The Sharp End

I’d been an angler for more than two decades when I caught the strangest fish I’d ever seen, a fish that led me down a path of questioning whether I even should have picked up a fishing rod in the first place. I was fishing my favorite Northern California trout stream, a ribbon of deep turquoise fifteen yards wide that babbles between banks of slick, grapefruit-sized cobbles of granite, the indomitable hulk of Mount Shasta looming far up-current, a snowy pyramid above the pines.

There hadn’t been much of an insect hatch that afternoon, so I’d spent the hot hours swinging in a streamside hammock I tied between two trees, half-heartedly reading a Larry McMurtry novel and watching the water roll past. Finally, as the sun set, the trout began their habitual evening rise to the surface. I waded to my waist in the ice-cold water, tied an all-purpose size-16 Parachute Adams fly to my whisker-thin leader, and began looping tight casts upstream