I caught my first trout at the age of five, from a mountain brook that flowed into the Cheat River in West Virginia not far from our summer cottage, using a piece of white wrapping - string tied to a stick and a small safety pin on which I had impaled a cricket. It was a splendid brook trout, at least five inches long and beautifully formed and colored, and it fought fiercely, or would have if it hadn't been derricked onto the pine - needled bank the instant it bit the cricket, but on the way home I stopped to watch a man shoot a rattlesnake that had crawled under the porch of his cabin, and lost the fish in my excitement.

That ended my trout - fishing for a long time, as my family moved to a suburb of Pittsburgh, and the creeks that ran near my home flowed yellow and malodorous with coal - mine drainage. Summers I went to camps and caught smallmouth bass in Ontario, a brace of rather puny muskellunge in Conneaut Lake and one no larger in Lake Chatauqua, and various pickerel, perch, bullheads, walleyes, rock bass and sunnies in assorted waters. But no trout. I went to college surrounded by some of the best limestone creeks in Pennsylvania, when a limit of browns over two pounds with a five pounder among them was no unusual feat, but it was in the midst of a depression the depression and a fishable split - cane fly - rod complete with reel and fly line cost upwards of ten dollars, which was more than I allowed myself for spending money for a month. (The three Leonard rods and Meek reels my father had left had been burned along with our house and most of its contents a few years previously.)