stood. His teen­ age broth­ ers ­ jabbed his ribs and ­ mocked him. His ­ father sim­ ply ­ teased. “I can smell ’em from here, ­ Scotty. Can’t you?” “Don’t kid him, Har­ old. You know how upset he can get.” “Look! Now I can even see ­ through ’em. Just below that ridge, under the cloud cover. See it—the water? Those fat rain­ bows swim­ ming­ around in your fa­ vor­ ite pool?” Hoots of laugh­ ter and more jabs from his broth­ ers. A quick shush­ ing groan from his ­ mother, look­ ing back ner­ vously into his eyes until she felt sure he ­ wasn’t going to gouge or kick out at their legs.­ Thirty years later, when mem­ ory has ­ sloughed away so much else, the fish­ er­ man can call up those mo­ ments—the smell of the pines, the acute an­ tic­ i­ pa­ tion—as if it were yes­ ter­ day. Ap­ proach­ ing a trout ­ stream, he felt more than a trace of them still. He had never been ­ poetic or phil­ o­ soph­ i­ cal ­ enough to ­ fathom why this ­ should be so. Why his ­ father and broth­ ers had ­ seemed to look for­ ward to that an­ nual week of Au­ gust 39 The Conception va­ ca­ tion as much as he did, but never ­ fished—just ­ stared va­ cantly at his­ catches, inter­ ested only in their ap­ pear­ ance an hour later on the ­ cabin’s din­ ner table. Why ­ they’d ­ teased him mer­ ci­ lessly the morn­ ing he’d­ blurted, “You’ve ­ ruined the whole day!” after no one had wak­ ened him at dawn so he could spend every day­ light hour on the ­ stream. Some­ how in a bi­ po­ lar uni­ verse the gods had or­ dained fixed sets of op­ po­ sites: man and woman, death and life, those who lived to fish and the far ­ greater num­ ber who did not. He ­ rarely went ­ deeper into it than that. What he found him­ self doing in­ stead as he set­ tled into mid­ dle age was sim­ ply re­ mem­ ber, and in­ ev­ i­ ta­ bly with the re­ mem­ brance, com­ pare. It was not the kind of thing he had ever ­ shared with an­ other fish­ er­ man,­ though he ­ fished with many, nor to these com­ par­ i­ sons too did he at­ tach any great phil­ o­ soph­ i­ cal ­ weight. His mind chan­ neled down a flow of em­ bed­ ded im­ ages that laced rocks and runs and ­ shaded pools to­ gether­ across half a life­ time of fish­ ing North ­ American trout ­ streams, a kind of­ angler’s déjà vu. A month ear­ lier, wad­ ing round a bend on the San Juan, he’d stood trans­ fixed for sev­ eral mo­ ments try­ ing to re­ mem­ ber where . . . where . . . until it ­ struck him. The rif­ fle on the We­ naha in east­ ern Ore­ gon where he’d ­ caught a dozen good ­ browns on an Elk Hair Cad­ dis the morn­ ing he’d ­ sprained his ankle on the rocky trail down. A river of ­ linked im­ ages, wid­ en­ ing with every year. Now more than three ­ decades had ­ passed since that first cra­ dling of a fly rod in his small hand. It had all begun back there, on Spear­ fish Creek. South Da­ kota. A­ ten-year-old boy ­ thrilled be­ yond meas­ ure by this un­ con­ ceived world of pine woods and bur­ bling clear water only a few ­ hours’ drive from his home on the other Da­ kota plain. That first rod was made for...

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